[PSF-Community] my own introduction

[Alex Martelli]

I've been lurking and reading a while, trying to gauge what the consensus
was -- it seems to me it's mostly in favor of introductions, so, here's
mine.

I met Python in the '90s, fell in love, immediately got active in the
community (at the time mostly the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.python) --
soon got tagged (by Steve Holden) as "the Martellibot", the third 'bot
after timbot (Tim Peters) and effbot (F. Lundh)... ended up soon writing
Python books and contributing to the code base (then a PSF Member -- now, a
Fellow) and winning awards such as the Frank Willison Memorial Award for
contributions to the Python community, in 2006). Later, I became a
top-rated contributor to stackoverflow, mostly on the Python tag.

That background got me my job at Google (offer extended and accepted in
2004 -- I only started in 2005 due to visa issues) which I still happily
hold to this day.

I'm currently working on the third edition of "Python in a Nutshell" - with
two awesome co-authors, the above-mentioned Steve Holden (who essentially
made the PSF *happen*, and was President for many years) and my wife Anna
Ravenscroft (also a PSF Fellow) -- both of my co-authors are also winners
of the Frank Willison award (Anna was the first woman so honored). Don't
hold your breath -- all three of us have demanding full-time jobs, it WILL
be quite a while before the 3rd edition (covering Python 2.7 AND 3.5) is
ready for even public preview, sorry. But, it IS happening... we're racing
towards the second milestone, "half chapters complete"...!-)

Today, my role at work is leading the "1:many" team for Google Cloud tech
support -- not fully Python-centric (as were my previous roles in
Infrastructure, then Business Intelligence software) though of course
Python IS a core language in Google Cloud (esp. but not exclusively in
Google App Engine)...


Alex
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