[PSF-Community] [ PSF community ] my introduction

[iLoveTux -]

Hello, World:

I, too, have been lurking in the background trying to see what the general
consensus was around these introductions. As most people seem in favor of
them, I've decided to add mine.

Online I go by the pseudonym iLoveTux, although my real name is Cliff. I
started programming in the '97 with QBasic (that's what was taught in my
high school's intro to computer programming class) and moved on to Pascal,
but I stuck with QBasic for my hobbyist adventures (I credit this to an
online publication called "The QuickBasic Fanzine" which kept my interest).
Around this time I got very interested in the move to object oriented
programming, and started in on C++ (and subsequently C), but life got in
the way of pursuing my career as a software developer.

In 2003, I was arrested for three counts of armed robbery and spent 5+
years in prison. I was then released on parole in 2008 and pursued any
employment I could find. I worked at McDonald's for about 4 years (I made
it to manager after 6 months which is about the time I met my loving wife),
then I learned how to make hand tossed New York style pizza, which earned
me more money than McDonald's. This is about the time that I had my first
child, a boy, and I soon became manager of the pizza shop. I then got a job
offer, my uncle who I would talk to on the phone about random computer
stuff (I never lost my interest in computer programming) had an opening for
a developer and wanted me to learn Python, so I hopped on codeacademy and
started to learn. A few months later (I still had to work), I was ready to
move on and start this new job. It is around this time that I had my second
son.

Well, my new job was to develop a tool to help manage multiple IBM
DataPower appliances. After three rewrites, I have a pretty cool
architecture, although right now there is a big cleanup effort going on
because I just learned about what are probably the two best, and
underutilized tools for working on large applications in Python, setuptools
entry_points (for a ready-made plug-in  system), and (while not strictly a
Python tool) git submodules. Also, I have incorporated the
Anaconda/MiniConda Python Distributions to serve the same purpose as the
(new in Python 3.5) embedded distribution of Python. So three new things
added to our product caused a major need for some major cleanup, but it's
going well especially for a product that has taught me (through trial and
error) so much about real-world programming.

Also, recently I became enamored with the (new to me) concept of Test
Driven Development (remember I had dropped out of the scene from
2003-2013). To start with this concept I created a project called
data.store which acts as a primitive database whose syntax is inspired by
MongoDB. You can check this out at https://github.com/ilovetux/datastore or
just "pip install data.store"

Anyway, that's the abbridged version. With an eye to the future I'm
pursuing a udacity nano-degree in full stack development and otherwise
trying to keep busy. I have also just added my third child, a daughter, to
our family. I hope everyone on this list is having as much fun in life as I
am!

If anyone needs any help our just want to talk shop, you can email me at
me at ilovetux.com, and if you want to check out my (not quite abandoned) blog
you can find it at www.ilovetux.com.

My other interests in addition to Python:

Open Source Software
Linux (usually Fedora or CentOS)
ksh
Docker
Splunk
XML/XSLT/XPath
JQuery
HTML/CSS/JavaScript
Pandas
SQL
Regular Expressions
And a few others I can't think of right now
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