[Python-Dev] Hello, I'm the other new guy

Christian Heimes lists at cheimes.de
Wed Nov 14 03:15:11 CET 2007


Hello Pythonistas and fellow core developers!

After Amaury introduced himself I've decided that I *have* to take some
time to introduce myself, too.

Hello, my name is Christian Heimes and I'm a 28 years old German from
Aachen. Aachen is a beautiful city about 70km West to Cologne and near
the borders to The Netherlands and Belgium. Some of you may know me from
#python as Crys (|Crys| or Crys_) or my former nick Tiran. Others may
have seen me at some Python related conferences like EuroPython 2003 in
Charleroi/Belgium, 2004+2005 in Gothenburg/Sweden, DZUG 2004 at the
DESY/Hamburg or Plone Conference 2004/Vienna.

Before I'm going to bore you with the (Python) story of my life let me
tell you something about my persona. I'm of average build and average
height but people usually don't describe me as an average guy. Unless
you see the more Metal and Gothic like chap with glasses, chin-beard and
very long hair in black cloths, boots and a hat as ordinary. *g*
When I'm not sitting in front of my box I'm spending time with my
beautiful girl friend, listening to music, my friends or in a disco. I
enjoy cooking but I rarely spend time in front of the TV. I only watch
some well selected series like Myth Busters + LOST and information
channels like ARTE.

My more exotic hobby is Medieval Living History, also known as
Reenactment although we don't take it as serious as Reenacters. I
usually describe it as a counter weight to my science and computer
interests. We are tailoring cloths and living in tents or castles like
people about 1200 to 600 years ago. That is without electricity, mobile
phones and computers as much as it is possible these days. It's like a
vacation from the modern world for a view days or entire week for me.


Now here is the story how Python entered my life:

I had my first real contact with Python in 2002 when some friends and me
were evaluation web frameworks for the relaunch of our community site.
We were all frustrated from our past experiences with PHP and MySQL and
were looking for something innovative and more professional. Quickly we
were brim over with enthusiasm for Zope3 and Python. But Zope3 wasn't
ready in 2002 and the community project went dead after some internal
frictions and lack of time. But I kept learning Python and playing
around with Zope3 and Zope2.

After some Zope related jobs I came in contact with Plone and eventually
 became a Plone core developer and elected board member of the newly
formed Plone Foundation. Unfortunately personal and health problems
forced me to drop everything. After things went better again I focused
on other areas like PyQt4, Twisted. C#/.NET and PythonDotNET in order to
broaden my knowledge and learn other techniques beside CMS and web
applications.

I came to Python C development as I worked on PythonDotNET for one of my
 projects. Although it might sound strange how a .NET and C# project got
me into C and Python C API but it's easy to explain. In order to fix
PythonDotNET for Python 2.5, Mono and UCS-4 builds of Python I had to
familiarize myself with the C API of Python. The project is a bridge
between CPython and .NET and not related to IronPython. The C# is doing
a lot of calls into the C library using a technology that can be
compared to ctypes. The code jumps forth and back between C, C#/.NET and
Python code. It's a nightmare to debug problems but it's fun, too.

Once I had overcome my fear of Python's C API I saw its elegance and
started to contribute to Python's core. I wrote some patches for Python
3000 because I saw an opportunity to get involved and contribute. And
because I like to play with new stuff  ;)  After a heap of patches and bug
reports Guido finally granted me developer privileges.

I'm planing to focus my work on Python 3000. I'm a Linux user (10 years
server and 5 years work station experience) but I've a VMWare running to
test patches on Windows XP, too.

Questions?  :)

Christian



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