what kind of work do you do

[Sean Blakey]

On Sun, Aug 20, 2000 at 12:58:51AM +0000, sp00fD wrote:
> I was just wondering, of the people here that use Python at work, what
> kind of programming are you doing and what company?
> 
> I'm a Systems Administrator myself, I use python for a number of tasks,
> mostly revolving around automating tasks.  I can choose whatever
> language I want to do this, therefore python, but I'm sure a lot of
> companies haven't embraced python yet, so I'd like to know who has and
> for what ;)
> 
> 
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.

I'm on the server development team here at FreeI (a free, anonymous
ISP).  Because of the somewhat unusual nature of our organization,
off-the-shelf products often are not suitable to us.  We often use
existing open-source products in conjunction with in-house solutions.

Mostly I use python for creating servers that communicate via in-house
protocols (almost all of my programs import socket, SocketServer, and
struct).  I've also tried to make a stab at implementing some protocols
not yet supported by Python (like RADIUS) (I will release these after I
have cleaned them up and made sure no proprietary information is
included).

I'm allowed (and encouraged) to use Python for development work because:
    1) This runs on OUR servers - no risk of end-users getting at source
    code
    2) Development time is FAST
    3) Run-time performance is fast enough

Additionally I've written a few logfile parsers, administration tools,
and CGI scripts.

I doubt we will be adopting Python for client development in the
forseeable future, but Python/C/C++ are definitely the "big three" for
server development here.

My only lament is I still haven't figured out a simple way to get Python
to talk to Oracle from a FreeBSD box (not Python's fault, Oracle <->
FreeBSD communication is an ugly mess).
    -Sean

-- 
Sean Blakey, sblakey at freei.com
Software Developer, FreeInternet.com
(253)796-6500x1025
Thus spake the master programmer:
	"A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program
is its own hell."
		-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"