Technical Skills

This is a list of my stronger technical skills. I’ve played with writing things ranging from graphics engines, to decoding game save file formats, to window managers, to IRC bots, to web sites.

For a concise list of languages and time spent in them:

• 5+ years experience with Python, JavaScript, and SQL.
• 2+ years experience with C++, Perl, PHP, Java, and Lua.
• 1+ years experience with Haskell, C, and C#.
• Have played with many others including Common Lisp, Ruby, Go, and Clojure

Python

I’ve spent the last 5 years programming in Python, 3 of that was professional. Most of my experience with Python is centered around writing Django applications.

Some things I’ve built outside of web applications:

• A command line task management system
• Screen scrapers
• Feed aggregators
• Plugins and extensions for various tools that embed Python.

Django

If I am going to write a web app, I am probably going to start with django-admin.py startproject <project name>. I’ve been using it for years now on projects both large and small.

Here are some highlights of from Django projects I’ve worked on.

• Three sites that shared the same code base and served a large number of users.
• OAuth2 (spec 10 and 11) based signup and authentication.
• Upgrading between multiple Django versions.
• Numerous community and small business sites.

Celery

I use this when I need to offload tasks in Django based sites. Here are a few things I have done with it:

• Helped architech and develop a lazy caching backend that updated itself out of band using Celery, or calculated in line if celery hadn’t updated the cache yet.
• Divided tasks into separated queues so the Celery daemon could be shared to multiple servers.

Fabric

This tool has saved me hours, if not days of my life.

• I have ran 2 sprints on it, one PSF sponsored, the other at PyCon.
• Made deployment simple and very reproducible causing it to be fast and take care of all the repetitive details for the team.

Redis

I reach for this when I want a key/value store or centralized pub/sub. I have use it for:

• Django caching backend.
• Django session storage.
• Celery queue backend (including connection pooling)
• Micro services based IRC bot using Redis’ pub/sub as a transport.

PostgreSQL

This is my preferred relational database. It scales pretty well, it is open source, and I’ve come to rely on it anytime I need a database.

• Have used tools such as pgfouine to profile and optimize usage.
• Used pgbouncer to do connection pooling to decrease latency.
• Have scaled to tables with millions of rows.

JavaScript

I’ve used it for many years now. Mostly doing front end work on the web. But more recently I’ve also done things like building a Firefox add-on, and many little micro-services.

jQuery

When I am doing JavaScript for the sake of front end development I tend to lean on this library quite a bit for its selectors and other niceties.

• Built many dynamic front ends using AJAX
• Built a Firefox Add-on that uses jQuery to build and modify most of the DOM.

Firefox Add-on SDK

I’ve only built one but plan on building more.

• An add-on for listing GitHub repos and quick links for them (code, issues, wiki, etc)

Node

Node is a recent addition to my bag of tricks. It sparked the fire in me to really start enjoying JavaScript. I have been using it to build out co-operative micro-services such as:

• An IRC bot.
• A layer for receiving web hooks.
• A GitHub post receive hook processor.
• Process management for all of these micro-services.

Git

I am commonly found teaching people how to use git, recover from situations they and not sure how to get out of, and giving my opinions on best practices based on experience and discussion with others that have passion about how to use their version control system.