Skip to main content

Available

Feature50 is winding down now that CEO Ben Galbraith has accepted a job offer elsewhere.  So, I'm interested in exploring my options, specifically, opportunities to build out the technology for a start-up working in concert with a strong business CEO. I've done this twice now.

Technical ability

I am a senior developer specializing in back-end technologies.  At Mozy, where I was employee #2, I wrote a distributed file repository that stores petabytes of data, an amount comparable to Amazon's S3.  I have 8 years of experience with PostgreSQL. I know how to design for scale, and how to find and remove bottlenecks.  I am not afraid of diving into a new code base; I took over as maintainer of the Spyce web framework and the FormAlchemy toolkit, and I have contributed features or patches to SQLAlchemy, Pylons, and Jython, among others.  

Soft skills

I enjoy building and working with a team.  At Feature50 I am responsible for technical interviews, and personally recruited five of our first eight developers.  At Mozy, I recruited three of the first five.  I designed a customized version of Review Board -- a code review tool -- for Feature50 and MediaBank, and contributed several patches back to the project.  I am active in the Python community and spoke at the last three PyCon conferences.  I have spoken at OSCON and I am speaking at PostgreSQL Conference West in October.

The bottom line

I'm looking to work on a challenging project -- that is, not Yet Another CRUD App -- with a small team. I am currently based in Utah; I am willing to work remotely or relocate.  Contact me at jonathan at utahpython dot org.

Comments

Ryan said…
Good luck!
fumanchu said…
I'm sure my company would love to have you on board. Shoot 'em a resume.

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...

PyCon Python IDE review

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g...