Skip to main content

RackLabs

Today marks one month that I've been working for Rackspace's RackLabs with the Mosso group in San Antonio, Texas.  (Anyone want to start a Python group?  The closest one is in Austin.)

It's kind of a gentle introduction to big company culture for me; at around 2,000 employees, Rackspace is easily ten times as large as any other company I've worked for, and 100 times as large as most.  Mosso is a lot smaller and RackLabs itself is smaller still, but I still had to go to five days (!) of corporate orientation.  Other than that, though, we're pretty much left alone by our corporate parent.

To start with, I'm working on Mosso's Cloud Files, which is basically an S3 competitor.  Cloud Files is similar to the work I did at Mozy, but there are a lot of technical differences.  Some are driven by Cloud Files being more of a general purpose storage engine than the one I wrote for Mozy; others stem from the Cloud Files authors being Twisted fans.

Strange coincidence: as with Mozy, I share an office here with a Debian developer, probably the only one in San Antonio.  My experience is that debian developers are pretty sharp guys, probably in no small part due to the rigorous screening process you have to go through.  They set a high bar.

Of course this continues to be my personal blog, and all opinions are mine alone.  RackLabs has its own blog for when they want to say something official.

Comments

Chuck said…
Hey Jonathan, welcome to San Antonio! And congrats on your new job at RackLabs. They are a good group of guys, and I hope it goes well for you. I think a python group would be cool, though 90% of them would be from Rackspace :)

Chuck
10:36 AM
Scott said…
A python group would be fun. welcome to SA.
10:52 AM
Greg said…
Hi Jonathan. I too live in San Antonio. I work at Southwest Research Institute and we have a lot of people using Python for lots of things. There has been some talk of a PUG (SATPUG?) on the SATLUG mailing list.
2:21 PM
Anonymous said…
Congrats, man!
1:51 PM
Gregory Holt said…
Interesting how our railing can be taken as part of what we're railing against. We'll have to counteract that at the "local" level.
7:49 AM
Noah Gift said…
I say start a group. You need something to do besides walk to the Alamo after work :)
12:29 AM
Extreme Capitalism said…
Hello mate nice posst
12:46 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Python at Mozy.com

At my day job, I write code for a company called Berkeley Data Systems. (They found me through this blog, actually. It's been a good place to work.) Our first product is free online backup at mozy.com . Our second beta release was yesterday; the obvious problems have been fixed, so I feel reasonably good about blogging about it. Our back end, which is the most algorithmically complex part -- as opposed to fighting-Microsoft-APIs complex, as we have to in our desktop client -- is 90% in python with one C extension for speed. We (well, they, since I wasn't at the company at that point) initially chose Python for speed of development, and it's definitely fulfilled that expectation. (It's also lived up to its reputation for readability, in that the Python code has had 3 different developers -- in serial -- with very quick ramp-ups in each case. Python's succinctness and and one-obvious-way-to-do-it philosophy played a big part in this.) If you try it out, pleas...
9 comments
Read more

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod...
Post a Comment
Read more

A review of 6 Python IDEs

(March 2006: you may also be interested the updated review I did for PyCon -- http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/02/pycon-python-ide-review.html .) For September's meeting, the Utah Python User Group hosted an IDE shootout. 5 presenters reviewed 6 IDEs: PyDev 0.9.8.1 Eric3 3.7.1 Boa Constructor 0.4.4 BlackAdder 1.1 Komodo 3.1 Wing IDE 2.0.3 (The windows version was tested for all but Eric3, which was tested on Linux. Eric3 is based on Qt, which basically means you can't run it on Windows unless you've shelled out $$$ for a commerical Qt license, since there is no GPL version of Qt for Windows. Yes, there's Qt Free , but that's not exactly production-ready software.) Perhaps the most notable IDEs not included are SPE and DrPython. Alas, nobody had time to review these, but if you're looking for a free IDE perhaps you should include these in your search, because PyDev was the only one of the 3 free ones that we'd consider using. And if you aren...
36 comments
Read more