What’s Next – I Honestly don’t know and am perfectly fine not knowing. My career stalled during my time at CSC, I don’t know why exactly and while I do have some strong thoughts about it I’m not prepared to elaborate in detail at this time. However, I do know I need a change and it’s time to head a different direction.

NGC – My career started fast and I’d like to think very successfully at TRW/Northrop Grumman and there are a couple lessons/ideas that I often think about regarding my time there.

1. I built a solid name for myself there and had total say in what I wanted to do, by in large I had escaped the corporate bureaucracy and wholly controlled my own destiny. I greatly underestimated this benefit prior to my departure there.
2. 6 months or so prior to my departure I was offered a position that would have made me responsible for a nice chunk of revenue. I turned it down for many reasons, but the thing I did not really consider was how much the people who offered me the position believed in me. I regret not believing more in those who believed in me.

Commoditizing Software Development – During my brief time at CSC, it became apparent that Corporate America (or at least CSCs clients) is interested in commoditizing software development, and doing it through offshore resources in India. Personally I don’t believe it can be commoditized and doing so is a losing business strategy because not only does the quality of software suffer, but the “business” also suffers. If the work can be done in India for cheaper, so be it, but in my experience the quality is so bad, it is not worth the cost savings.

Fitness – I spent my 20s way overweight, I guess obese is the proper term. In the last 15 months I’ve lost 75lbs or so, others seems to notice the physical change. But, honestly I don’t so much. However, I do notice a mental change, and it is a huge one. It’s a major differentiator in why I am not nervous about being unemployed, I KNOW I am talented and I KNOW I will figure something out and be successful.

California/Ohio – I think it is safe to say while some good things have come of me moving back to Ohio, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if I end up back in California, in fact I’d probably me more surprised if I didn’t. I miss it a lot, not sure if I’ll go back to SoCal or look for something new somewhere in the SF Bay area. Time will tell.

Python – I spent some time earlier this summer introducing myself to python. As I have said before something about python just seems right, and now that I have unlimited free time, I’m going to use it to hack some of my ideas together. I may also explore Scala.

After looking around for alternatives, it looks like IPython will be a good upgrade. But one problem, the installation documentation was way too verbose and complex, so I’ve tried to simplify it here:

1. Install readline — you need readline to use all the fancy command line edit features, like advanced history and auto completion. You need to install a new version because apparently the version shipped with OS X will not work properly with IPython. Luckily for you there is already a pre-built version for download and you just need to put in /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages.

2. Install IPython — Obviously, you’ll need to build and install this, luckily it is not hard.

Now if you are like me, you may wonder what just happened, run the following commands to check out the installation:

Finally go test it out and have fun:

For more information view the Official IPython Documentation.

2 talks stick out in my mind.

First the “Decorators Are Fun” discussion by Matthew Wilson was easily the most enjoyable discussion for me. Obviously, he demonstrated python decorators, which allow you to dynamically modify functions without actually changing the function. Decorators are not totally unlike AOP or java annotations and it was interesting to see python examples. If there was a downside, it was that his presentation was a little too fast, when you start nesting functions and talking about functions that modify other functions, it gets a little hairy especially if you are new to the concept. But it also makes a ton of sense once you get the hang of it.

The second talk I really enjoyed was Gary Bernhardt’s Talking to the Web with Python. During the talk Gary demonstrated 2 python modules, Beautiful Soup and Universal Feed Parser, for parsing html & xml. I enjoyed this because he provided some very practical examples (eg: parse a webpage for links) of things you may want to do with parsing web pages or syndication feeds. He even showed a simple web crawler in about 8 lines of code, using these modules. Plus Gary had the first talk of the day, which is tough, but he brought a lot of energy to the discussion and kept me focused on his talk, which was good since I was up until 4:30 the night before and the red bull hadn’t kicked in yet.

All in all it was a good day and I am glad I went, I don’t know that I have ever been so excited to learn a new programming language, there is something about python that just clicks in my head, it makes a ton of sense to me. Back in college the president of ACM tried to get me to learn it, but I didn’t listen, not sure why it has taken me 7 years to dig in.