[Python-Dev] Hello, I'm the other new guy (original) (raw)

Christian Heimes lists at cheimes.de
Wed Nov 14 03:15:11 CET 2007

Hello Pythonistas and fellow core developers!

After Amaury introduced himself I've decided that I have to take some time to introduce myself, too.

Hello, my name is Christian Heimes and I'm a 28 years old German from Aachen. Aachen is a beautiful city about 70km West to Cologne and near the borders to The Netherlands and Belgium. Some of you may know me from #python as Crys (|Crys| or Crys_) or my former nick Tiran. Others may have seen me at some Python related conferences like EuroPython 2003 in Charleroi/Belgium, 2004+2005 in Gothenburg/Sweden, DZUG 2004 at the DESY/Hamburg or Plone Conference 2004/Vienna.

Before I'm going to bore you with the (Python) story of my life let me tell you something about my persona. I'm of average build and average height but people usually don't describe me as an average guy. Unless you see the more Metal and Gothic like chap with glasses, chin-beard and very long hair in black cloths, boots and a hat as ordinary. g When I'm not sitting in front of my box I'm spending time with my beautiful girl friend, listening to music, my friends or in a disco. I enjoy cooking but I rarely spend time in front of the TV. I only watch some well selected series like Myth Busters + LOST and information channels like ARTE.

My more exotic hobby is Medieval Living History, also known as Reenactment although we don't take it as serious as Reenacters. I usually describe it as a counter weight to my science and computer interests. We are tailoring cloths and living in tents or castles like people about 1200 to 600 years ago. That is without electricity, mobile phones and computers as much as it is possible these days. It's like a vacation from the modern world for a view days or entire week for me.

Now here is the story how Python entered my life:

I had my first real contact with Python in 2002 when some friends and me were evaluation web frameworks for the relaunch of our community site. We were all frustrated from our past experiences with PHP and MySQL and were looking for something innovative and more professional. Quickly we were brim over with enthusiasm for Zope3 and Python. But Zope3 wasn't ready in 2002 and the community project went dead after some internal frictions and lack of time. But I kept learning Python and playing around with Zope3 and Zope2.

After some Zope related jobs I came in contact with Plone and eventually became a Plone core developer and elected board member of the newly formed Plone Foundation. Unfortunately personal and health problems forced me to drop everything. After things went better again I focused on other areas like PyQt4, Twisted. C#/.NET and PythonDotNET in order to broaden my knowledge and learn other techniques beside CMS and web applications.

I came to Python C development as I worked on PythonDotNET for one of my projects. Although it might sound strange how a .NET and C# project got me into C and Python C API but it's easy to explain. In order to fix PythonDotNET for Python 2.5, Mono and UCS-4 builds of Python I had to familiarize myself with the C API of Python. The project is a bridge between CPython and .NET and not related to IronPython. The C# is doing a lot of calls into the C library using a technology that can be compared to ctypes. The code jumps forth and back between C, C#/.NET and Python code. It's a nightmare to debug problems but it's fun, too.

Once I had overcome my fear of Python's C API I saw its elegance and started to contribute to Python's core. I wrote some patches for Python 3000 because I saw an opportunity to get involved and contribute. And because I like to play with new stuff ;) After a heap of patches and bug reports Guido finally granted me developer privileges.

I'm planing to focus my work on Python 3000. I'm a Linux user (10 years server and 5 years work station experience) but I've a VMWare running to test patches on Windows XP, too.

Questions? :)

Christian

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