Recently I had the good fortune of connecting with Dušan Omerčević, VP of Engineering for Zemanta who visited NYC from their engineering center in Slovenia.

Dušan wrote a terrific post inspired by our conversation here, and it is worth a read.

We talked a lot about how important patience and pacing are in an engineering organization, especially when building yours from scratch or pivoting an existing one with new hires, new processes, and new focus. Our tendency as engineers is to fix what we can fast and get things moving. We want to focus on code, and through code right everything and release fast. But there is a discipline to learn around letting some things run their course while very precisely controlling others. In mentoring team members, for example, it is often essential to stand on the sidelines and allow some hard but harmless lessons to be learned, while at other times one has to steer a less experienced developer away from failure with words and examples.

It was fascinating to compare engineering cultures and practices, and I came away feeling once again that common sense, a foundation in solid engineering process, and indeed patience are the basic ingredients for a winning productive development team. No matter what it’s size or location.

I spent much of last week soaking in all the inspiring developments in the Python community at Pycon 2012. A huge thanks is due Jesse Noller @jessenoller and his team for organizing an engaging, well-paced conference and for executing it flawlessly. Impressive.

I played a small part with a Poster Session on Sunday, the final session day. I talked about how and why we arrived at a Python codebase for my new project, Happify. My poster, below, is an unscientific look at various startup-friendly languages across axes like hiring, readability, produtivity, and performance. I spoke about the state of the NYC startup scene, how Python is on the rise, and why it’s a particularly good fit for small teams that require each member of the team to contribute at every layer of the stack. It was very well-received, sparking some vibrant post-session conversations on everything from Positive Psychology to creative use of Python decorators. My short intro video is here. You’ll see clearly I’d had insufficient sleep ond more-that-sufficient caffeine.

But the best aspect of Pycon for me was getting to know the community of folks that make the language thrive. For years I have been intrigued by the differences between various self-organizing open-source technical communities, with first-hand knowledge of the groups driving Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, and PostgreSQL. I have in mind a long post which will explore their similarities and differences, but I will pen a few words about Python here.

Python has a long history as a utilitarian “get things done” language. It’s wide adoption by academic and scientific programmers, as well as the web application startup scene has proven that its readability, lack of magic, and productivity are important to anyone writing code. Perhaps even more important than out-of-the-gate performance and concurrency. This cross-cutting eye toward utility is very clear at Pycon. Talks and Posters surrounding my own included explorations of computer vision, artificial intelligence, asynchronous evened programming, web frameworks, and even my favorite “Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes.” Get the language out of your way, and you can do anything from shooting rodents to making people happier through gaming.

Anyway, I’m excited to be a small part of the Python community.

And a PDF version: PyCon 2012 Poster

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Originally uploaded by andyparsons

Contentment in the laundry room. This is me testing wiring up Twitter to this blog.

I’m doing a casual study for a personal project  on how many variant user experiences there are for interconnecting Web apps I use frequently, and how unifying standard practices to cut down on clicks and enhance security could help data flow more freely.

After looking at this stuff for a bit, I felt like Izzy looks in this image.

There are too many impediments to interconnectivity.

This morning, in the latest chapter of my trying to find a suitable desktop RSS reader, I mistakenly removed an imprtant category, and all its content, from Google Reader. Argh. It’s gone, gone, gone, and I can’t remember the 75 blogs that were in it.

But that’s OK; it forced me to consider which ones were important. Those I read daily were top of mind and easy to find. Those with which I play pound-the-weasel of unread items are useless anyway.

I urge you to try this. On purpose. If you can recover your blogroll, it’s no fun.

iPhoners: if you aren’t using Nuevasync, you should check it out. The lack of over-the-air sync to Google calendar has always been a near deal-killer for me, but Nuevasync works. It’s still beta, and they’ll happily send you your password in plaintext (ouch!) but it’s a clever hack using Apples iPhone OS Exchange ActiveSync support that solves a big problem. Enjoy: http://nuevasync.com

Well, besides the obligatory useless “welcome to my blog” post, I can’t think of anything more important than linking (often) to Poncakery.com, Monica’s new business website. Monica is an amazing pastry chef/cake scupltress/creative artist extraordinaire here in our hometown of Brooklyn, NY. If you ever need a remarkable cake in the NYC area for a special occasion, get in touch!

I’ll start off with the obligatory, “now what?” I’ve finally made the time to start up a blog, or rather, the time was made for me. Since I am a person of relative leisure at the moment, I am focusing on the very, very long to-do list that’s been accumulating for the last several… years. And now I will need to cultivate a habit of discovering useful things to say. Or just blather on, adding bits to the Web, raising the temperature at so many faceless data centers, and accelerating global warming.

Stay tuned to see which it’ll be.