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One of the posts I’ve been mean­ing to do is this one — a more extended ver­sion out­lin­ing what I spoke about in my five minute light­ning talk I did at PyCon 2010 (more gen­eral thoughts on the con­fer­ence later). Of course, mean­ing to post it — and actu­ally get­ting a chance to are two dif­fer­ent things.

So — my goal of the light­ning talk was to say thank you to the python com­mu­nity, not only from me, but from the point of view of the com­pany I work for (Nasuni) which recently launched. Thanks can be given back to the com­mu­nity in a vari­ety of ways — money, code, spon­sor­ship, pro­grams, etc.

Some­times, a sim­ple Thank You can be a good start, and that was my goal. Unfor­tu­nately, I also com­pletely deleted my slides (inten­tion­ally, what was I think­ing?) after my talk was done.

What is Nasuni? We’re pretty small — obvi­ously much smaller when start­ing (5 core engi­neers). The goal was to build a sim­ple to man­age, secure, reli­able cloud-storage backed vir­tual stor­age appli­ance. Every­one helped code and design the prod­uct. We had to build it fast — when you’re a startup on VC money, you’ve got to be fast — you have finite time. Lim­ited time, money and people.

From a tech­nol­ogy stand­point — it sim­ply made sense to put the core data path in C and C++ — you need speed, secu­rity, and the com­pact­ness C offers you when you’re talk­ing speed. Not to men­tion, this is a device which has a finite amount of space, so keep­ing it rel­a­tively com­pact is a Good Thing. So the brain and cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem are in C — but we’re lack­ing something:

The rest of the per­son. D’oh. You know, arms and legs and stuff.

Let’s look at all of the other stuff we needed:

• tests
• tools/glue scripts
• prototypes
• user interface(s)
• other sys­tem daemons
• infrastructure
• web site
• deploy­ment tools

And that’s just the stuff I could think of off the top of my head right now. So, we needed to com­pli­ment our super strong core with some­thing pretty flex­i­ble, some­thing that could also eas­ily mesh with the core sys­tem as well.

When pick­ing the tech­nol­ogy; we needed speed of devel­op­ment, a broad ecosys­tem to build from, and it needed to ramp up and down. It had to be flex­i­ble enough that any­one involved in the project could become imme­di­ately effec­tive with it.

Enter Python.

“Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the uni­verse together.”

Python Ramps “up”, and it ramps “down” — it’s good for “hard” pro­gram­mers, and peo­ple just try­ing to get things done. It’s sim­ple enough that any­one who has scripted in the past can get some­thing done, and quickly. My motto has slowly become “there is no such thing as bad code — there’s just code that works, and code that doesn’t”. Code that comes out of some­one who is just learn­ing, and gets the job done is just as valu­able as code that is well thought out and designed.

Python, and it’s broad ecosys­tem. It’s the glue, the face, the hands, the legs. It, plus insanely smart engi­neers let us move quickly, adapt to any­thing that popped up and put together a kick ass product.

8 months.

With Python’s help, we put together a ready-to-ship sim­ple to man­age, secure, reli­able cloud-storage backed vir­tual stor­age appli­ance. 8 months! This isn’t a web app, or a another web ser­vice. This is some­thing just shy of putting actual hard­ware into a dat­a­cen­ter! We’ve got python deep in our DNA. (And heck — the pres­i­dent of the com­pany wrote a good chunk of it! How awe­some is that?)

The moral of the story, how­ever brief it is — when you need to sell Python to your boss, or that client — or if you’re just start­ing out. Don’t sell it with words. Sell it by show­ing it’s effec­tive­ness, it’s speed. Just do it — that’s what Python is here for. help­ing you get your job done and succeed.

Python is not meant to be the pret­ti­est, or the fastest-to-run, or the one with the lat­est fea­ture du-jour. It’s there to let you get your job done. That’s why I love it, and much of the com­mu­nity around it — it’s the prag­ma­tism, how will this let peo­ple be effec­tive.

I wanted to take a moment not just to cheer­lead — but to also specif­i­cally thank the projects and tools out there in the com­mu­nity that helped us get the job done.

• Python (duh)
• The Python stan­dard library: This can not be stressed enough! Despite any­thing else we use from the ecosys­tem, the stan­dard library is rich enough that it’s a mas­sive time, and life saver. This is why I don’t believe that “get­ting rid of it” makes any sense at all. Python’s suc­cess is not just a by prod­uct of the lan­guage itself — the stan­dard library is such a big sell­ing point it can’t be stated enough.
• Django
• Vir­tualenv / Virtualenvwrapper
• Nose
• pip
• fabric
• paramiko
• lxml
• pycurl

And many, many oth­ers (includ­ing obvi­ously non-python projects). Thank you, thank you, thank you!

In clos­ing — Thank You!. With­out Python, as a lan­guage — Python as a com­mu­nity, Django, and so many oth­ers — we would not have been able to achieve our goals. There’s so much to be proud of as a com­mu­nity, and some­times we loose sight of it while debat­ing frame­works, this, that or the next thing. Python is the per­fect secret weapon for peo­ple and com­pa­nies just try­ing to get things done

Thank you all — hope­fully we can give back as much as we’ve gotten.

One of the posts I’ve been mean­ing to do is this one — a more extended ver­sion out­lin­ing what I spoke about in my five minute light­ning talk I did...