About Me

While I've worn a lot of hats in my professional career, the various titles or labels have usually been euphemisms for programmer. I got interested in programming in college, where I studied electrical engineering, and have been doing it (or something close to it) for most of my career. I enjoy it a lot and its also one of my hobbies, I guess, at least if you define a hobby as something you spend a lot of time and money on! I'm currently using Python almost exclusively, but the progression to Python includes C, C++, Java and C# with offshoots into Awk and then Perl on the scripting side, and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the web side. I have a lot of opinions on each of these languages, but that's a topic for another day...

Although my background is technical, most of my career has been spent in finance - the early part on the sell side (i.e. Wall Street brokerage firms) and the latter part on the buy side (in my case, hedge funds). I've found the mixture of technology and finance interesting in a lot of ways: there are a lot of interesting problems in finance, its an industry where people use technology as a competitive advantage, the industry changes quickly so there are always new problems to tackle, you get to see your work in the hands of users very quickly (sometimes even the same day!), and working on a trading desk with all the interaction and banter (and yes, distractions) is a lot of fun. Oh, and there's that compensation thing, too. Working in finance does have some downsides, though. You don't always find many technical peers to bounce ideas off of - especially in smaller organizations like hedge funds. But that's partly what drew me to creating a blog ... the desire to talk about interesting topics and to discuss them with others online.

Originally, I used packaged blogware for this site (MovableType, then WordPress) but recently I've gotten into Django so I decided to write my own blog. Its a fun project, fairly easy and gives me ultimate control over the site. As I add interesting features, I'll post a summary of what I did and how I did it in Django.

About This Site

This site is built on the following technologies. From the bottom up:

• Dell PowerEdge 750 server, 2x 3.2GHz P4, 1GB RAM, 2x 160GB SCSI RAID 1
• Fedora Core 4 (2.6.11) Linux host OS
• VMWare GSX Server 3.1
• Fedora Core 4 (2.6.11) Linux guest OS
• MySQL 4.1.19
• Django dev trunk (typically up-to-date)
• Python 2.4.1 with docutils and markdown
• Apache 2.0.54 + mod_python

Interestingly enough, I typically develop on a Windows XP Pro machine running MySQL 5.0.21, Python 2.4.2 and Apache 2.2.2 but I haven't had any issues deploying on the slightly different configuration under Linux. I simply do a svn up on the Linux box, then a service httpd restart and it just works.

I've been using VMWare in various configurations both at work and for my personal projects for about 2 years now and I think its great. This particular box is actually hosting another Linux guest running a phpBB site. I even used to have a Windows XP Pro guest on it, too, and all 3 ran nicely with very little CPU load. For this site, I built the whole VM on my home workstation, configured all the packages, got the web site up and running, then copied the VM files to the host and booted it up. I never had to touch the hardware. And the whole image will fit on my USB keychain with room to spare. Try that with a physical machine!