metaprogramming and politics

Some bits about me

I am very interested in communication.  Socially this means engaging and co-organising neighborhoods and technically it means i am interested in distributed systems and thriving to make available and built better communication machines for other people.   I also care for my son with whom i am regularly spending part of my days and weekends.  And I like to dance to “electronic swing” music with which i’d like to see more parties happening.

Past Software / Python projects

When i discovered Python i was thrilled by its high-level constructs and introspection facilities. I am still thrilled by the idea of dynamically deploying and executing high level programs in the net. In my view, Python and testing are a wonderfully productive combination for writing software. Out of this conviction, I founded and co-developed the PyPy project and maintain the pytest and tox testing tools. I also maintain a number of other projects, among the more popular are execnet for ad-hoc cross-interpreter communication and the py lib (i agree the naming choice of the latter was not very wise but it’s too hard to change now without breaking tons of code).  Most of my code you find at bitbucket/hpk42.

The coding culture in almost all my projects consists of test- and documentation-driven development and applying metaprogramming techniques.

Communal projects

My non-programming activities included the founding and living in the Trillke house project in central germany, where some 50 people and 10 children set out to collectively own and manage a 4000 squaremeter house in a city. Since 2009, I am living in Freiburg where i am also active in the local Go Club.

Money / Consulting

I continue to manage the merlinux company which executed and helped to manage the PyPy project from around 2004 to 2011, as well as executing contracts for the Google Open Source office, Nokia and other companies.

Me and my company are sometimes available for coaching, programming and teaching.

Contact

Feel free to contact me at holger at merlinux eu if you have questions, inquiries or comments. You may also find me as hpk42 on twitter.