Welcome

I had worked for several years at a large institution when a friend invited me to Python Atlanta, a local meetup for programmers. I had thought that books and blogs were keeping me up to date, but conversation with real people taught me so much more!

I made the fateful decision to attend PyCon 2008 and two Plone conferences, after which, I was hooked! A few months later I resigned my position and became an independent developer so that I could send myself to as many conferences as I wanted.

My vocation has been transformed thanks to the Python community. While doing Python and occasional JavaScript programming for customers large and small, I focus on giving back to a movement that has given me so much. My talks and tutorials have taken me everywhere from the middle of Arkansas to the country of Poland, and people from several continents have offered improvements to the software that I myself contribute back to the community.

I live in Bluffton, Ohio, with my wife Jackie and two cats.

My Book

I recently had the privilege of revising John Goerzen's Foundations of Python Network Programming to produce a Second Edition.

Free chapter:
Chapter 10 — Screen Scraping

I was stunned at how far Python has come. When the first edition was written in 2004, HTMLParser was the preferred screen scraper, xmlrpclib was the reigning protocol for async web requests, and the book skipped web frameworks entirely (it ignored Zope) to present chapters on cgi and mod_python instead!

Take a look at the Second Edition if you are interested in a thorough tour of the network stack as seen from modern Python, including tutorial introductions to popular libraries like BeautifulSoup, lxml, and paramiko. All example programs from the book are available for free from my BitBucket repository which also offers Python 3 versions of each script in case you have already made the leap!