I'm the whole company, and that's the point

Hello, and welcome.

You just signed up for Better Developers, and I want to take a minute to introduce myself, because the weekly Python article you subscribed to is one thread inside a bigger teaching practice, and I think you should know who's writing you.

It was in December 1995 that I went freelance. I gave up a stable corporate paycheck to go out on my own as a consultant, and in the 30 years since, I've gotten married, bought a house, raised three children, gone on numerous vacations, and slowly narrowed the work down to something I love. That turned out to be teaching.

My background on paper is MIT CS plus a PhD in learning sciences from Northwestern, but the reason I think I'm still doing this thirty years later is that the teaching itself keeps me interested. I tell jokes when I'm teaching, and often I'm the only one laughing. Which is just fine. Over those years the teaching has taken me into companies you'd recognize: Apple, Cisco, Intel, Sandisk, and a handful of others.

Better Developers is the newsletter side of that practice. I write it, I send it, I answer replies at [email protected]. If you email me with a question, you're getting me, and that is the whole point of a one-person company. Nobody is going to hand you off to a support team, because there isn't one.

Alongside the newsletter I teach at Python conferences, write books for O'Reilly and Manning, run monthly office hours and special lectures for the members of LernerPython.com, and once in a while I write longer posts about what I'm seeing in the language. I'm not telling you that to sell you anything. I want you to know where the Monday email is coming from.

Thanks for reading. The first regular Better Developers issue will land on its usual schedule. Before that, I wanted you to know who you're hearing from.

Reuven

P.S. Tomorrow I'll tell you about my first job out of school. It was at a company that wrote software for hospitals, and the head of QA was the most feared person in my department. It's the story that explains why I care about software quality the way I do, and why I'm still teaching Python 30 years later.

To make sure that these messages get to your inbox (and aren't tagged as junk or spam), please add [email protected] to your address book, or whitelist it.

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My company is based at: 404 Rices Mill Road, Wyncote PA 19095, USA