On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Benjamin Root <ben.r...@ou.edu> wrote: > Alternate title: "How I finally convinced my Dad that open-source can put > food on the table". Since this entire story got started on this mailing > list, I figured it would be appropriate to end it here.
Love the alternate title. I'm sure we can all substitute dad|mom|wife|husband|significant_other in that one. > About a week later, I got a personal email from the original poster > informing me that my solution worked perfectly. He also noticed that I was > working in a neighboring building on campus and wondered just how much > longer my PhD was going to take and if I had any interest in going into the > private sector. (The company happened to deal with atmospheric science and > my PhD is in meteorology). I love that a tiny bit of altruism turned into a good job for you. Recently my wife, who is a criminal defense attorney, decided to transition from criminal law to family law, and took on a pro-bono case of a friend who was in a tough spot (he was accused of spousal battery by a mentally ill wife and they had several young kids in the middle). At a Halloween party, she met someone who worked at a family law firm and began telling him about her case, and that led to a job interview and soon she'll be having her third interview with the firm. I don't know how it will turn out, but I'm pretty sure that she wouldn't have gotten this opportunity had she not taken on this case pro-bono. I grew up pretty much accepting the US ethos that 'there is no such thing as free lunch" and "no one works for free". So it came as a great surprise to me, sometime in 1994-1995, when I posted a question on comp.lang.awk about a script I was developing mixing sed and awk which parsed BibTeX. Some kind soul responded withing 12 hours, "you should really be using Perl for this", *and* wrote a non-trivial, several hundred line piece of Perl to solve my problem. I was dumbstruck that someone would stay up all night solving a problem for me, not looking for anything except perhaps for "credit". What I learned next was that altruism is infectious. I began diving deeply into Perl, mastering it, and answering other people's questions on the Perl mailing list. At one point, I was one of the top ten posters on the Perl mailing list -- no mean feat at the time -- mainly obsessively answering people's questions. Of course when I discovered Python, I dropped Perl faster than a hot potato, but that spirit of contributing to and benefiting from a community of people motivated not by a payback but by contributing to and participating in something excellent persisted. That free help that guy gave me on comp.lang.awk probably caused me to spend 8,000 hours over the next decade helping other people. I guess there is no such thing as free lunch. > It turned out that the company realized the value of having on-staff a > "SciPy Guru" (I still consider myself a beginner). After the usual visits > and interviews, I was offered a position. At multiple times throughout the > process, it was obvious to me that while it was good that I was an > atmospheric scientist, what was most valuable to them was my knowledge, > insight and expertise with Python and its tools. > > The lesson I hope everyone here can take in is that there are many companies > out there that are using open-source tools and libraries for their > purposes. Learning and using these tools for your own purposes not only > solves your immediate needs, but also sets you up for future opportunities. No doubt about this one. I have tried with mixed success on a number of occasions to hire people for a job in quantitative finance who possess skills in scientific python tools as well as statistics, and it is hard to find good matches. Whenever I meet other people like me who are trying to hire people, they all tell the same tale: it's hard to find talent. So if you have these skills and would like a job, contact me :-) I've been astounded by the degree of uptake of the scientific python toolset, and it is accelerating. As more and more people use these tools, more and more companies require them and most importantly, more and more talented developers put their energies into them. The amount of productivity being poured into not only the core tools but also pandas, scikits-learn, scikits-image, pystatsmodels and others is awesome, and is definitely taking the tool chain to the next level. > Therefore, I would like to thank John Hunter for making matplotlib available > for the community, and a hearty thanks to the rest of the community for > their contributions to matplotlib. Without this, I doubt I would have found > this job opportunity, nor have the "value-added" skills to have them > consider hiring me. You're welcome, but I owe you a significant thanks as well. As my time for significant development has dwindled, the major contributions by you and the other developers has enabled the project to thrive. I hope that in your new position, you can continue to devote some time to core development. Congrats on the new job, and thanks for sharing the story. JDH ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
