My new job: zest software¶

Per 1 april (standard this-is-not-a-joke disclaimer) I'm going to work for Zest software in Hoogvliet, near Rotterdam. They're a five (soon six !) person open source company that uses python, zope and plone to create websites and web applications for mainly educational, governmental and non-profit entities.

I'll mostly be doing programming, with a lot of personal responsibility for quality, for thinkwork and for keeping up my knowledge. Well, I should be able to handle that, more so after 4+ years of being a PhD. A PhD's job is to demonstrate that he can do independent research (of a certain quality).

My main challenge will be to pick up steam quick enough in real, productive zope/plone programming. I'm confident that I've got the right mindset and enough skills to be productive enough, but I'm nowhere near the fluency I'd want. There's a simple enough reason for that: I haven't programmed enough! Papers to write, research to do.

This is actually one of the reasons I accepted this job: I want to immerse myself in python/zope/plone programming! I want to get some decent amount of lines of code and unit tests under my belt. I think I can be pretty good, but there's nothing like a real test. I seriously want to know whether I'm good at this :-) (Note: "pretty good" at the moment is terribly relative. I think I'm better than a lot of people, but I've got a long way to go compared to a lot of pythonistas).

Second reason: the python/zope/plone community. I still remember my first europython conference where I was impressed by the drive for quality and, more important, the level of friendly cooperation. Friendly cooperation; working with Austrians and Canadians and all the rest; together building a truly great product: yeah, I'll like it here.

Third, and most important, reason: what I saw till now of Zest. Nice, professional, friendly, competent, energetic, active. Most of these qualifications are based on what they smelled like to me: being a good engineer, I trust my intuition :-) What I've seen in practice till now hasn't made me revise my opinion. (Though, if I can trust the qualifications on Zest's website, I can expect someone with a bad sense of humour, someone who doesn't know a python file from a word file, a struggling programmer, someone who doesn't communicate and another programming-ignorant one. Ah well, I'll fit right in then.)