New Hire: Kapil Thangavelu
by Kendall Clark
We decided a few months ago to get serious about Python web development in the Semantic Tech area (more about that next year, I think) and I’ve been needing to stop working in the biz and start working on it, which meant only one thing: hire a new Pythoneer to take over from me.
I thought this might be a bit tricky because Semantic Web stuff (mostly OWL and RDF) hasn’t exactly exploded inside the Python world; there’s some stuff, but nothing overwhelming. I posted a few job descriptions in obvious places, aiming to find someone with a strong CS background who could learn the SemStuff as needed.
We got really lucky and found a really outstanding candidate, who I knew already by reputation from inside the Python world. One one of my concerns was that we’d become over the past year a Pylons shop, but this candidate was a big name in the Zope and Plone world. I was on record, back in the day, saying bad things about Zope, so I wasn’t sure how this would work.
Two things saved the day:
- Zope 3 is very different from the old Zope stuff I learned to hate; more to the point, it’s a lot more relevant to what we want to do than it used to be.
- the candidate said exactly the right thing in the f2f interview: “I’m a Python programmer. I know Zope but I can learn anything”—just so!
So we did what anyone in our position would do: we hired him! I’m happy to introduce Kapil Thangavelu, Python Web guy extraordinaire, as our newest coworker. He’s hit the ground running, already making great strides on an ontology and metadata repository project/product that we’re working on for a client. I think this consolidates our position as a Java/Python shop quite nicely, and we’re all looking forward to good things from Kapil.
