I’m John DeRosa, and this is my blog.
What I write about
The topics you’ll find here include Python, Plone, Django, social and traditional media, careers, start-ups, technical and team leadership, and the Seattle geek/tech ecosystem. I’ll keep the personal chit-chat to a minimum, but I will sometimes flame about products or companies.
What I do today
I work at IP Street, and I’m co-founder and Principal in Meta Consulting. Meta Consulting provides business development and technical consulting to start-ups, medium-size businesses, and non-profits.
Before Meta, I was Director of Web Development for Fisher Interactive Network, which was the web division of Fisher Communications. Among other matters, I led a large CMS project for in-housing all of Fisher’s news sites, using Plone.
My technical skills are in web application development (community sites, e-commerce, content delivery, etc.), and architecting and implementing extremely large data stores. For technologies, I favor Python, Django, Plone, PostgreSQL, Solr, and other open source technologies. I’m also fluent in JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, etc.
My management work includes building large first-rate technical departments from scratch, and taking over dysfunctional organizations and pushing them into more productive states.
Past technical work includes working in Perl, C, Java, C#, Lisp, and ISP microcode, creating spiders, search engines, embedded operating systems, and CPU instruction sets. I’m rusty in those disciplines, but their neurons are still somewhere in my head.
I attend PyCon and Plone conferences. Rather than attend OSCON, I attend Open Source Bridge.
A brief history
I first used a computer in the fall of 1974, at Lynbrook High School. It was a Data General Nova 1200 running in-core BASIC.
After attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where I became enamored with a DECsystem-1050 during the golden age of WPI hacking, I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). There, I wrote CPU microcode for the VAX-11/750 and VAX 8600, and worked on the first DEC Alpha workstation. I also worked on porting Windows NT to DEC’s Alpha, on the first Alpha NT firmware (which was like a BIOS), and managed the NT/Alpha platforms team.
After DEC, I held VP, Director, and senior management roles in a few start-ups; and did Perl, C#, and Java development, in mostly open-source stacks. The most successful was Singingfish, where I was Co-founder and VP Engineering. Our team created a novel service that was ahead of its time. We sold it to Thomson SA, which strangled it with unrealistic expectations, after which AOL finished it off. But it was one of the few successful start-ups in 2000.
Joe Heck introduced me to Python and Django in 2006, when he and I built TrenchMice. TrenchMice also required intimacy with PostgreSQL, Apache, and Linux sundries.
For fun, I dabble in amateur astronomy, spend time with good friends, and sign to my dog.
More details and contact info
My LinkedIn entry has lots more details.
My e-mail address is john @ this site’s domain. I’m jderosa on IRC, where I hang out in #django. I’m @johnderosa on Twitter. I post artistically questionable photos in my MobileMe gallery.
