About

I’m John DeRosa and this is my blog.

What I write about

The topics you’ll find here include Python, careers, technical and team leadership, and the Seattle technology ecosystem. I also occasionally snark about random stuff.

What I do today

I work at Brex. Before this I worked at Coffee Meets Bagel, CBRE, and Solinea.

My technical interests include web application development and data-mining. I’d describe myself as a back-end guy. I usually work in Python, Django, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and other open source technologies. I’ve worked in TypeScript since joining Brex but that’s probably not my long-term arc.

I’ve held senior technical management positions and built first-rate technical teams. But these days I much more enjoy spending the day in Emacs writing interesting Python code.

My past technical work includes development in Perl, C, Java, Lisp, and ISP microcode; on spiders, search engines, operating systems, and CPUs.

I used to regularly attend PyCon, and I will again if I return to working in Python.

A brief history

I first used a computer in 1974, at Lynbrook Senior High School. It was a Data General Nova 1200 running in-core BASIC.

After attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where I was enamored with a DECsystem-1050 during the golden age of WPI hacking, I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). I wrote CPU microcode for the VAX-11/750 and VAX 8600, did RISC architecture research, worked on the first DEC Alpha workstation, ported Windows NT to DEC’s Alpha, and managed the NT/Alpha platforms team.

After DEC, I held VP and senior management roles in a few start-ups. The most successful was Singingfish, where I was Co-founder and VP Engineering. We created a novel service that we sold to Thomson SA, which sold it to AOL, which killed it. Joe Heck introduced me to Python and Django in 2006 when he and I built TrenchMice. Thank you Joe!

For fun, I spend time with friends and obsess about my pets.

More details and contact info

My LinkedIn entry has more detail.

My e-mail address is john @ this site’s domain.