Alexys Jacob-Monier on Cluster Management
Get an expert opinion on the concepts you learned in this chapter.
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Asking an expert
Following is a conversation with an experienced Python developer Alexys Jacob-Monier on the topic of cluster management.
Alexys Jacob-Monier
| Q: Hi Alexys! Could you introduce yourself and explain how you came to Python? |
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| A: I tend to describe myself as an autodidact who spent more time trying to figure out how to make something out of his machines than actually making them work. The constant struggle of the fail-and-retry strategy taught me better how not to build things than how to build them right the first try. I guess this is why I define empiricism as the art of frustration management! |
| I started my professional life as a Flash web developer also doing ASP/C# at 1000mercis which was a digital advertising and marketing startup at the time. Since we were satisfied, I started multitasking a lot, and my job shifted to be a network administrator added to a system administrator before I became an accidental programmer after building a somewhat elaborate email parsing platform using bash (1000+ lines of code). |
| This insanity made me realize that I needed a programming language that would fit my empirical approach as well as my broad range of use cases. |
| I first heard about Python through my interest and heavy usage of Gentoo Linux which I brought to production state at work. Then a Linux Magazine introducing Python came into my mailbox, and I decided to give it a shot. It was a shock. All I needed was there, and I felt so galvanized that I started (re)writing everything using Python! |
| Nowadays I am CTO at 1000mercis, which scaled into an international group known as Numberly while embracing Linux and Python as its central technological keystones. I am very fortunate to work with a lot of talented people who use the language to build distributed, reliable and performant data-oriented platforms at scale. |
| I am also part of the Open Source software community. I have been a Gentoo Linux developer since 2011 with a particular interest in packaging and contributing to clustering and NoSQL related projects and their corresponding Python libraries. I have also given a few talks at EuroPython conferences related to distributed applications and systems. |
| Over the last couple of years, I have also been extremely pleased to see Python becoming the reference language for data science and engineering! |
| Q: What do you think makes Python great (or not) when building distributed systems? What are the things you consider to be advantages or drawbacks? |
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| A: At the risk of disappointing you, I actually think that Python is a mediocre language for building distributed systems! To be fair, |