I’m kind of known as a polyglot among coworkers. We would often argue that instead of hiring great Java/Python/C++ developers, we should rather strive to hire great engineers with strong CS fundamentals who can pick up any language easily. I came from scientific computing background, doing mostly C/C++/Python many years ago. Over the course of the last three years at my current job I coded seven languages professionally, some out of interest and some necessity. I enjoyed the experience learning all these different things and want to share my experience here, what I learned from each one of them and how it helps me becoming a better engineer.

C

The first language I used seriously, apart from LOGO & BASIC when I was a kid of course. It’s probably the closest thing one can get to the operating system and bare metal without dropping down to assembly (while you still can in C). It’s a simple language whose syntax served as the basis of many successors like C++ & Java. It doesn’t offer any fancy features like OOP or namespaces, but rather depends on the developer’s skill for organizing large code base (think …

Finally decided to jump (back) on the blogging bandwagon. This time I decided to use a static site generator, since that seems the cool thing to do these days, and found this site. I want something in a language I know well, so Ruby or JavaScript is out. It should also be actively maintained, so Scala is out since monkeyman, the only entry there, seems abandoned. I eventually settled on Pelican, the top ranked Python framework.

I set up a new virtualenv with virtualenvwrapper and also discovered autoenv along the way. It was easy to get started with the pelican-quickstart script and in a few minutes I have a working site already. Next I went shopping for themes in pelican-themes and picked pelican-bootstrap3. Turns out it doesn’t work with Spotify icon yet so I forked the repo and made a quick PR.

After some further tweaking with the settings I was pretty happy with the results. I went on to set up Disqus and Google Analytics for the site, and published it to my Linode with make ssh_upload.