Long ago, in the late 1990s, I had a website on Christian Tismer’s Starship Python to show my Python projects to the community and report on new developments, provide tips, hints and small utilities. The site was called “Marc’s Python Pages”:
Turning a hobby into business
I then launched my company eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH in 2000 to market a web application server I had been working on for a couple of years. As it turned out, I was too early with the product. The market was still thriving using CGI scripts, Perl and a couple of static pages to run websites. At the same time, the Internet bubble burst, so it wasn’t exactly perfect timing for starting a DotCom company.
I eventually sold a single license of the application server to Steilmann in Bochum and then turned to consulting work, using the eGenix mx Extensions I had written for the application server as a way to market the company and myself to companies using Python.
This worked reasonably well and I have since run several projects, in-house at clients or outsourced to eGenix, and continued to add new useful commercial products to our portfolio - mostly around the commercial ODBC database Python interface mxODBC I had originally written for the application server.
Commercial and Open Source Software
Incidentally, the mxODBC development in 1997 also triggered the development of a date/time library mxDateTime at the time, since Python had no way of storing date/time values as objects apart from using Unix ticks values. Since it was a basic building block, I open-sourced it, in the same spirit as Python itself was open source (even though the term wasn’t known at the time). mxDateTime became the de facto standard for date/time storage, until Python itself received a datetime module.
I also open sourced several other C extensions for Python, which were all used in the application server, such as mxTextTools, mxTools, mxProxy, etc. - what was then to become the eGenix mx Extensions.
Still enjoying Python and it’s community
Over 15 years later, I still haven’t lost interest in Python, which I think means something. I continue to enjoy working with it, for it and enjoy the community that has developed around Python every single day.
I usually write lots of emails on mailing lists to discuss and stay in touch with people. Lately, I found I was missing a more persistent way of writing down ideas and snippets, something along the lines of what once were the Starship pages, so here you go… hope you’ll enjoy the ride.
If you want to follow the blog, please see the contact page. It’s currently possible to use RSS, Twitter and Tumblr for this.
Enjoy,
—
Marc-André
PS: The website is not yet complete, e.g. the project pages don’t work yet. I’ll add more content over the next few weeks.