Any community would be lucky to have such a passionate, gracious, earnest and competent person as Jesse Noller. I've never met or even corresponded with him, but as a workaday programmer using Python, I've benefited tremendously from his leadership and generosity. I wish him all the best in this new adventure!
Hopefully the new opportunity really does allow a balanced life. Technologies and companies rise and fall quickly, products appear and become irrelevant even faster. You get just one chance to be present while your children grow up and your effect on them lasts beyond your lifetime. They are watching you all the time; you are at the very least a landmark in each of their coordinate systems, if not the origin itself.
Seconded, and in this world of test based interviews and be awesome now expectations, I want to create a company and a ethos that is not merely family friendly, but family biased.
- not duvet days, but sick kid days - we expect you simply not to turn up 9 days in winter and call, 3 days in summer, just because you have a sick kid and shoukd be there not here
- remote working as a default
- benefits including emergency nannys, flying ou to a conference - fly your kids too! (Yeah might not see that as a benefit :-)
I don't know how to get there just yet, but as a family man and business owner I know I need to hire people with child care responsibilities, because else I am just hiring 25 year olds, and I like old school.
Jesse's a very active member of the Python community, has published remarkably informative and helpful blog posts that have got us OS X users out of a jam far too many times to count, recently chaired PyCon 2013 and last, but not least, an all-around nice guy.
Here's yet another "I don't know you, but keep on doing what you do, man" post. Reading your twitter feed after Pycon this year, I was worried for a minute the trolls would win and you'd want to throw in the towel on the python community altogether. Seeing people like you dig in their heels after being met with that kind of craziness just makes me smile.
Congratulations Jesse. Its clear you made the decision after a lot of thought. PyCon 2013 was my first and it was especially better because of the help and support we got from you and your team. It was remarkable to see you on top of things and helping everyone out.
Good luck on your new venture and the company is lucky to have someone like you.
Ironically, I've seen this on pages with JS on Chrome/OSX - something to do with the webkit framework/chrome going bonkers. It keeps getting worse/popping up on other pages too. The only thing that seems to fix it is a hard reboot.
