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Hi! I'm Tom.

I've been doing full-stack web development and Linux¹ system administration for a long time — since I was a teenager in the 1990s. I somehow ended up co-founding and successfully selling a company by the time I was 20.

I stumbled across Python a few years later, followed by Django, leading to me working with several of Django's creators and core contributors at the Lawrence Journal-World. I ended up authoring Django's __regex QuerySet lookups² during my time there, along with various other patches, and maintained the LJW's internal Django fork (a.k.a. "FrankenDjango").

Later, at The Onion, I authored the (now abandoned) django-tagcon library, as well as several in-house modifications for The Onion's internal Django fork; these included a fix for Django's then-broken timezone support, and a "model shadowing" facility which worked like the later custom User model support, except it allowed substituting any arbitrary Django model³.

While I've learned enough about dozens of different languages over the past couple of decades to be dangerous — from Haskell to Lisp — I've always come back to Python. It fits my brain in a way nothing else does (although I'll admit I wish it were a bit more functional-friendly in its design). It's the most readable language I've ever used (at least before static type hints showed up⁴), is amazingly well-documented, has the best "batteries included" out there, is a near-perfect "glue" language, and its introspection facilities allow for easily exploring APIs in an IPython REPL⁵.

I'm quite handy with JavaScript and React as well, along with the various pieces of a modern JS toolchain like Webpack, Babel, and PostCSS. And I live and breathe Linux, running it everywhere, including on my personal ThinkPad. (Arch, in case you were wondering.)

I'm available for hire professionally, either via full-time employment or contract work through my consultancy. Feel free to check out my LinkedIn profile for my (extensive!) work history.

Tools I Use Constantly

• Arch Linux, operating system
• i3wm, tiling window manager
• st, terminal
• tmux, terminal multiplexer
• zsh, shell
  • Although there are days I'm tempted to switch to Xonsh, since zsh is ludicrously arcane, and time spent learning its secrets doesn't readily transfer to other domains.
• Neovim, text editor (heavily customized)
• Git, verson control system
• fzf, handy text skimmer
• Docker, container tool
• Borg, backup utility
• Ungoogled-Chromium, web browser
  • Along with a bunch of extensions, including:
    • Allow Right-Click
    • Browserpass
    • Decentraleyes
    • Stylus
    • uBlock Origin (the most indispensable one, by far)
    • Violentmonkey
• Python, programming language
  • My two most used third-party packages are IPython and Pytest.
  • I'm slowly open-sourcing my gobs of utility libraries; Seittik is the first stage of this.

(That's not to mention a ridiculous number of bespoke tools I've written to fit my brain, 99% of them in Python.)