This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz by Jarno Virtanen. Original Post: This week's featured superhero: Fredrik Lundh Feed Title: Python owns us Feed URL: http://sedoparking.com/search/registrar.php?domain=®istrar=sedopark Feed Description: A weblog about Python from the view point of Jarno Virtanen. Latest Python Buzz Posts Latest Python Buzz Posts by Jarno Virtanen Latest Posts From Python owns us

This week's featured superhero is also known as effbot, /F, or Fredrik Lundh.

Congratulations to Fredrik Lundh for receiving the Frank Willison award for outstanding contributions to the Python community. Again, highly deserved recognition to an intelligent, skillful, and a productive individual, who has done more to the Python community than most will ever do. Thank you, Fredrik, for all that. (And, mind you, Fredrik and his efforts have been featured on my weblog earlier.)

Fredrik is perhaps best known to Python old-timers as a relentless and extremely helpful comp.lang.python regular. Just check out the stuff Fredrik has posted to comp.lang.python according to Google groups, if you don't believe. He was so quick posting answers to comp.lang.python at times that people begun to suspect that Fredrik actually wrote a bot to do the posts. Whether that actually happened, is still a secret.

Be that as it may, Fredrik pretty much converted these efforts into a brilliant and useful book, The Standard Python Library, which you should consider buying in a form or another. The book is a magnificent course through the appraised Python standard library, with which you can avoid a lots of wheel re-inventing. Python Standard Library, the book, provides that oft-needed ladder between the concise explanations in the Python Library Reference and working programs by offering code samples that are actually correct.

Fredrik has also contributed to the core Python. I do not know all the details of these efforts, and Fredrik whole-heartidly supported egoless programming, but as far as I know, he has contributed major portions, amongst other things, to the regexp, unicode, and xmlrpclib libraries. He has been having a break from python-dev recently though, but never mind, that's life, move on, move on, move on.

Most of Fredrik's visible activity is therefore nowadays at zone.effbot.org. It contains a myriad of Python modules, programs, which are used by many people myself included, and helpful tips and longer writings. His writing style is so concise and straight-to-the-point that I cannot but admire it. For example, check out Fredrik's guide to Python Objects; it's a classic.

Like all of this wasn't enough already, he also initiated and ran a weblog concentrating strictly on Python, the Pythonware Daily Python-URL, which has been a wonderful news source of Python related announcements and resources. What is remarkable about the Daily Python-URL is it's format and that it's run by many different people, apparently now by Hamish Lawson. Both of these have contributed to the fact that the Daily Python-URL has been running steadily for years with ever-frequent updates, which is a tough job. This frequency and on-topic-ness have made Daily Python-URL a well-deserved success in the community.

Finally, Fredrik works for Secret Labs AB, the company behind PythonWare; or is that the other way around? Secret Labs has recently been focusing more on image processing especially in the meteorological applications, but continues to support its clients and Python community, and supposedly keeps developing the brilliant Python Imaging Library.

Oh yeah, and he runs a weblog, in case you didn't notice already.

PS. Fredrik, -- if you managed to read all the way through -- too bad I missed the opportunity to see you when you were in Helsinki, but perhaps some other time? Hope so.

PPS. Whew, that was a lot of links, wasn't it.