Eric Raymond perhaps? - Programmer, Musician, Media personality, Martial artist, Economist, Mathematician, Mystic, Essayist, Author

The man does have a way of 'inflating' what he does but these are things he claims to be.

you have to be good at those things to count

Point taken. :)

How about bigot? Does that count?

Perhaps Python specific but I use this a lot

  epy () { 
  	cmd="import $1 as a ; print   a.__file__.endswith('.pyc') and a.__file__[:-1] or a.__file__" 
  	file=$(/usr/bin/env python -c $cmd) 
  	echo $file
  	emacsclient --no-wait $file
  }

I suppose http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEVA0WbmfAA applies to manpower as well as brains.

It's really just a tool like your editor. I personally dress for expedience. There are some forums where i have to go to where power dressing really does have a positive outcome. There are some places (eg. code sprints) where a T-shirt and an old pair of jeans works better.

>One solution is to send a (moderately complex) programming >problem by email and ask them to send code back. This will >weed out a lot of people without wasting your time.

This is I think the best solution. A friend works at a company here called Tachyon and they have this part as part of the form on their jobs site where you can apply for jobs. http://tachyon.in/jobs.html

While not as much as in the west, there are plently of companies that use Python in India and not all of them "do crap work outsourced to India". Here's a list

http://wiki.python.org/moin/BangPypers/PythonCompaniesInIndi...

A local user group in Bangalore is organising the first Indian PyCon right now and we've talked to many companies (some Indian and some not) about sponsorships because they use Python.

You say,

"there are plently of companies that use Python in India and not all of them "do crap work outsourced to India"."

Interesting. I see Tavant (outsourcing company), servelots (looking for people with java sql tomcat -hardly indicates a Python focus), moog (nothing very python specific and seems to follow the "offshore India dev centre" model - high probability of dealing with crap work the folks in the West don't want to do), Trellisys (outsourcing) , DIQ (I can't even make out what they do. Seems like a company run by a bunch of jokers, see their blog!).

Can you point out any companies working primarily with python don't do outsourcing, and have sophisticated python based products in that list? If you can't doesn't that just prove my point?

I remember products from Tachyon (http://tachyon.in, the makers of QuillPad) using Python. Some of them are even open-source!

Freelance web development (not much) and corporate training (might sometimes make more than my day job). This is in India where service companies abound and they have high training budgets.

I'm spending my free hours trying to write a Steampunk themed vertical shooter game using PyGame. The code is at

http://github.com/nibrahim/Xenon-Retroblast/tree/master