Philip Herron - Learning Cython Programming

Philip Herron is an avid software engineer who focuses his passion towards compilers and virtual machine implementations. When he was first accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010, he used inspiration from Paul Biggar's PhD on optimization of dynamic languages to develop a proof of concept GCC frontend to compile Python. This project sparked his deep interest of how Python works.

After completing a consecutive year on the same project in 2011, Philip decided to apply for Cython under the Python foundation to gain a deeper appreciation of the standard Python implementation. Through this, he started leveraging the advantages of Python to control the logic in systems or even to add more high-level interfaces such as embedding Twisted web servers for REST calls to a system-level piece of software without writing any C code.

Currently Philip is employed by NYSE Euronext in Belfast Northern Ireland, working on multiprocessing systems. But he spends his evenings hacking on GCCPy, Cython, and GCC. In the past, he has worked with WANdisco as an Apache Hadoop developer and as an intern with SAP Research on cloud computing.

To achieve this book, I would like to thank many people. Firstly, my girlfriend Kirsty Johnston for putting up with my late nights and giving me the confidence I needed; you're the best! My mum and dad, Trevor and Ann Herron, who have always supported me my whole life; thanks for helping me so much.

I feel that Ian Lance Taylor from my GCC Google Summer of Code experience deserves a special mention; if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be writing anything like this right now; you have shown me how to write software. Robert Bradshaw for mentoring my Cython GCC-PXD project even though I had a lot going on at the time; you helped me get it done and passed; you taught me how to manage time.

Special thanks Nicholas Marriott for helping me with the Tmux code base! I would also like to thank Gordon Hamilton, Trevor Lorimer, Trevor Thompson, and Dr Colin Turner for the support you've all given me.

Namit Kewat is a financial analyst and XBRL expert. At his job, he has worked on almost all the major SEC filers' XBRL creation (for example, BAC, GS, FB, and WSH). He is using Python extensively for extracting and generating reports from financial information present in XBRL financial reports. He has made a few quality checking apps in Python that are extensively used by his company for quality checks, which reduces the quality-check time from hours to seconds.

Goran Milovanovic is a Python programmer from the Blender Game Engine community. His interests include real-time simulation, nanotechnology, and education. If he is well known, it would be for his video tutorials, which can be found by Googling for "Goran's Python tutorial series".

I would like to thank my mother and father for their continuing support and encouragement.