Denis Ryzhkov

Python Senior Software Engineer

Crafting the code with love and thought since 1992

Why Python
My attitude
Python is almost the language I wanted to invent for myself: beautiful to read and to write, powerful and simple at the same time.
From TechCrunch
«Python has been a backbone of Dropbox… helped the product remain simple as it scales to let over 100 million users save over 1 billion files per day»
Companies using Python
Amazon,
CERN,
Disqus,
Dropbox,
EVE Online,
Facebook FriendFeed,
Google,
Instagram,
NASA,
Netflix,
OpenStack,
PayPal,
Pinterest,
Rackspace,
Reddit,
Spotify,
Uber,
Yahoo,
Yandex,
Yelp,
Wakie,
Wikipedia,
etc
Please read
The Python Paradox by Paul Graham

Principles
Value for user
Sometimes I make solutions too beautiful inside, so reminding myself the main goal is helpful.
DRY
«Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system»

Design principle I use by default for everything. Aware it should not be over-used to avoid breaking KISS.
KISS
Adding complexity is simple. Making simple solution may be complex, but:

«most systems work best
if they are kept simple
rather than made complex»
Proactive!
Proactively generating and proposing ideas. An intrapreneur for your company.

Clients say
(in chronological order)
Dim Newman,
Brand Lane ApS Founder
«there has hardly been any other developer who could beat Denis's brilliance and innovative approach.

His talent helped us to achieve the solutions that seemed to be technologically impossible»
Ben Widhelm,
Burstly CTO
«Thanks Denis, we appreciate all the work you have done for us.»
Trystan Kosmynka,
TestFlight CTO
«Great job Denis, good problem solving skills. Really impressed.»
«Very nice job Denis,
I also checked this out and was very pleased with
a) the amount of thought / work that went into this
b) the quality of the documentation
c) the testing procedure that you applied»
Bryan Dickson,
Lootsie CTO
«Well done Denis and thanks for all the hard work.»
Tony Aly,
Paradise Modern CEO
«wow… that's a really cool solution! it's very elegant, awesome. very impressive denis… tyvm!!»
«very astute questions…»
«i'm really impressed by all these phenomenal speed improvements -- way to go!»
«Thank you so much for all the hard and excellent work you have been doing. You're truly one of the most talented and intelligent people I've ever worked with -- and I'm privileged to have had this pleasure.»
«you really are awesome and i feel very happy knowing that in the future i can count on you to make the most complex things come to life!»
Jan 2014

Examples
Achievement:
Optimization
Once I've done a 1041x speedup (from 18.740 to 0.018 seconds) of third-party code via monkey-patching Django ORM to hint MySQL to use index instead of filesort in this case.
Achievement:
Big Data
Created a chain of ETL-steps that processed 650 millions of records using dozens of servers, making pre-calculations required to access these records efficiently.
Code
My greatest code is non-public property of my clients. My open-source code is way simpler:
github.com/denis-ryzhkov
Reading
Programming Pearls,
Code Complete,
Python original docs - completely,
Implementing Responsive Design,
Concurrent Programming in Erlang,
Programming Erlang (2nd edition) by Joe Armstrong
- Disclosure
- While Python is my present,
  Erlang is my next step ahead.