One of the many qualities that makes DomainTools a unique and refreshing professional environment is our hiring process. Although some may consider this exercise grueling, it has resulted in a high bar for technical and non-technical hires. In the time I have worked at DomainTools, however, I have observed that our employee talent goes far beyond professional prowess – we have an office full of musicians, athletes, dancers, writers, and much more. In order to celebrate these unique talents, we will be including a series in our blog called “Employee Spotlight” to share interesting and fun stories about our DomainTools family.
The inaugural edition of the Employee Spotlight features Timothy Crosley. Timothy is a back end engineer at DomainTools, ping pong aficionado, and passionate Python programmer. He is known around the office for his quick wit, love of notebooks, and delight in the carbohydrate delivery system known as the potato. It turns out his passion for coding began at the young age of 8 years old when he learned QBasic on his family’s computer. In no time, Timothy not only picked up C and C++, but also created a game called “Smiley”. Smiley included a two-character set with, you guessed it, smiley faces. There were slight variations in the characters, so one smiley acted as a protagonist and ran away from the other smiley. As a brief aside, all Seattleites would immediately relate to the game and would also support Timothy re-releasing “Smiley” with a new title, “The Seattle Freeze” where the two characters will be Seattle transplants (optimistic smileys) and Seattle natives (introverts). Timothy also packed a mean punch with his marketing tagline and simple value proposition: “But it, it’s cheap”.
Later on in his career (as in after the ripe young age of 8), Timothy began working at ARINC as a software engineer, where he was thrust into the world of Python, and his love affair with coding continued to blossom. According to Timothy, he prefers Python because it is the most natural to read and least painful way to express complex concepts. As he began to excel at the programming language, Timothy forged ahead with his own open source projects like iSort and Jiphy. His most recent project known as hug (“hopefully useful guide”) has received lots of recognition in the programming community. Below is a quick list of hug’s design objectives:
- Make developing a Python-driven API as succinct as a written definition.
- Encourage code that self-documents.
- Be fast. Never should a developer feel the need to look somewhere else for performance reasons.
- Make writing tests for APIs written on top of Hug easy and intuitive.
- Don’t push the problem set to the user of the API framework.
- Be the basis for next generation Python APIs, embracing the latest technology.
Timothy presented on hug at PuPPY in Seattle last September and his project, which was also featured on Hacker News, is considered the fastest growing web framework for python. As a marketer, I have to not only appreciate Timothy’s technical aptitude, but his ability to make delightful and punny taglines:
Hug continues to gain traction and acclaim, and Timothy is excited to announce that his next version with a wide variety of updates with a focus on better case handling for exceptions and more flexibility in how users create their APIs. So keep your eyes peeled for v2 and Timothy’s new and improved website.
Needless to say, we are very lucky and excited to have Timothy on the DomainTools team. Looking forward to sharing more fun DomainTools stories as our series continues.
Interested in joining our team? Check our job listings.
