Eric Florenzano
Who is Eric Florenzano?
I’m a developer and a new entrepreneur. I was interested in Django early in its lifetime, and became an outspoken enthusiast for it–creating screencasts, tutorials, and reusable applications for it. As the sites that I worked on got larger, my focus shifted to scalability in general, and then to databases, and then to distributed systems. Now I’m starting a new start-up, so I’m focusing a lot more on product development and everything that goes along with that.
Where and when did you start programming?
This is going to sound cliché, but I wanted to make video games. So I bought “Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours” by Tony Zhang and went through those exercises cover-to-cover. Realizing that programming is harder than it seemed at first, I mostly stopped pursuing it. I dabbled a bit in high school, but didn’t really dive back in until college, when I decided to try Computer Science as a major.
Why Python?
Because Django was written in Python, and (coming from Java) I thought Django looked very interesting. Through learning Django I learned about the vast Python ecosystem and enjoyed using it enough to stick with it for many other projects.
You favorite IDE. JS Framework?
My favorite IDE is anything that gets out of my way. I don’t geek out at all over customizing or tweaking my editor or IDE, so I always use everything stock and just use the bare essentials. jQuery is by far my most used framework, but recently I’ve been very impressed with backbone.js, even if I haven’t had a chance to use it much.
What does your typical day look like?
My answer to this would have been different a week ago from today. I’ve just left my job to found a company, and one thing I’ll say so far is that every day is atypical. A good day is one where I get to spend the majority of time coding.
What do you do in your free time?
In the past I’ve worked on several side projects, worked on open source, co-hosted Django Dose (a podcast about Django), and organized the San Francisco Django meetup group.
Current favorite apps?
Chrome, Twitter, TextMate, Colloquy, Kindle, and Word Lens
What OS do you prefer?
OS X for the desktop, and Ubuntu on the server.
Small picture for your Workplace?
I always have an extremely spartan workplace. Having extra things means having to manage extra things, which I don’t like to do, so I try not to have any extra things.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
Seeing Word Lens released was inspiring to me because they took a very simple concept, looked at what technology was available to them, and they made an extremely useful product out of it.
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
I’ve never done freelance work, so I can’t comment too much on this, but I’ll say that starting a company is much more exciting than working for someone else. Exciting can be both good and bad: high points are higher, but the low points are lower too.
What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?
My biggest goals for 2011 are to publicly launch the product I’ve been working on, to help it grow, and to ensure that I’ll be able to help it continue to grow in 2012. I also plan to write more technical blog posts about some of the more interesting stuff I’m working on.
