David Mertz

David is a well-known author and speaker in the Python community; he wrote the long-running columns, Charming Python and XML Matters for IBM developerWorks and the Addison-Wesley book Text Processing in Python, and has spoken at OSCon, PyCon, and keynoted at PyCon India. He also created (but has not recently maintained) the "Gnosis Utilities" collection of Free Software, primarily in and for Python, for dealing with XML, meta-programming, text processing, and various other facilities helpful for illustrating abstract concepts presented in his writing.

Currently, David serves on the Board of the Python Software Foundation, and is chair of its Trademarks Committee and Outreach and Education Committee. He has been active in Python communities since approximately 1999.

As a day job, David has had the great honor of working with some folks who have built the world's fastest supercomputer for performing molecular dynamics. At the edges of that task, he still finds himself able to dabble in Python tools and is pleased to find Python becoming the default high-level language for most scientific computing projects.