Pinax Developer Profiles: Patrick Altman

This is a post in our Pinax Developer Profiles series, where we highlight awesome people who contribute to Pinax. Read more about it here.

Patrick Altman has been a Pinax developer since the early days. He is also the VP of Engineering at Eldarion. He currently resides in Nashville.

Tell us about how your story with code started.

My first computer was an Apple ][c when I was in elementary school. When my parents purchased it they also either bought a book or it came with it, on writing programs. It was a book of program listing in BASIC bound with a cheap plastic spiral binder, I would spend hours typing the listing into an editor and running the program. I’d then experiment and change variables around to see how to affected things. I was hooked!

What do you love about programming?

I love the process of creating something. For me it’s more about crafting software, rather than coding.

Why did you start contributing to Pinax and what do you like about Pinax?

After reading an interview with James Tauber in the short lived Python Magazine, the vision he casted for Pinax was very attractive to me. I was a relatively new Python/Django developer at the time but had just finished helping build a startup based on Python/Django. The notion that most web apps share a lot of the same functionality and we shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel with each web app really clicked with me.

Tell us about a cool project you built with Pinax.

I’ve built a lot of small tools just to help everyday life. Things like a membership site for my children’s school to help the PTO collect fees (using Stripe), or a tool for my extended family to use as a shared calendar/reservation system for some shared family property. With Pinax I was able to build this solutions in a few spare hours over a weekend.

There there are larger things like ThoughtStreams that I helped to build.

What’s a Pinax app/starter project you would like to build/you think is missing?

A demo starter project to show how pinax-stripe can be used.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

When I’m not working on Pinax, I love to play golf or go to a crossfit class.

Do you have any tips for new Pinax contributors?

Do not be afraid to submit pull requests and ask questions!

Thanks Patrick! :)

If you contribute to Pinax, we’d love for you to do an interview for our Pinax Developer Profiles interview series so the Pinax community can get to know you. You can submit your interview by filling out this form. If you’d like to nominate someone who we should interview, please send an email to Anna Ossowski. Our Pinax community manager, Anna Ossowski, will be happy to reach out to them. Please don’t be shy! You are awesome and we’d love to find out more about you!