I joined IBM’s recently acquired XIV group to write Python, on the team building the test platform for their high-end storage system. Soon after I joined, the team’s manager left and I was offered the seat. I had come there to build, and it took me a while to say yes. I stayed in the code the whole time I held the position.

The platform drove the storage system along both its control path and its data path, hard enough to surface the kind of bug that off-the-shelf tools never reach. Engineers on other teams began writing their own tests on top of it, helping speed up development as well as finding bugs. The platform’s interfaces were now holding up work by people who did not report to me and could not be broken on my schedule, so I began designing it that way: we moved the layer that ran work across the lab machines from implicit RPC to explicit message passing, so each host’s side of it could be tested standing on its own.

Python at the time was treated across the company as a scripting language, held to a looser standard than the C sitting next to it. I built a course that worked out what the tighter standard looks like in a dynamically typed language, taught it to colleagues at the office, and was later asked to teach it at IBM’s other sites in Israel. It ran for years, and was something people kept remembering me for long after I left IBM.