I came to IBM’s Tel Aviv site to write Python, on the team behind the test platform for XIV, IBM’s 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 it.

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, and that changed what it was. Its 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. The layer that ran work across the lab machines moved 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 wrote a course that worked out what the tighter standard looks like in a language with no compiler behind it, taught it at my site, and was asked to teach it at IBM’s other sites in Israel. It ran for years. The gap it was written to close was the one between my team’s Python and everyone else’s.