Anna Ravenscroft

Anna (no relation to the homonym Welsh artist and calligrapher!) lives and works with her husband AlexMartelli (currently -- late 2011 -- they live in California, USA), and, in her own words, is not a programmer but just uses Python to get her work done. Nevertheless, she's co-edited with Alex and DavidAscher? the second edition of "Python Cookbook", published by O'Reilly in 2005; she then became the first woman member of the Python Software Foundation; she's holds a Psychology bachelor's degree from Stanford University (a small switch of major from her original focus into Symbolic Systems).

The marriage of Alex and Anna has been described as "The first Pythonic Marriage" (and indeed Alex gave a lightning talk about it at OSCON 2004!), partly because among their readings (http://www.aleax.it/mar.html) was a lightly edited version of Tim Peters' "Zen of Python" (great advice to any couple, they claim).

Anna presented an excellent introduction to distutils at PyCon2004, finding a way to interest both the gurus in the room and the newbies. Other talks she's given at OSCON and EuroPython? in 2003/2004 were about "how NOT to write a Python book" and about date/time processing in Python. Googling for her finds all the materials (just skip the many references to the artist/calligrapher!-).

Somehow her name just seems to fit her hair. ;-)

Anna Ravenscroft sounds like the name of a Bronte heroine! And well it might as she is witty, bright, insightful, lively, and wickedly gorgeous.

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