Alex Martelli has been programming for over 30 years, mainly in Python for the recent half of that time. He wrote the first two editions of Python in a Nutshell and co-authored the first two editions of the Python Cookbook. He’s a PSF Fellow, and won the 2002 Activators’ Choice Award and the 2006 Frank Willison Memorial Award for contributions to the Python community. He's active on Stack Overflow and a frequent speaker at technical conferences. He's been living in Silicon Valley with his wife Anna for 12 years, and working at Google throughout this time, currently as Senior Staff Engineer leading "long tail" tech support for the Google Cloud Platform.