Welcoming Mahdi to the Gyroscope team!
In a small startup, the first employee has a huge impact on the execution and culture of the whole company. We’re happy to announce Mahdi Yusuf has joined the team!
Mahdi was one of the first people to sign up for Gyroscope last year and had been sending us lots of feedback, so his impact started even before he joined.
As an experienced Python & iOS engineer, Mahdi will help us go much faster and ship many long-awaited features. In his first week, he’s already built a new music integration to add your latest Spotify songs to your profile.
Mahdi helps curate Pycoder’s Weekly, a popular Python newsletter, which I’m sure many of you already subscribe to. He’s published some fantastic open source libraries. Oh, and he once broke Google (ok not really, but he did write about a cool bug he found.) Mahdi will be at PyCon this week representing Gyroscope — if you’re there, be sure to find him and say hi!
Here’s a bit more about Mahdi:
E: You were one of the first users to sign up & start paying for Gyroscope Pro last year. Since then, what kind of changes have you noticed in your life?
M: Most of last year I spent focusing on my health and betterment of my physical self.
I am huge believer that if you want to change something, you have to track it or you won’t progress. So I went to work!
Then I saw what Anand was doing and thought this is pretty awesome, no brainer for me to sign up for Gyroscope. Then I went out and got a scale just so I could track my weight. I was already tracking what I ate in MyFitnessPal, and combined with Fitbit I was really able to see drastic changes.
No joke, I got this notification on my phone yesterday just after I weighed myself on my scale.
E: How did you first hear about Gyroscope?
M: It was on Twitter I believe, I think I saw a super early version of Anand’s personal prototype that I thought was pretty legit! I was following ever since because this concept has always been super interesting to me.
E: What brought you to learn Python originally?
M: I actually have never thought about this. Give me a second here. It was my third year in university, I was asked to do something in my programming languages class and I was looking at how to do in C or Java or some other language I knew at the time. We were also asked to write in an language we didn’t know, I ended choosing Python probably not so randomly but that was my first encounter with Python. I didn’t do anything fairly large with it until my 4th year project where we built a contextually aware advertising engine (evil I know) in Django!
E: What’s the origin story of Pycoder’s Weekly? How did it get started?
M: We were pretty tired of all the Python news not having a central go to place for news. So we thought it might be cool to build out a newsletter! We quickly found out we already had a competitor, but we persevered anyways and had a page up and couple of thousand subscribers before we even sent out an issue! We are now at just under 20K subscribers and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. It’s been crazy ride!
E: How has it been jumping into a mixed Python/Go codebase? Any advice for others doing the same?
M: Its been pretty fun in all honesty! Am missing a few niceties that I have grown accustomed to but overall Go seems really powerful. Tons more to learn but pretty exciting!
Things I would recommend are two things for sure:
- If you are searching for language related stuff /s/go/golang saves to tons of bandwidth.
- Embrace the brace, no more white space delimiting for you!
E: Any Gyroscope feature you’re particularly excited to work on soon?
M: I am hoping MyFitnessPal integration lands on my to do list soon! Hopefully some more integrations with friends maybe promote some healthy competition.
New feature: Music tracking with Spotify!
Mahdi dove in on the deep end, working in both our Python and Go codebases to build our new music tracking feature. We’re still rolling it out, but check out a sneak peek of that integration for Mahdi, Anand, or myself — the latest music we listen to on Spotify shows up right there.
You can follow Mahdi on Twitter or check out his Gyroscope profile.
