Jim Hugunin says a lot of programmers are jugglers. Literally.

He discovered Python through a chance meeting in a park with fellow juggler Pavel Curtis, who offered to "pass clubs" (a.k.a. juggle bowling pins to us laymen). Pavel, also a programmer, related why he thought Python the world's greatest language. Says Hugunin, "I went home and tried it and found that it matched my mind, too…Python writes how I think."

Hugunin got his start in computers when his Dad brought home one of the first IBM PCs from work and taught him to write a Breakout game in Basic. He then created a one-screen advertising program for Ramada® Inn, which his dad then used to promote IBM PCs to Ramada managers, saying "hey, if a fifth grader can do this, think what you can do." It sold.

Years later, Hugunin found himself working with a wide variety of computers in college and graduate school including Sun, UNIX, Linux, and NextStep™ operating systems. "I worked on OS X before there was an OS X," he says of the Steve Jobs startup. "NextStep was going to create a great new operating system, with really nice, well-designed, object-oriented APIs, which was cutting edge at the time."

Hugunin's first (and favorite) open source project was his own graduate work at MIT, adding numerical libraries to Python so scientists could use it. He mailed a list of experts asking who would be interested. He got responses from all over the world.

Even today, at Python science conferences, Hugunin meets people who are still using his initial work – scientists use it to make sure the national nuclear waste disposal is safe, neurosurgeons use it to better understand brain MRIs, people in the movie business use it to create special effects, and scientists use it to compute data from the Hubble space telescope to find stars.

"I feel like it was kind of my baby... And yet other people have made it do things I never imagined it would."

Besides occasional Silverlight projects on the Mac, Hugunin says he now works almost exclusively on Windows .NET because it's a geek's paradise. His job is to help take Python and Ruby, key tools of the open source community, into the .NET world. And the community is responding.

"My job is to be the tool maker who helps people do cool things," says Hugunin, explaining how his recent success is helping developers use Ruby and Python to build applications that can run inside of a browser. "As a language guy, I don't enjoy writing JavaScript. Letting me write Python code or for my colleagues to bring in Ruby that's the part that brings the most value to the open source community."

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