Co-founder and lead developer of arguably the most exciting project in the Python ecosystem, PyPy. He is also credited with doing the bulk of the work in building its legendary RPython translation framework.
What inspired this post (originally published 2013-03-31) is the incredible honor given by the great Raymond Hettinger in one of his PyCon US 2013 talks, where he deems him "probably the smartest person I have ever met". Given that there isn't a shortage of brilliance in the Python community, that's some serious kudos.
Also, here is what one of speakers at that conferences said:
... Armin Rigo is awesome - he's perhaps the only incredibly intelligent person involved with programming I've met who seemed genuinely happy about life (and not grumpy at all).
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