Posts

About me

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Brian Curtin. Everything here is handwritten by me. Yes, I’ve been using em-dashes for 20 years.

I live in Denver, CO
I used to live in Brooklyn, NY and Chicago, IL. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs.
I am a software engineer, most recently at the principal level at Elastic
I was on the Python Software Foundation board and worked on PyCon for many years
https://www.linkedin.com/in/briancurtin1/ has more work details
I’ve contributed to some open source stuff over the years under https://github.com/briancurtin
- Though not active recently, I am on the core dev team for Python
- I was the project technical lead of the OpenStack SDK

Contact me

Email is the best way

Starting Over

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:17:56 -0600

This is now the third or fourth iteration of having a blog. So much of my writing has taken place elsewhere, like the PyCon and Python Software Foundation blogs, where I wrote around 175 posts in total. A lot of it was small announcement stuff, like there being 25 tickets left to yet another sold out PyCon, but I got to write plenty of longer content that I really enjoyed.

Here are some of my favorite bits of writing from that time:

Use Glom

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 07:26:00 -0600

Dictionaries are really cool. They’re very powerful and a large part of Python: so much stuff is built on the dict type. They’re generally quite easy to work with, but what about when you have nested dictionaries that contain lists that contain dictionaries that contain certain keys only in some cases and sometimes there’s another list involved?

Use glom.

Elasticsearch Bulk API Responses

The Elasticsearch Bulk API is an efficient way to perform actions on multiple documents instead of using multiple calls.