Prior to his Django/Python adventure, Ned was with Iris/Lotus/IBM working with the Notes and Domino platform. It's hard to tell now, what with IBM first buggering up the system and then nuking all of history with the sale of Notes and Domino to HCL, but that was probably the best tech hippie love-in environment ever. Not only was the documentation ridiculously friendly, the peer-to-peer dev community would often half-build your app for you if you seemed lost or headed in the wrong direction, and it wasn't at all uncommon for the platform developers to be in there neck-deep either dealing with unexpected behaviour (edge cases testing could never have caught) or explaining why a different approach might be better for performance or security reasons. Every dev community should be like that one was at its best.