My very first real tech job in the bay, my new boss recommended I study up on Armin's open source code in order to get better as an engineer. It's been very interesting following his work over the years. I'm extremely curious to see how Earendil goes — no surprise if it's a success.

Congratulations Armin, and Mario, and good luck.

Dug up the email, here's what my boss said directly:

In terms of tech to keep up on, it might be worth while to play around with node.js a bit as we've been doing a few small projects using the Express MVC framework. A great reference for js, (which I remember chatting with you briefly about) is Javascript the Good Parts (Douglas Crockford). You may also consider seeking enlightenment on Armin Ronacher's github page (he's a python master, leader of flask, genshi, pocoo, long time python contributor) https://github.com/mitsuhiko. His code is pretty top notch. I follow Kenneth Reitz quite a bit too (Armin and he often work on projects together). Kenneth is know for le*git and python's request library.