Emmett

Butler

hackNY class of 2012

Emmett Butler’s journey in tech began as a participant in the hackNY program – first as a fellow in 2012, then as a mentor in 2013. After residing in NYC from 2009 to 2015, he now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his spouse and their 2-year-old child.

Emmett works at Datadog as a Python specialist, maintaining the open-source repository dd-trace-py. Before joining Datadog, he spent 11 years at Parse.ly, starting with a hackNY internship that blossomed into a full-time role.

Emmett’s Favorite Projects

  • pykafka

    The first Python implementation of Kafka’s “balanced consumer,” which was heavily used in production at Parse.ly and beyond.

    GitHub

  • CubeCobra

    Emmett contributed to the fledgling open-source app for Magic: The Gathering players to manage their collections. He added functionality for custom card images, channeling his obsession over factory-defect cards.

    Emmett's Cube

  • Cibele

    Cibele is a game about love, sex, and the internet. You play as a 19 year old girl who has become close with a young man she met in an online game. Her relationship with him becomes more and more intimate with each phone call and chat.

    Steam

Learning to Code

Emmett’s first encounter with programming came from thumbing through his dad's old O’Reilly books as a kid. But he credits the start of his programming journey with hackNY co-founder Evan Korth’s introductory course at NYU in 2010. He dove into a “larval stage” of knowledge acquisition, building games and toy web apps using the then-ubiquitous LAMP stack. Emmett attended the first-ever hackNY hackathon at NYU’s Courant Institute. It was a turning point in his budding career.

hackNY

Evan Korth encouraged Emmett to apply for the hackNY in 2011. Emmett missed the fellowship application deadline, but, Evan agreed to give Emmett access to hackNY’s list of startups. Through that network, Emmett found Parse.ly and interned there for the summer.

The next year in 2012, Emmett met the application deadline and made his return Parse.ly internship part of his hackNY experience.

Parse.ly

Emmett ended up spending his next 11 years of employment as Parse.ly, and he considers their technical cofounder Andrew Montalenti a mentor to this day.

During his tenure, he made substantial contributions to the Pykafka open-source project and served for as the lead of the Parse.ly data engineering team. During those years, he spent time outside work creating small, eccentric video games including Heads Up! Hot Dogs, Cibele, and How Do You Do It? with partners Nina Freeman (hackNY 2014) and Diego Garcia.

Working in Open Source

After Parse.ly was acquired by Automattic in 2021, Emmett became a dad and transitioned to Datadog as an individual contributor on the dd-trace-py open source project. Working in public and giving away software for free has always been one of Emmett’s most cherished opportunities as a programmer, and he feels incredibly lucky to be able to support a family by doing so.

Emmett’s current interests 

These days, Emmett no longer spends his free time grinding on code. Instead, he’s spending time with his wife and child, making dark music and visual art, and baking wood-fired pizzas in his backyard.