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 and then as a mentor in 2013. After residing in New York City 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", was used heavily in production at Parse.ly and beyond until Confluent released an official Python client.

    GitHub

  • CubeCobra

    Emmett found this fledgling open-source app facilitating Magic: the Gathering collection management and added the functionality for custom card images, letting him showcase his obsession with 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 heats up, becoming more and more intimate with each phone call and private chat.

    Steam

Learning to Code

Despite Emmett’s first encounter with programming coming from thumbing through his dad's old O'Reilly books as a kid, he credits the start of his programming journey with hackNY co-founder Evan Korth's introductory course at NYU in 2010. He dove into the "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 became a turning point in his budding career, illustrating the endless possibilities of collaboration with smart, motivated people.

hackNY

Evan Korth encouraged Emmett to apply for the hackNY fellowship in 2011, and despite missing the application deadline Evan gave Emmett access to "Hack Match". Through that list Emmett found Parse.ly, where he'd spend the next 11 years of employment. The next year Emmett managed to meet the application deadline and made his Parse.ly internship part of his hackNY experience. He consider Parsely's technical cofounder Andrew Montalenti a mentor to this day.

Parse.ly

Emmett stayed at Parse.ly for a long time after his internship, contributing heavily to the Pykafka open-source project and serving for a few years as the lead of the Parse.ly data engineering team. During those years he spent a ton of his non-Parse.ly time creating small weird video games including Heads Up! Hot Dogs, Cibele, and How Do You Do It? with my game-making 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 spend his free time grinding on code; instead spending time with his wife and child, make dark music and visual art, and baking wood-fired pizzas in his backyard.