Career
He authored a popular blog, and has written several books including Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Formerly an accessibility architect in the International Business Machines Corporation Emerging Technologies Group, he started working at Google in March 2007. In 1992, while a sophomore of Cornell University and a part-time employee of a Cornell computer center, Pilgrim and another student, David Blumenthal, embedded a computer virus, "MBDF", into three games that were transferred to an archive at Stanford University, causing disruption to computers internationally.
The origin of the virus was traced, and Pilgrim and Blumenthal were arrested on the misdemeanor charge of "second-degree computer tampering".
The two students were found guilty, ordered to pay restitution to those affected and perform ten hours of community service every week for a year. Pilgrim"s book is a teach-by-example guide to the paradigms of programming in Python and modern software development techniques.
Other work Mark Pilgrim has contributed to a number of open source works including Feed Validator Universal Feed Parser Google Doctype From 4 October 2011, Mark Pilgrim"s various websites (diveintomarkorg, Dive Into HTML5, Dive Into Accessibility, Dive Into Greasemonkey,, etc) returned HTTP status 410 Gone. He also deleted his Twitter, Reddit, Google+ and GitHub accounts.
On 5 October 2011 Jason Scott Sadofsky tweeted that Pilgrim himself was "alive/annoyed we called the police".
Both Pilgrim"s actions in October 2011 and why the lucky stiff"s similar disappearance in August 2009 have been described as "infosuicide". The incident was reminiscent of Pilgrim"s 2004 hiatus from blogging which lasted approximately 18 months. In 2004, rather than deleting his content, he posted a short entry entitled "Every Exit" in which he said, "lieutenant’s time for me to find a new hobby.".
