Yeah you can sense the Java experience, SQLAlchemy is what Hibernate wishes it could be :)
I believe I read that someone hired him to work on SQLAlchemy full time.
I work for Red Hat in the Openstack group. I can spend part of my time working on SQLAlchemy upstream as it is a core component of Openstack. But we still take donations!! http://www.sqlalchemy.org/ :) :)
Mike is a master.