New Year’s Python Meme

I love these blog memes, so I give you my version of Tarek Ziade's New Year's Python Meme.

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2011?

For python libraries, that would have to be Kenneth Reitz' python-requests library. I've used it for an amazing amount of stuff and blogged about it. It took the grunge out of doing HTTP actions with Python. The API is clean and elegant, getting out of your way. It embodies the State of the art for API design, which closely matches the Zen of Python.

For applications, djangolint.com is awesome. It has helped me out so much on several projects. I would love to see something like this implemented and maintained for modern Python.

All the Python friendly PaaS efforts that have emerged are changing the landscape for those of us who want to launch projects but don't want to become full time system administrators in the process. Heroku, DjangoZoom, DotCloud, ep.io, gondor.io, and others are making it possible for developers to focus on development not server tooling. Google App Engine paved the way and it is wonderful to see the rest of the universe catch up with material that more closely follow core.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2011?

Event based programming! I've touched on it for years, but this year I really got a lot more more into it thanks to Aurynn Shaw kickstarting me and Audrey Roy expanding my knowledge ever since.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2011? What did you do?

I participated mostly as co-lead in the Open Comparison project, which amongst other things involved running the largest sprint at PyCon 2011. We maintained Django Packages and launched Pyramid and Plone versions of the project. We hope to launch a Python implementation in 2012.

I took a lot of notes this year at pydanny-event-notes - enough to make a book.

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2011?

Like Nick Coghlan, that would be http://planet.python.org.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2012?

1. How to use whatever consistently maintained project that replaces PIL that works in Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x.
2. Really advanced Python as taught by Raymond Hettiger.
3. backbone.js

6. What are the top software, app or lib you wish someone would write in 2012?

A tool python-requests, but for shell access. Something like Unipath, but kept up-to-date and with nicely written documentation on Read the Docs.

A PIL replacement that is maintained, works for all modern Pythons, and is close enough to the PIL API to not cause too much confusion.

Something like Django Lint but for Python 2.7.x/3.x.

An open source project that tracks test coverages across PyPI and publishes reports of the results via an API.

Want to do your own list? here’s how:

• copy-paste the questions and answer to them in your blog
• tweet it with the #2012pythonmeme hashtag

Quick conferences report: Presentations

My lovely Fiancée, Audrey Roy, was invited to be the opening keynote speaker at both PyCon Australia on Diversity in Python (video) and PyCon New Zealand on Python on the Web.

As for me, I managed to get talks into both of those conferences AND DjangoCon US. I co-presented on three of them, and I share all credit for success with my cohorts. The talks I gave at the conferences were (I'll post videos when they get up):

Confessions of Joe Developer (PyCon Australia, DjangoCon US)
The genesis of this talk was as a lightning talk at I gave at the Hollywood Hackathon. It is a talk about admitting that us mere mortals need to ask questions, take notes, and follow good practices in general. I gave it again at LA Django this summer, extending it to a full length talk complete with lots of technical content. At PyCon Australia I toned down the technical content because I was nervous, and while the response was positive, it  could have been much better. So for DjangoCon I ramped up the tech-talk and it worked much better. I've now given the talk 4 times, and I'm leaning towards retiring it.

 

Python Worst Practices (PyCon New Zealand)
This talk grew out of a SoCal Piggies lightning talk which I gave for the purpose of humor. Often we as Python developers are smug in the clarity of the language that we don't realize just how easily we can obfuscate code. In fact, I contend that Python is fully capable of a code obfuscation contest. This talk rejects a lot of crazy practices I've either done myself or had to debug from other people's work. For New Zealand I added a ton of content and tested things pretty diligently. The variable naming pages stumped some people I really respect and I was quite happy with that result.

 

Django Packages Thunderdome (co-presented with Audrey Roy, DjangoCon US)
Audrey did most of the work for this presentation. In this talk I helped review a horde of Django Packages across 7 different categories. It was nerve wracking because every part of our talk would get judged - but Audrey kept things really positive and made it clear we were providing constructive criticism. I think she got her message across to most people, and more importantly, it got a lot of people thinking about what ought to be normal community standards. I'll probably blog on those community thoughts and statements later, but I think Audrey (with help from me) accomplished what she aimed to do.

View more presentations from Audrey Roy

Advanced Django Form Usage (co-presented with Miguel Araujo)
Some time ago Miguel befriended me and helped resurrect the django-uni-form project. He graciously agreed to help me present on Django Forms and we decided to make the talk as sophisticated as possible. Previous Django form talks have been good, but focused on the fundamentals and we wanted to do something really different. This talk was hard because Miguel and I were on opposite sides of the planet, so we did a lot of github pull/pushes. In both doing research and presenting Miguel did an unbelievably good job and I hope he does more of this in the future. The response was extremely positive and I'm certain that our plan of getting our notes/work/transcript into Django core is well on it's way.

 

Ultimate Django Tutorial Workshop (DjangoCon US)
I got about 10 professional Django experts in a room, including Django core developers, and had them help me coach nearly 20 people through a modified version of the Django tutorial. Students seemed to learn tons, lots of socializing happened thanks to some happy accidents, and the experts got a chance to really see where the Django tutorial needs work. PyLadies organizer Esther Nam spent her sprint days working on something that ties the slides into the Django Tutorial - and for now I'm holding off on sharing my work until she says her work is done.

Summary
These were amazing opportunities to speak and will hopefully make a difference. I wouldn't have traded all of this for the world. It was a lot of work, and I doubt I'll ever go quite at this pace again. My plan is to do fewer talks and make them much better.

The Ultimate Django Tutorial Workshop

That is a big statement to make as a title of a class/workshop blog post. However, in this case I believe I'm fully justified because this is going to be awesome. Here's why:

1. The teachers are beyond incredible

In the course description it says I'm the teacher and I have lab assistants. In retrospect, what I should have said is, "Daniel Greenfeld is organizing a workshop taught by the people he respects and admires".

Think I'm kidding? Look at just some of the names of people I've got lined up to participate:

• Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Benevolent Dictator For Life of Django
• Russell Keith-Magee, President of the Django Software Foundation
• Audrey Roy
• Jacob Burch
• Katharine Jarmul
• Corey Bertram
• Sandy Strong
• Jonas Obrist
• Christine Cheung
• Shimon Rura

Follow those links to their bios or talks and you'll see that they are the people speaking at DjangoCon.  The general idea is to get the people already speaking at DjangoCon or those who are extremely experienced in it to teach the class.

2. The teacher to student ratio is going to be really small

This is not going to be a room with a few instructors and umpteen students in it. If the class size gets big, I'm going to bring in more teachers. I'll cajole, plead, and do whatever I must to get them in the room. I don't want anyone left behind!

I want a ratio of 5 students to each teacher.

3. Class implemented with a lot of lessons learned

I've taught a bunch. So have a number of the instructors I've lined up. We know which parts of the tutorial are important to focus on, and which parts should be visited by students later on their own. This means you learn the critically important parts that get you kick-started as a Django developer.

One thing we'll try to squeeze in is deployment to one of the new Django hosts such as Djangozoom.com, Gondor.io, and ep.io. In fact, Shimon Rura, one of the co-founders of Djangozoom, participating as an instructor.

4. We're all volunteers

All the proceeds earned by the instructors for this course will be going to the Pyladies Sponsorship program. That is important for two reasons:

1. Your attendance will help Pyladies sponsor more women to learn Python in the future.
2. The teachers are doing this because they want to do it. They want you to learn Django.

5. It won't end at 12:30 PM

Officially the tutorial ends at 12:30PM and we should be done. Sometimes though we stumble on things  and we don't finish with the rest of the class (like me in my last C programming class). But after a lunch break I'm planning on grabbing some space and working through the rest of the tutorial with anyone who didn't complete the class.

6. The tutorial opens DjangoCon

The tutorial starts on Monday, September 5, 2011 at 9:30 AM at the Hilton Portland and Executive Tower at 921 SW Sixth Avenue in Portland, Oregon, USA. If you do plan on attending DjangoCon and are new to the framework, what a great way to get started!

7. You don't have to attend DjangoCon itself to take the tutorial

Tickets for the event are being sold separately from the conference. So if you can't take off more than one day of school or work, this is a great way to capitalize on DjangoCon.

Convinced? Here is what you need to know and do to get signed up:

• Get a laptop running Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.5 or higher, or Ubuntu.
• If there is no Python installed, install Python 2.7.1. DO NOT INSTALL PYTHON 3!!!
• Make sure you have a grounding in Python. If you are new to Python you need to have finished at least half the chapters in learnpythonthehardway.org before you attend. If you come to this event with no prior Python experience you will be left behind.
• Buy a ticket!

Python and Django class/hackathon!

The Los Angeles Python community (LA Django and LA PyLadies) is meeting in Santa Monica on July 23rd to teach Django and hack on all things Python on Saturday, July 23rd. The day will start with a Django class based on the official Django tutorial, then turn into a general hackathon, and finish up with lighting talks.

Leading the event is noted Pythonista Katharine Jarmul. As Katharine is giving the talk on web scraping at DjangoCon US, I'm hoping we can get her to give a lightning talk on the subject.

Learning Django

Sandy Strong will lead the effort to  teach people the fundamentals of Django. Besides all things Django and devops, Sandy is presenting the testing talk at DjangoCon US. And if that isn't good enough for you, she won't be alone teaching - there will be a bunch of us developers experienced with Django there to to provide her with support.

Even if you already know Django, please come and hang out for the first half! You can either help out others or work on your own project.

Hacking Python and Django

The second half of the day will be about working on whatever you want. If you are new to Django and want to finish the tutorial, go right ahead. Or you can work on your own pet Django or Python project. In fact, I know that there will be work on the nascent Pyramid project intended to represent the entire Los Angeles Python community.

Lightning Talks

We'll finish with lightning talks. Several people who attended the day will get the chance to talk for 5 minutes or so about a project, tool, or cause they wanted to share. If they go too long we start applauding until they step down.

Social Hour

After another awesome day of Python in LA, everyone will cool down by hanging and chatting over drinks. If you're lucky, maybe you'll get to see me do a drunken one-handed cartwheel where I don't spill a drop of what I'm holding.

My role

I'll be there in my normal role of setting up tables and chairs, helping during the class portion, and hacking on some Packaginator stuff in preparation for the forthcoming August/September Packaginator sprints at PyCon AU, Kiwi Pycon, and DjangoCon US.

Sponsors

This is all possible thanks to the sponsorship of Mahalo, Cars.com, and the Python Software Foundation

Sign up!

Tickets are selling out really fast! Sign up now!

We won first place at Startup Camp LA!

On a whim we (me and audreyr) decided to try out Startup Camp LA organized by Semantic Seed. This is one of those Silicon Vally style competitions to launch a minimally viable product along with a business plan and marketing pitch in the course of a weekend. We thought it would be a good excuse to hack on a project we've been cooking up in our heads over a year. So we booked our tickets via meetup.com and showed up at the new Nextspace Los Angeles location.

The organizers did a really good great job providing space, food, and lots of useful advice. I look forward to the next event that they run in the area.

Startup Camp LA Pitches

The first pitch was on Confidox, an exclusive recruiting site for lawyers with a focus on clean design, security, and good use of email/sms. The presenter, a professional attorney with great oratory skills, had mockups and a business plan ready to go.

Audrey gave our pitch, which is a site for recruiting developers that is created and maintained by developers. Developers are treated with dignity and respect, and not as replaceable components. We've talked to people on-and-off about this for over a year, and thought this would be a good opportunity to get things moving.

After Confidox and our proposal came a lot of other dreamers.

Then began the bargaining and voting for team placements. Voting was done with paper money. We received the second-highest amount of paper money and Confidox got third place.

Switching projects

As said, our recruiting idea got second place in votes. We got assigned two other people, one of them being the Confidox guy. This meant we got the most paper money total!

Rather than work on our project and have to educate the new guys on the developer ecosystem, we decided to switch to Confidox for the weekend. The scope was reasonable, the plan sound, and the mockups meant we had a specification to code against.

Development

"Ideas are cheap, implementation is hard."

From the start Audrey and I decided to not allow any scope creep. No social media widgets, banner advertisements, forums, branding, coupons, or anything that distracted from the business model. That would allow for a clean design and elegant implementation. We went to work, taking breaks to help hammer out the marketing pitch and socialize with the other teams. Our goal was a stable, functional prototype - something we achieved thanks to our mostly open source technology stack.

Technology Stack

Unless specified otherwise, everything is open source:

• Python
• Django
• Ubuntu
• PostGreSQL
• JQuery
• Blueprint CSS
• Apache HTTP Server
• Tropo (commercial SMS messaging with free dev accounts and developer friendly API)

The Final Pitches

The Confidox pitch:

• Our group presented as a team. Marketing talked marketing, techs talked tech.
• A live prototype site with fully functioning authentication, registration, profiles, listings, search, and email/SMS notifications. 

The other teams presented well, but I was shocked by a few things:

• Most pitches lacked even a buggy prototype.
• Presenting teams bickering during their presentations.
• Unbelievably, one slide presentation had music that the presenter had to shout over.

Why Confidox won Startup Camp LA

Audrey took charge of the group and kept us focused on the elegant, straightforward idea. She didn't just code, she also treated the business side as being equally important as the technical delivery (giving them constant feedback and coaching). Which meant we could both roll out a working prototype and nail the marketing pitch.

When it came down to it, we were a team. Everyone had purpose and everyone contributed. We communicated our idea and demonstrated that our prototype works.

Going forward

Confidox is not off the ground yet, we'll see where it goes. We certainly have a capable team.

This event was a success for us and our company Cartwheel. Also, with ancillary projects with large contributor basis such as Django Packages, Packaginator, and Django Uni-Form, me and Audrey have proven ourselves capable of just launching dynamic projects quickly that work and are used by real people for real work. We'll see what we can do with that proof.

Finally, if you want to learn our techniques for constructing Confidox and other efforts, come to our Los Angeles area classes.

I teach Python and Django

This is one of those blog posts where a developer announces that he/she is teaching for a whole week. The difference is that in this post I'm going to explain why I want to teach and why you should take my classes or send your staff.

I'm an experienced instructor.

I've taught a variety of things for over 20 years, including in alphabetical order: Best practices, Django, English, JQuery, martial arts, Pinax, Python, Selenium, soccer, and unit testing. I speak clearly, get across technical points well, and love the material. I also know how to provide an early foundation of knowledge and then expand upon it for maximum benefit.

I don't just dump knowledge into the heads of my students; I take the time to teach them common standards and best practices, so their code is extendable and maintainable.

I'm not alone. 

Audrey Roy, co-founder of Cartwheel, leader of PyLadies and Django Packages, who has tutored and lab assisted at MIT will be teaching with me, meaning the teacher-to-student ratio is kept at 5:1 for our first offering. 

I want you to surpass me.

After teaching various things for many years I've found it a point of honor and immense pride when a student shines better than myself. I'm not one of those teachers who holds something back so I can always have the edge. In fact, my ultimate goal is to make you better than me.

I rest on the shoulders of giants.

I'm sure the people I'm mentioning in this section are going to roll their eyes, but lets face it - they rock!

In any case, I've had the fortune of helping Steve Holden write Python 3 classes for the O'Reilly School of Technology. I've been exposed to the Django code bases of NASA, RevSys and Eldarion. While I can't share that work directly, I can take the abstract of their methods and turn it into lessons.

For the employers: Classes are a good way to find resources

Having trouble finding staff? Imagine instead you hire a talented developer from another language and send them to my classes. In a week's time for a fraction of the price they'll have been kickstarted into not just knowing how to do their job, but how to expand their knowledge so if they don't know something, they know who to ask.

Refresher courses are free for six months

Space-permitting, you can retake a class at no charge.

The course schedule

Our first classes are scheduled for May 16th to May 20th. We are offering:

• Three Day Python Crash Course (May 16th, 17th, and 18th)
• Two Day Django Crash Course (May 19th and May 20th)

One more thing, if you take both classes we'll give you a 10% discount after registration.