2011 Resolution Summary

Items that are crossed out are completed.

• Travel to Europe again. Travel to Asia or Africa.(Went to Australia instead. Which was an very, very acceptable substitute.)
• Visit a Disney park.
• See a place in the USA I've never been.
• Drop the waist size 2 inches and not break any bones.
• Go to Pycon and present or teach.
• Go to DjangoCon and present or teach.
• Present at LA Django
• Continue my Muay Thai and Capoeira studies, get back into Eskrima, learn some more BJJ, and practice the forms I know.
• Work out at least three times a week.
• Go back east and teach martial arts for a day.
• Finish some outstanding legal proceedings.
• Launch a site that does cool stuff and somehow brings in money. (Consumer Notebook)
• Get to the point with LISP where I can do cool stuff in it without needing a textbook. (I seem to have spent this time working on JavaScript instead).
• Blog once a week. That is at least 52 blog entries! (almost there!)
• Explain why I wrote Diversity Rocks.

Made Up Statistics

At DjangoCon my good friend Miguel Araujo and I presented on Advanced Django Form Usage. Slide 18 of that talk mentioned some made up statistics. Here they are for reference:

• 91% of Django projects use ModelForms.
• 80% ModelForms require trivial logic.
• 20% ModelForms require complex logic.

Important Disclaimer: These numbers were cooked out of thin air by yours truly. I determined them with zero research, they carry absolutely not scientific weight, and shouldn't be used in any serious argument. They are wholly my opinion, which is good or bad depending on your point of view and your own opinion of my opinions.

With that out of the way, I'm going to make a bar graph out of my fictional data:

You'll notice that my bar titles could be stronger. I actually did that on purpose in case anyone tries to use that chart in real life. In any case, if you thought that was interesting, then read on. I have many more made-up statistics. For example, here are more numbers I've cooked up:

Pydanny Made Up DevOps Statistics

DevOps is the new hotness. I know because every other Python meetup features someone speaking on it - just like every other Ruby, Perl, and PHP meetup. Anyway... numbers:

• 24.3% Python developers doing DevOps think they could have launched a PaaS (aka Heroku clone) before it got crowded.
• 46.3% Python developers doing DevOps spend all their time writing Chef/Puppet scripts and yet still claim to be Python developers.
• 14% Python developers are worried about so much of the backend being done in Ruby.
• 54% Python developers are just happy that there are many options now and don't care about the internal machinery that much.

This time, because I'm worried about the data being taken seriously, I've titled the bar chart in such a way that no one will reference it in anything important:

Pydanny Made Up Python Enviroment Statistics

Following the obvious logic flow (to me anyway) of DevOps to something else, let's go into Python environments, also known as the VirtualEnv vs Buildout debate, which adds up to an even 100% (making it good pie chart material):

• 77% of Python Developers prefer VirtualEnv.
• 13% of Python Developers prefer Buildout.
• 7% of Python developers rolled their own solution and wish they could switch over.
• 3% of Python developers rolled their own solution and are fiendishly delighted with how they have guaranteed their own job security forever. I know who some of you are and I can say with some confidence that when the Zombie apocalypse happens, no one is going to invite you into their fortified compounds. We hate you that much.

Pydanny Made Up Template Debate Statistics

The made up statistics in this post frequently touch on contentious topics. So let me add another controversial topic, this time the never ending template debate in Python:

• 70% python developers prefer non-XML templates
• 25% python developers prefer XML templates
• 5% python developers wonder why we don't just use the str.format() method and be done with it
• 50% python developers strongly disagree with my Stupid Template Languages blog post from last year.

The display for this data is a lovely pie chart as seen below. In order to make it appear more useful, I took out the part where people disagreed with me and also made it a 3-D pie chart.

Pydanny Made Up Python Web Optimization Statistics

I sometimes get asked how to best optimize a Django site. My answer is 'cache and then cache some more' but there are those who disagree with me and start switching out Django internals before doing anything silly like looking at I/O.  My bet is this same thing happens with other frameworks such as Pyramid.

• 20% developers argue switching template languages.
• 80% developers argue using caching and load balancing.
• 100% Django/Pyramid/Flask/etc core developers argue using caching and load balancing.

Of all the made up statistics in this blog post, I suspect this is the one closest to the truth of things.

Update: Alex Gaynor and Audrey Roy pointed out that the original line graph for this data was not appropriate. My weak defense was that I'm trying not to make things too serious but they stated that the line graph was so inappropriate it distracted from the rest of the post. Thanks for the advice!

Pydanny Made Up Framework Debate Statistics

Alright, let's conclude this article with some statistics I cooked up about frameworks in Python. I'm going to do more then just mention web frameworks, dabbling into other awesome things that the Python community has given us.

• 23.6% of us get web.py and web2py confused with each other.
• 42% Python developers think Pyramid/Flask have awesome names that don't get mispronounced the same way Django does.
• 28% Python developers wish they could find a way to get some SciPy into their projects.
• 22% Python developers wish there was a PEP-8 wrapper for Twisted.
• 49% Twisted developers wish that Python had accepted their standard instead of PEP-8.
• 90% Python developers wonder what they were drinking when they renamed it to BlueBreem and wonder if it is sold over the counter in their municipality.

No chart? Getting this one to look meaningful was turning into a herculean effort. I invite others to render this data into something that look attractive and doesn't lose meaning. Come up with something impressive and I'll put it into a follow-up blog post.

The Story of Live-Noting

Like a lot of people, I've got this thing I do when I attend conferences, meetups, classes, and tutorials: I take notes. My open source based ones are mostly written in RestructuredText and I've kept in a particular folder since at least 2006.

Putting notes in a DVCS

On September 13, 2009, I uploaded these notes to Github.com. I did that because I wasn't pleased with the workflow I established of moving items to Dropbox for backup. I use DVCS all the time and I figured why not just put my notes where I put my code? So I added my notes as a Github repo.

DVCS Notes Based Management System?

For a while I tried to use the Github folder README.rst trick to make a navigations system for my notes. But Github isn't designed for making a README into a dynamic custom content navigator, and it would make a silly feature request. I would rather the Github team work on Mercurial integration or other practical things before they honored a request to turn their system into my own custom Notes Management System. Eventually I just gave up on it and moved on.

Sphinx + Read The Docs!

In early July of 2011 I had a wicked fun thought. What if I turned my notes into a Sphinx project and posted it on readthedocs.org? Most of my content is in RestructuredText and I've gotten really fast at rolling out Sphinx documentation. The 'hard' part would be converting the few README.rst files into index.rst files, but on the flip side I could use fancy Sphinx directives.

I'm not exactly sure when I started down this path, bit this commit log entry leads me to think I had it working on or around July 8th. What that would mean is that every time I pushed up a change in my notes, within minutes readthedocs.org would publish the content to the world in lovely HTML markup.

The result?

Pydanny Event Notes

Here's a screen shot of the front page

PyCon Australia 2011 Test Drive

For the 2011 PyCon Australia I gave my new process a serious whirl. I found if I created the page before the talk and entered some basic data like author and title and tied it to the index then I could constantly check the quality of my output while taking my notes. It made my notes seem a bit more exciting and alive. I even tweeted about it cause I thought it was fun, and people around the world seemed to enjoy the effort I was putting into my notes.

Because I was committing constantly in order to get updates on readthedocs.org as soon as possible, I also adopted the habit of super-short pull request messages. That's because the content I'm writing overrides the need for verbose comments. So when you see me writing "moar" it's because every minute or so I'm doing something like:

$ git commit -am "moar"
 $ git push

Kiwi PyCon 2011

I did my rapid note taking again at Kiwi PyCon and it was fun. The downside was that sometimes I get rather critical in my notes and I had a couple speakers come up to me later to clarify their positions. This makes it a bit challenging because I want to put down my thoughts, but if my thoughts impact another person, what should I do? Especially since if my negative notes on someone turn up in a search it can negatively impact the speaker way beyond a single talk. This is now always on my mind when I take notes, and I'm trying to figure out a good way to handle this going forward.

In essence, I don't want to constrain what I write but I also don't want to write something that will haunt someone else later. Even with a caveat and all that stuff, it can still be problematic. There is a difference between me ranting about something and me taking notes, and the written word is such that things are all too often taken out of context.

Food for thought indeed.

DjangoCon 2011 and the invention of the term 'live-noting'

At the start of DjangoCon 2011 someone tweeted that they were planning to 'live-blog' the event. Suddenly I realized that what I was doing had a name for it, and that was 'live-noting'. So I tweeted that was what I was doing and it seemed to catch on.

Not only that, but I got asked if I would accept pull requests. After a good two seconds of deep thought, I responded that I would only consider corrections and clarifications, not new material. I received not just one, but two pull requests from good friends and left the conference pretty happy.

On top of that, I managed to get featured on the front page of http://readthedocs.org! (Thanks Eric)

Kenneth Love also took notes in a similar fashion: readthedocs.org/docs/djangocon-2011-notes

PyCodeConf 2011

I had the excellent fortune of being an invited speaker to Github's PyCodeConf. While I gave my talk, my lovely fiancée, Audrey took notes of my talk and submitted a pull request. Her contribution was the first time I accepted content I did not write, and I'll say right now she's the only one for whom I will accept such content. On the other hand, If you take notes when I present let me know and I'll link to them from my own notes.

Josh Bohde also took notes at the event in a similar fashion readthedocs.org/projects/joshbohde-event-notes and even as I write this post he shares the featuring of our notes on the frontispiece of readthedocs.org:

Closing Thoughts

I often use my notes as reference, and if you follow the commit logs you may even see me comment or clean up things I wrote down years ago.

The graphs and stats of this effort is really interesting. Fortran? And a total of
Five contributors!

All of this makes taking notes a lot more fun. I enjoy finding ways to enhance and improve my process, and find it exciting that others are following a similar pattern of effort. My hope is to make 2012 the Year of PyCon, where I find a way to go to a Python related conference on six continents (Antartica is too cold for my tastes) and take notes everywhere.

Going forward, should I document how I built this out? Would my steps and patterns be useful for others?

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!

Announcing django-uni-form 0.8.0 beta!

This has been a long time coming, but I am pleased to announce the release of the django-uni-form 0.8.0 beta. We plan to release the 0.8.0 final next Friday around the start of July 2011.

This is an enormous jump forward in the project, and I think you'll like what has been done and who contributed.

Some notable changes

1. As of this release, there is now a formal django-uni-form release on PyPI that fully supports Django CSRF tokens.
2. Better error messages to help you debug. No more annoying Null messages on bad helpers!
3. The Python code has been carefully cleaned and optimized. Much easier to read, debug, and it plain runs faster on form heavy sites.
4. Various improvements to the templates to better match the parent Uni-Form library.
5. Only compatible with Django 1.2 or higher and Python 2.6 or higher. If you need something to work with other earlier versions of Django/Python, then I suggest using django-uni-form 0.7.0. Or better yet, upgrade your site!
6. Much improved documentation on the awesome readthedocs.org site.
7. Tons of other things!
8. Upcoming faster release cycles. More on that in the next section...

Leadership change for django-uni-form

Let's face it, over a year between releases is too long for any active open source project. I haven't done the incredible (and patient) django-uni-form community justice in supporting their issues and pull requests. This project has needed a much more active lead for some time. Fortunately, I found a new project in the way of Miguel Araujo.

Miguel Araujo shares my passion for good form generation and has a very deep understanding of Python, Django, and HTML. Also, his decisions on everything about this project either matches my own thoughts or he's been able to easily convince me why his concepts are sound. He is responsive to pull requests and issues, and his work is of high quality. So we should be seeing lots of releases and a better evolution of the system to match other advancements in the Django community.

So going forward Miguel will be the project lead for django-uni-form, and I'll be 'former project lead' and 'documentation donkey'.

The future of django-uni-form in the face of the forms refactor

Some people are wondering what place django-uni-form has in the face of the Django GSOC forms refactor by Greg Mullegger. Is the need for django-uni-form going away?

First of all, I actually have been pushing for a forms refactor in Django for some time. At the djangocon.us 2010 sprints Russel Keith-McGee, Django core developer and DSF president, asked my opinion on the design of a forms refactor. For the GSOC effort, I was delighted that the GSOC forms project followed the opinion that I preferred in how to  doing things, and so I put in my non-binding vote for Gregor's approach. I'm rooting for you Gregor!

Second, while I think that while this library may change a bit to accomodate the eventual integration of Gregor's work, the need to be able to do guaranteed working Section 508 compliant layouts easily and more importantly make fancy layout changes in Python will keep this library alive and useful for a long time coming.

Whither goes the source code?

Finally, we'll be keeping the repo at https://github.com/pydanny/django-uni-form for the 0.8.x series so we have time to properly warn the community. When the forms refactor hits Django (prompting the necessary release of the 0.9.x series) we may be moving the library to its own github account.

Conclusion

I want to thank all the contributors, users, and anyone who gave me guidance or suggestions for this project. All the credit for this goes to you. I'm honored to have started something used by so many great people in so many wonderful ways.

This evolved from a Django beginner's shortcut filter to a rather sizable project with a great community. Due to my support of this project I learned git-scm, setuptools, JQuery, Sphinx, custom Django filters and templatetags, and more. I look forward to where it will go in the future with Miguel as lead.

Resolutions for 2011

• Travel to Europe again.
• Travel to Asia or Africa.
• Visit a Disney park.
• See a place in the USA I've never been.
• Drop the waist size 2 inches and not break any bones.
• Go to Pycon and present or teach.
• Go to DjangoCon and present or teach.
• Present at LA Django
• Continue my Muay Thai and Capoeira studies, get back into Eskrima, learn some more BJJ, and practice the forms I know.
• Work out at least three times a week.
• Go back east and teach martial arts for a day.
• Finish some outstanding legal proceedings.
• Launch a site that does cool stuff and somehow brings in money.
• Get to the point with LISP where I can do cool stuff in it without needing a textbook.
• Blog once a week. That is at least 52 blog entries!
• Explain why I wrote Diversity Rocks.

2010 Resolution Summary

Items that are crossed out are completed.

• Sell the house, pay off the remainders of my debts, and get my own place to stay. And get a car too.

• Travel to another country.

• Take my son to another country.

• Drop the waist size 2 inches and not break any bones.

• Go to an amusement park, visit the beach, and also see a part of the USA I've never been.

• Do more educational work for Python related technologies, and that includes getting the Django Education Foundation really rolling forwards.

• Throw away at least half my current stuff. I don't have much stuff now, and I want even less. Also, If I don't use or interact with any one of my non-book remaining possessions by 2011, I'm throwing it away.

• Move my blog to my own system and blog at least once a week.

• Get a mountain bike and have reasons to use it.

• Get back into Eskrima, focus more on BJJ, get into Capoeira.

• Hire a maid. I'm not messy, but I want someone to do the fine tuning of my place.

• Go to Pycon, DjangoCon, and a new conference.

• Have a beer with Thomas, Andy, Andy, Tony, Garrick, Bernd, and the rest of Ye Aulde Gange.

DjangoCon 2010 report I

The conference was like a family gathering except without any oddly weird uncles. To my utmost embarrassment I got overwhelmed a few times and forgot names of people I respect and admire.

If I went through people I got to touch base with, I would have to list three digits worth of people and play favorites. That just ain't me, so I'm just going to say everyone there was awesome and I hope to see you again at Pycon!

Alright then, some reporting:

Django Software Foundation Panel

Russel Keith-Magee, the new DSF president hosted a panel with Ben Slavin, Sean O'Conner, Jeremy Dunck, and myself. Russ went over plans for DSF finances and the hopeful creation of a DSF ecosphere of applications.

My own contribution was talking a little about Django Packages, and bit more about "Why Django".

Why Django, or maybe one day "Enterprise Djangoproject" is an advocacy site for Django targeted not to developers but to decision makers. It is a work in progress, we are collecting case studies and articles, and building out the site.

Ben Slavin then challenged me about the code and data. Other Django community projects like djangoapps and djangosites are closed source efforts without an API and this causes problems for the community. If a site goes down or is unmaintained then the community loses.

I agree.

So I promised that for these Django community projects the code is public, APIs were being made to support people fetching data from them at any time, and I'm trying to figure out how to do data dumps without handing out even salted passwords. Furthermore, I would give full access to these sites and servers behind them to those that Russell appointing to the position of being watchdog.

And I'm working on that promise. Django Packages now has an API and a BDFL has server access to Django Packages. Why Django is still a work in progress, so things are still in flux. I'll post updates to my promise of openness.

Furthermore, I challenge anyone who puts together a site useful to the community, be it a new version of Django Apps or Django Sites to follow my own promise. By all means maintain and work your project, but be willing to publish all data and keep your code under an open source license. Also provide access to whom the DSF president appoints so that others can provide maintenance for your site.

Eric Florenzano's Keynote

Eric Florenzano gave the keynote on What Sucks about Django (and how we can fix it). He did a very good job of it. Watch his talk. It has some amazingly telling points.

Anyways, I'm challenging for Eric to eat his own dogfood. The only people I saw Eric talk to were the same people he is always around and conferences. How many times did he go up to a person he didn't recognize and start talking to them? How many new people did he meet at DjangoCon 2010?

Portland Views, Food, and Beer

On Saturday, as a break, I went with Eric Holscher, Ben Firschman, and Andrew Godwin to the park around the Portland zoo. Below you can see where a lady pointed out that we could see mountains 50 and 150 miles away. That left three geeks speechless while
Ben Firschman captured the moment. This picture is Ben's and all rights belong to him.



And then I had my action shot taken by Ben. Again, all rights to him.



I just have to say that Ben is an amazing photographer and I'm honored to be in a few of his pictures of DjangoCon. In addition to that he presented on class based views in Django, which I plan to blog about as well as incorporate into Django Packages in the near future.

Edit: Blogspot is acting really oddly which is why I took out the linking and other things.

Edit II: Eric ate his own dog food. Awesome!

More reasons to go to DjangoCon!

I was thinking some more about DjangoCon next month.

Capoeira - I'm known for doing one-handed cartwheels. But at last year's DjangoCon I got a chance to try my hand at Capoeira. Since then I've managed to get in some actual regular Capoeira training. My hope is to tag up with Oregon Capoeira and see how my Angola matches their Regional. Even if you've never done a cartwheel, it should still be a blast to try out!

Okay, now on to listing some more talks I'm looking forward to having at the conference:

• Why Django sucks and how we can fix it - While Django is the king of Python web framewrks, Eric Florenzano is going to slam it hard. But he isn't going to just troll the conference, he's also going to provide us some possible solutions. The best thing of all, is that since Django is open source, we can all contribute to make it better!
• Pony Pwning - Django is a nicely secure framework thanks to the security focus of the community, but Adam Baldwin shows us how as developers we can make compromising mistakes. If you want to avoid being caught with your pants down on a day where you didn't wear clean underwear, go to this talk!
• State of Pinax - Pinax is a platform for rapidly building websites in Django that I've made contributions to off-and-on since about December 2008. Heck, my talks and tutorial at DjangoCon and Pycon were about Pinax! Anyway, Brian Rosner, arguably the second tallest man in the Pinax community is going to tell us the past, present, and future of this incredible tool set.
• From Slice to Site: Django in 30 minutes - Tired of hearing about how its easier to deploy a <insert-competing-but-sucky-language> site? Katie Cunningham of NASA SMD fame is going to show you how you can do it fast and easy. A great beginner talk from someone skilled at speaking and educating!
• How to sell Django - So your trying to convince the customer/boss that Django is the way to go. But they read somewhere that XML + Shell scripts is how to build an application used by millions or talk to a well-dressed salesperson selling antiquated/broken technology. How do you get past this issue? Well, I'm hosting a panel on how to convince the people who sign the checks that Django is the way to go. I've got Steve Holden, James Tauber, and either Jacob Kaplan-Moss or Frank Wiles, plus another person to discuss this on a panel.
• Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved - Unfortunately scheduled at the same time as my own talk, my good friend Eric Holscher is giving a talk on some of the best applications written for Django. These are tools that solve a lot of problems for you. Ever wonder what is the best REST application? How to do proper searches? Migrate data? Also, want to make your pet application endorsed by the Django ecosphere? Then attend this talk! 

Getting excited about DjangoCon US!

Djangocon starts in just a month. I'm looking forward to this event because of so many reasons. Lets go over some of them!

Friends - I'll get to meet with old friends and make new ones. Rather than list names I'm going to mark a sheet of paper with the alphabet and check off letters as I meet/make a friend with the first name that matches an unmarked letter. Which makes me wonder if their is a Django app for that in the making...

Portland - Great food and awesome beer at cheap prices. The wonderful thing about Portland is that the base ingredients are really good. I found I liked the simpler/cheaper things there more than fancy foods. The food carts alone are worth visiting the city.

Oregon State - It is a beautiful state and since words can't do justice here is an image:

Me at Mutnomah falls!

 The conference schedule rocks! - The talks they lined up all look really good. They range from the basics to the advanced, and include things that go beyond the technical. Some of my favorite picks from just the first day:

• Typewar: A Case Study - James Tauber is an incredible speaker, not to mention the founder of Pinax and the CEO of Eldarion. His talks are best served live. Typewar is an interesting game but the story of its inception and maintenance is a gem for anyone looking to see how the masters do it.
• So you want to be a core developer? - Russel Keith-Magee, a core developer, lets us know what we need to know and do to work on Django core. He got approved for three talks so you know he has to kick butt as a speaker.
• Maps of Imaginary Lands - Malcom Tredennick, another core developer, shows how to use django.contrib.gis to set up fancy maps of non-existant places. One day I'll have to do this for a place I created in my youth, a place called 'Dannyland'. Anyway, Malcom also has three talks so he's got to have a lot of cool points.
• Django Forms: Tips, tricks, and ways to stay out of trouble - Shawn Rider of PBS fame might not be a core developer but he's another brilliant coder and great speaker. This is a great beginner talk and maybe a decent advanced talk too.

Thats just four great talks described. And its just the tip of the iceberg! This is going to be great!

Edit: Fixed a geography mistake. I am so embarrassed.

Resolutions for 2010

Since I start my decades at zero, that means we have just 4.5 hours left in this first 10% of the 21st century. And with just 4.5 hours left, I post my New Year's Resolutions.

• Sell the house, pay off the remainders of my debts, and get my own place to stay. And get a car too.

• Travel to another country.

• Take my son to another country.

• Drop the waist size 2 inches and not break any bones.

• Go to an amusement park, visit the beach, and also see a part of the USA I've never been.

• Do more educational work for Python related technologies, and that includes getting the Django Education Foundation really rolling forwards.

• Throw away at least half my current stuff. I don't have much stuff now, and I want even less. Also, If I don't use or interact with any one of my non-book remaining possessions by 2011, I'm throwing it away.

• Move my blog to my own system and blog at least once a week.

• Get a mountain bike and have reasons to use it.

• Get back into Eskrima, focus more on BJJ, get into Capoeira.

• Hire a maid. I'm not messy, but I want someone to do the fine tuning of my place.

• Go to Pycon, DjangoCon, and a new conference.

• Have a beer with Thomas, Andy, Andy, Tony, Garrick, Bernd, and the rest of Ye Aulde Gange.

2009 resolution summary

Items that are crossed out are completed.

• Compete in tournaments and/or races

• Refinance the house

• Go to yet another country

• Get more people hired at NASA (Welcome Chris Adams!)

• Learn Django, JQuery, and get better at zc.buildout and CSS

• Stay with NASA another year

• Test for my 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do

• Not break any bones

• Fix up more rooms in the basement

• Take down that one tree in the backyard

• Enjoy my family more (Things are better with my parents, siblings, and perhaps my son).

• Go to PyCon, Plone Conference 2009, and DjangoCon

• Become much more active in the open source community

Pycon talk thoughts

Back at the start of this month I posted my thoughts about sessions I was considering giving at Pycon 2010. They ones I've killed are:

• How to suffer through SOAP web services using Python even though REST is so much better (I might be too bitter for this one).

The general response to this one has been that SOAP is icky. I think SOAP is icky. Why should I present on a topic I loathe and I'm mildly bitter about? So I'm not going to do this presentation.

• Why I like stupid template languages (expanding on a tangent of this article).

I think this might make for a good NOVA-DUG talk or a blog rant but I don't think it would work for a pycon talk. So we'll consider it nixed.

• Lets move widgets into HTML templates and out of python code! Modern JavaScript libraries makes this easy!

I think this design pattern makes for a good NOVA-DUG talk or a blog post. Not enough for a pycon talk.

The one I submitted to Pycon:

• A reprise of the Pinax tutorial at DjangoCon

I've already submitted this to Pycon. It went well enough at DjangoCon and we've already made changes to things so its just plain better.

The one I'm considering:

• Why and how to make accessible508 compliant AJAXified python applications.

Actually, this one is interesting. The focus would be on things and focus on 508/accessibility issues and degradable AJAX. I would explain why 508/accessibility is important. I would demonstrate how to construct an examples using several python frameworks (Django, TurboGears, and repoze.BFG come to mind) and maybe more than one JavaScript framework (JQuery, YUI, et al).

I could certainly give that talk in 30 or 45 minutes. My concern though is just plain getting ready for the talk. It would be a lot of work in research of unfamiliar frameworks and just plain coming up with working material. Add to that selling of the house, work on a professional side project, running NOVA-DUG, working a full time job, my normal teaching schedule, leading the Django Education Foundation forward, maybe starting up Capoeira, and maybe doing some things for the Django Software Foundation, and I'm not seeing it in my schedule.

One more thing: at Pycon I want to learn! I'm not sure I want to be involved in giving too many talks since those will eat precious listening time.

I think what I will do for now cook this up as a Django + JQuery + 508 presentation for NOVA-DUG and see where it takes me.

Slides from DjangoCon 2009

James Tauber and I presented a tutorial at DjangoCon. The presentation well until a gaff near the end. We are changing things a bit and presenting this again at Pycon (if we are accepted). My slides are up!

http://www.slideshare.net/pydanny/pinax-tutorial-090909

Bonus points to anyone who identifies the mistakes in the slides.

Best DjangoCon 2009 Day Ever!

This might sound a bit familiar, but yesterday was a day I don't think I will ever be able to top again. It was one of the pinnacles of my geeky existence, and I fear that the rest of my life will be a dull effort to recapture the glory that was yesterday. Why do I think this is so?

• Fresh Oregon state blueberry pancakes for breakfast with James Tauber, Brian Rosner, and Jannis Leidel. If you know me well, you'll understand why the pancakes were so important.
• Great keynote speech by Ian Bicking.
  
• I gave my first Django and Pinax related talk in a single combined event. Me and James Tauber gave a Pinax Tutorial that besides a demo gaff at the end went very well.
• Saw a really good talk by my new Public Broadcasting System (PBS) friends! Those guys are really smart and I'm delighted they are in my home area.
  
• I participated in my first conference panel ever! We (me, Katie Cunningham, Gary Wilson, Shawn Rider, and our host Brian Luft) told our story with getting Django (and python) into our shops. Lots of great questions at the end.
• Finding out that my 508 form project django-uni-form isn't just used by NASA and Pinax, but also by PBS!
• Chocolate peanut butter filled cookies for afternoon snack.
• Got a chance to tell Chris Wanstrath not only how much I appreciated that github kept me from having to learn all the git functions besides the basic ones, but also fended off the inevitable person accosting him about github performance issues (I fully recognize that scaling complex dynamic sites can be hard).
  
• The weather was amazing with a nice second trip to Powells. We should move the conference outside.
• Fondue for dinner that was so good it shut down James Bennett for 2 minutes!
• I witnessed my fellow NASA Dangonaut from Ames Research Center, Mark Friedenbach (NAI, NLSI) get married to his lovely fiance, Ariel Lee. Pictures to follow soon!
  

Best. DjangoCon. Day. Ever.

I'll say right now that yesterday tied my 'Best Pycon 2009 Day'. I'm delighted I got something just as good as that wonderful day in the same year.

By the way, watching Mark and Ariel get married was much, much better than Zed Shaw kicking me in the nuts.

See you at DjangoCon!

I'm off to the Pacific Northwest, specifically Portland, Oregon for DjangoCon. I'll be presenting a tutorial with James Tauber and participating in two panels. This sort of event is always a lot of work, study, and networking. I won't have much time to go sightseeing because this is a working trip, but I'm sure to squeeze in a little bit.

Portland is a very green city, has great food, and is famous for cycling. I'm sure I can find something to do!

Thanks to everyone who had a hand in me getting there or is holding down the fort back home. The quick list would be in alphabetical order:

• Chris Adams
• Corin Turner
• Dave Sanchez
• Jim Consalvi
  
• Katie Cunningham
• Katie Wilcox
  
• Mom
• Robert Lofthouse
• Ron Boykin
• Ruth Netting

Thanks everyone!