March 12, 2011

Lightnings, 17:30 Saturday March 12

Eric Holscher says use ReadTheDocs, they are hosting scads of stuff for some great people. DjangDash gave birth to this fully open source project. Learned chef ass-basckwards. Heading for half a million hits a month, custom themes, tags & branched from Git with PDF generation thanks to Sphinx. Subdomains and project shortcuts will bebrilliant. They support CNAMEs. Chef is awesome. Multiple servers, because it's architected and shit. Think hard about your URLs before they become dumb-assed lame legacy URLs. Promote your project and find a designer. Open source is cool because they've had patches. You don't get arbotrary code execution rights until you are trusted. You now have one less reason for not writing docs.

Nate Aune says managing servers sucks, nobody likes setting up nginx or Apache, establishing backups, monitoring. Why don't we just have a "DeployNow" button, and that'd what DjangoZoom is supposed to to this. Copy your source code URL from github, paste it into DjangoZoom, and add a new project. Zoom inspects the .py file to make intelligent guesses about what's in there, setting it up to be served from nginx. In less than a minute, here's a django CMS instance running against a publicly-available Internet address. Now there is no reason to admin your servers for deployment, just use DjangoZoom.

Update on the Red Cross donation challenge. So far 45 definites, somewhere between $450 and $800 raised so far. If you haven't donated, please do so. A nuclear reactor in Japan has breached containment. Thngs are pretty dire. Please test REDCROSS to 90999 and then tweet with hashtag #pythoncares.

Oops, this speaker suddenly realizes this isn't the latest version of his stuff. Philikon talks about English, which started out giving us German words, then French, anwadays Finnish, Afrikaans, anything. We can manage to communicate nevertheless, and despite English being a mess the whole world manages to communicate. JavaScript's kinf ont he same. JavAScript, y u not pythonic? It's a mess. But we have all these really great apps, and slowly even replace desktop apps. JavaScript will be moar pythonic, ES5 deprecates all kinds of silly stuff. ES Harmony (much of it already implemented) will do more. Structural (unpacking) assignments, generators (stlen wholesale from Python), iterators, array and generator comprehensions, fewer parentheses, records, all kinds of great stuff. Use these features they are super exciting.

Enrique Bastos is talking about Community Bootstrap. He is deeply involved in building the Python community in Brazil, which is growing really fast, but fortunately community can scale. Why do this? If you don't have a good reason you could falll into traps like chasing an amount opf money rather than what you could experience with it. You need to live an experience to understand it, but don't rush. At first simply get people together to allow interpersonal bonds to form naturally. Don't try and build a group, hold events. People like to join in, they have a lot of events. Your community is the people who turn up at your events. Actively reduce entrance barriers by focusing on newcomers as the most important part of the community. Students are often valuable contributors. Empower people. Rules have side-effects, try to avoid them but discover your principles. Shirts are available with the Brazilian group's ten principles.

Jacob reminds us that daylight savings time begins tomorrow, and that iPhone alarm clocks will not work tomorrow.

Barry Warsaw confirms we all internationalize our applications, right? (of course we do). The flufl.i18n module helps you much more than gettext. Doing stuff with this is pretty difficult. Mailman 3 has some internationalization stuff, which has now been refactored out of the project for standalone us. You can find catalogs using the built-in strategies, or write your own. You can build stacks of languages and query the state of the stack.  Adaptable, it's on PyPI and Launchpad, available now. I think that FLUFL thing has gone to Barry's head.

Aron Grifiths (sp?) wants to tell us he's been through a series of Window managers pretty much like us all. They are either not scriptable or you have to write complex things like C plug-ins. Tomorrow's window manager won't use today's plug-ins. PyWI allows you to program your WM in Python, sand focus in any direction, do all kinds if wonderful stuff. Nice screencast to finish.

Josiah Carlson is talking about Over-Engineering for Dummies. This means either over-building a system or service. RUle 1: write everything yourself. Under no circumstances use convenient modules that do exactly what you want. 2. Start with something completely unsuited to the task; like the professor Josiah knew who build Prolog on top of Scheme, or the guy who added distributed counters to Cassandra. 3. Keep adding features and functionality and so on until no-one can think of anything else to add. 

Grace Law wants to tell you how to get that job you want. Lots of really qualified people don't get the jobs they want, Grace is here to help. Insight into some and interview questions and answers. Employers are looking for hidden remarks. Unintentionally disses QA people to ribald amusement. Be able to talk about learning new things - the more complex a technology you are learning the more impressive that is. Build open source projects and offer to discuss the code. You have initiative, take actions, and undertake complex projects for fun. Poor speed of answers to questions can give a bad impression. Tips on job search, see Grace.

Thanks to all speakers and, of course, Jacob Kaplan Moss.

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