Python Training Day Feedback

After a day at The Church House I am happy to say that the Intermediate Python repository is in much better shape to move forwards.

Work on the Repository
About eight people turned up throughout the day, with the stalwarts being Kevin Dwyer and João Miguel Neves. With their help I investigated some thorny problems I had created for myself in the area of git filtering. It turns out that there is a subtle bug in Python's JSON generation which has existed for quite a long time.

We eventually worked around it by adding import simplejson as json for now, though I suspect a better fix might be to explicitly add a separator specification. Anyway, with that change the filtering then started to work predictably, and we could move forward with a review of the notebook contents to ensure that changes I made during the teaching were incorporated into the main code base.

With three of us hacking away that work didn't take very long, but before it could commence there was a certain amount of git-wrangling that I confess I probably wouldn't have managed anywhere near as quickly without Kevin's and João's help.

Training Market Discussions
All in all quite a success, and we also spent time discussing the UK training market for Python. I've a few more ideas now about how to approach that market, but if you, dear reader, have any ideas I would be happy to here them either in the comments below or through my web site's contact page.

Thank You
Thanks to everyone who turned up or merely wished the enterprise well. I am really looking forward to spending more time in the UK and helping to encourage even more Python use. Thanks also to the staff at The Church House for their excellent attention. We couldn't have been better taken care of.

Python Dev of the Week

I'd like to thank Mike Driscoll for running his Python Dev of the Week series of blog posts. I was fortunate enough to be featured a while ago, and previous victims include Carl Trachte, Michael Herman, Brian Curtin, Luciano Ramalho, Werner Bruhin, Facundo Batista and Ben Rousch.

I hope Mike keeps going with this series. There are many interesting personalities in the Python world, and this brings them just a little closer.

UK Python Training Open Day and Lunch

Regular readers (both?) know that I live in the USA but hail from the UK, where I still return regularly to stay in touch with family and friends. So to dip a toe in the UK training waters I booked a room (rather a nice one, as those who have attended other events I organized will not be surprised to learn) and put out an announcement that I was running a Python Programming Skills Lab. You could have booked a place here. Of course if this were the movies, the spirit of “if you build it they will come” would rule and I could welcome those wishing to drink at the Python fount. But it isn't.

So

a) I am not a marketing genius;
b) this is not the movies.

Result: I am now planning to spend the day in said reserved room, working on my current open source project, whose sadly neglected repository can be found in a weed-infested corner of Github. This is the code I used as a script for the videos which (if you are reading my blog) you should see advertised up at top right. The code is presented as iPython Notebooks, and only some of them are properly documented in interspersed Markdown cells, so if I end up spending the day alone then at least some sensible purpose will have been served.

With that in mind the Skills Lab is now metamorphosing into an open Python Training Day. I understand this is very short notice (I'm not very good at operations either, go figure), but if you have any interest in either receiving Python training or having such training presented to a target group I would be delighted to talk with you on Tuesday December 9, 2014 at any time between 10:00 am and 4:30 pm at the Church House Conference Centre in Westminster.

If you would like to join me for lunch then please sign up (there are 12 places for lunch) and arrive no later than 12:30. If you simply want to drop in and say hello (or, better still, help work on the codebase) then feel free to arrive at any time during the advertised hours and stay as long as you like (but please do sign up for lunch if you plan to eat). It would be helpful if you reserved a drop-in place even if you aren't coming to eat. Those with an interest in beer might want to arrive towards the end of the proceedings so a post-event excursion to a licensed hostelry can be entertained if appropriate.

The room reserved for this event is absolutely delightful, with a view across the Dean's Yard. I welcome all Python friends and anyone who would like to get to know me professionally to visit at some convenient time during that day. But do remember to reserve a place if you want lunch!

I have had very little time to work on the Github repository since the videos were shot, and yearn for an army of Internet interns to help me improve what I believe are useful open-source training materials. In the absence of visitors that day, any spare time I have on that day will go to improve the Notebooks, so at the very least the curated Notebook collection will become more useful.