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.

PyCon Lightnings, 17:30 March 11, 2011

Session starts almost 20 minutes late - looked to me like logistical problems with the stage change, but I am so far out of the loop and the people in charge are so competent that the best thing I can do is start the post and wait patiently like everyone else.

I am sitting with Titus Brown and Peter Conerly, who are discussing matters of great technical moment. It's Peter's first PyCon, and the opening announcement is the every lightning slot in the conference is allcoated.

The opening talk is a request for PyCOn to raise $10,000. If 1 in 5 gave $10 each ... Text REDCROSS to 90999, then tweet that you gave with hashtag #pythoncares. End of talks on Sunday we will get a count.

Next speaker's display isn't working. Awkward pause. Silent audience. I am hoping things soon run more smoothly for Jacob (Kaplan Moss, the evergreen sprint chair who is here for the first time as a gentleman farmer).

Jeff Daily talks about Global Arrays Parallel Programming Toolkit, that added Python bindings to it toolkit in the last year. It gives access to a high performance computing array, giving access to distributed numpy-style ndarrays. Compared with other models, Global Arrays is less general than some techniques, but it scales well to at least 200,000 cores. This finally achieves highly parallel programming with true Python programming ease. Much simpler than message-passing interfaces, the technique is extensible and scalable, but requires that algorithms acknowledge the need for data consistency. If you're at PyCon, see Jeff at Poster #13.

Matt Harrison talks about his geek inferiority complex. He bought a computer at Fry's because computer class at school was too full. For years now people have been declaring "the year of Unix". Linux people run stuff like Gnome and KDE and a tiny set of other window managers. This guy inhabits a pretty specialized point in the Linux desktop fractal space, a rarified atmosphere in which indexing by 1 is awesome. And still we get more specialized. Matt's wrists forced him into this (in)sanity by screaming when he tried to pick the mouse up. Impressive demonstration of driving a window manager from the keyboard ensues, and lo! relevance: the QTile window manager is written in Python and is scriptable: now windows are flashing on and off in four different virtual screen. 2 further users will amount to exponential growth in the user population. Please join him.

Pete Fein wants us to hack for freedom. Video of protesters, under attack by flame throwers, getting pictures out through cellphone. Pete explains how he has helped freedom by getting stuff out on the street in 105 cities in a week. He worked with telecomix.org to help keep sites up and services running. They are leaderless and fanatically devoted to freedom. When the net was up they provided encryption and other services, mirrored censored sites and manually relayed tweets for egyptian users with no network access later. With Anonymous they set up a network to send information by fax, and by injecting information into logs of a few servers they found still up. It can be exhausting working for freedom, but we have the power to help people achieve it.

Next speaker (fumanchu at aminus.org(?)) not using his own laptop, another pause but we are now seeing images. No, gone again. Back again. Go. Logging. Really? Yes, because all the modules in your application can use the logging model independently, but this isn't applicable for things like performance statistics so that independent modules can log performance data and report on it. Solution: log into Python dictionaries, with package names as the top-level namespace. You can define record structures, and (for reporting only) can insert functions into the dict to be used when reports are required (writing the log should be high speed, so no function calls). This allows people to build their own reporting tools, or to user ready-made ones such as the one built into CherryPy. Open Space tomorrow.

More AV glitches as the next speaker arrives, then departs so I have no insight into the problem. Ah, they need a VGA dongle for a mini-display port. Strange, PyCon normally has this stuff buttoned down. I hear someone say "waht are the odds" and don't know whether this is a good sign or a bad one. BVideo at last appears, and Nathan Nichols wants to tell us some lessons he learned writing automated content generation systems using DSLs. Clients send data, they create quality content for it. Journalists are needed but hey they don't know Python. So instead use DSLs. Rules: 1. Keep Parsing Simple, Stupid (PyParsng was overqualified for the job, regexes and YAML serve better); 2. Keep things on rails (no, not Rails - Nathan knows his audience) and remember that while we think Python is awesome journalists don't and would be overwhelmed by its complexity; 3. Tools are super-important, and DSLs allow you to write very specific tools. Good talk.

Another pause, this time to load the next presenter's files ont he same laptop. It's Giles Thomas wants to tell us why Resolver Systems switched from IronPython back to CPython. Resolver are known for their eponymous spreadsheet, which is quite clearly a windows application. They now have a new project, Dirigible, was written for the web to provide similar services. The initial strategy of marketing to financial companies, and Windows was mandated bh the conservative nature of the client base. So Resolver 1 was a full .NET application. For Dirigible, CPython was the natural choice since none of the .NET stuff was required.

The SingPath competition is about to start somewhere close by. More lightnings in the morning. Awesome day 1!