Friday, April 17, 2009

What I learned at Pycon 2009

Why write a repetition about all the things that everyone else has documented the greatness of Pycon 2009 when I can write about the awesome stuff I learned?
  • How to use Python via XLRD and XLWT to handle truly brobdingnagian Excel files (8 million records anyone) without anything Microsoft.
  • New Internet scraping tools like html5lib and mechanize to reinforce lxml and the fading but still lovable BeautifulSoup.
  • Many awesome things about the Sphinx documentation experience.
  • That spending a day in test focused sessions is an intense experience.
  • argparse makes writing command line python interactions so much easier.
  • Good rules of thumb for breaking apart applications in not just Django, but for python modules in general.
  • Git! The Pinax community embraced Git just as I was started to work on it. I owe a lot to Brian Rosner's patient coaching, and Jannis Leidel's patience.
  • That I am addicted to checking on the Github graphs to see how I compare.
  • 15 minutes of sitting next to James Tauber gave me the grounding I wanted in JQuery event handling.
  • That people who hate XML based template languages HATE them. HATE HATE HATE.
  • Mashed potatoes and bacon pizza is yummy. And spinach and anchovy pizza rocks. Yes, I ate anchovies and oddly enough liked them.
  • I really want to teach python, Django, and Pinax. I may not be the best coder by far, but I think this could be the largest contribution I ever make to this community.
Some of what I need to follow up on
Did I miss anything? Let me know!

1 comment:

yacitus said...

Danny, I'd like to see you blog in more detail on the "rules of thumb for breaking apart applications in not just Django, but for python modules in general."

And thanks for the reminder about argparse.