My Pinax Solutions class at Pycon 2011

Heavily inspired by Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way class I'm changing the lecture style format of the Pinax Solutions class at PyCon 2011 to a more workshop-oriented format.

Which means that the first half of the class we (myself and the peerless Brian Rosner) will spend on material critical for people new to Pinax or old hands who want to see what 0.9 offers. That means setting things up via virtualenv and pip, Pinax specific settings, media handling, template layout, extending core Pinax apps, use of idios to change profiles, openid/openauth, Django Packages to find Pinax approved stuff and more. That will be the foundation and our slides/handouts will be useful as cheat sheets for these critical parts in any Django application.

The second half of the class will be a workshop. We'll spend the next half helping people with their personal projects, and will even have a few stock projects we can toss at people that either already are open source or could be released as open source. We won't write your project for you, but we will provide advice, guidance, and some elbow grease in getting things to work. If someone asks for something that we think the rest of the class could benefit from, we'll show them how to do it on the projector and then everyone benefits.

After the class, I'm free the rest of the day so I'll continue helping people even after the tutorial is officially over. Thursday (March 10th, 2011) after lunch I'll be also available to provide aid and support.  Anyone else can join but those who attended the Pinax Solutions tutorial will get precedence.

During the main body of the conference I'll be attending talks and giving a couple myself so my time to provide aid will likely be completely curtailed.

I will be there at the sprints working on various Pinax and Django projects.

If time permits we'll go over deployment, but I recommend Jacob Kaplan-Moss' Python/Django Deployment Workshop if you want a full treatment of the subject.

Note I: If you've already signed up for the Pinax Solutions tutorial, you should be getting an email from the PyCon tutorial staff shortly.

Note II: If you are new to Python, I recommend that you take any of the basic Python tutorials at PyCon instead of this class.

Los Angeles Open Source Hackathon

I want to announce the launch of our new company which we've named Cartwheel! Besides Python and Django consulting, our plan is to support local Los Angeles small business, teach classes, and host events. And our first event is a Los Angeles Open Source Hackathon on February 5th! Space is limited so RSVP before tickets run out!

Open Source Hackathon at Cartwheel

A hackathon (or sprint if we want to be Pythonic) is where a bunch of developers get together to push various projects forward.

Bring your laptop and work on any open source project that you'd like, as long as it's open source. It can be an existing open source project (e.g. Django, Python) or a new one of your own. Leave the work stuff at work!

Got an existing project? Hackathons are a great place to share ideas and perhaps find additional contributors. Let me know and I'll put it in an additional blog post.

New to open source? A beginning developer? We'll help you get started with open source software development and do our best match you to a project that fits what you want to do.

Some projects that may be worked on:

• Nudge: Evite's API tool is being open sourced!
• django-packages: Integration with brabeion and bugfixes
• django-uni-form FormWizard integration, documentation cleanup
• Pinax django-tagging-rst 0.3.1 integration
• tastypie adding oauth for authentication

Please RSVP as soon as possible. The $10 ($11.54 with fee) ticket price covers breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Costs are partially subsidized by Cartwheel. We hope you can join us!

Pinax Tutorial at Pycon 2011

Tutorial Name: Pinax Solutions at Pycon 2011 (March 9th)

This year I am yet again part of a two man team providing instruction on Pinax at Pycon. Last year's Long Pinax Tutorial went well, with myself and James Tauber receiving a lot of positive feedback plus some really good constructive criticism.

Based off that criticism and our own experiences since last year's tutorial we decided to make some changes, specifically we wanted our class to be very solutions focused. Think of it as an organized brain dump of how best to start a project, leverage in the Pinax framework plus the rest of the Django ecosphere to do all that tedious make work we so dislike. Using these tools will let you focus on your project's unique attributes, meaning you get to focus on all the fun stuff!

Another big change to the class is that Brian Rosner will be taking over in James' place as co-presenter (last year he was instrumental in reviewing the content of the class). Brian is a Django core committer, a Pinax core developer, the tech lead of Eldarion, and the steward of Gondor. If you like how the current Django admin works, you can thank him for his hard work. Even if he didn't have those credentials, Brian is a great speaker and really patient with questions. He started me on git back back at Pycon 2009 and has been kind to me the times I've screwed things up in git ever since.

The course itself will go over the 0.9 series of Pinax. You'll need a laptop with Python 2.6+ installed (Python 3.x won't work in Django). You should be familiar with Django and Python.

See you there!

Recap of 2010

This has been an unforgettable year. I can't believe all this stuff happened. I've moved many times, met wonderful people, and seen my life change in ways I could have never predicted.

The good:

• Met a whole new bunch of wonderful people - relationships to last a lifetime. Arthur, Audrey, Celso, Cody, Daniel, Jacob, Jeff, Lahn, Moriah, Skyler, Todd and others I'm certainly forgetting to my undying shame. Thanks for your awesomeness!
• Presented and taught at Pycon 2010.
• Had a blast in the blizzard of 2010.
• Prepped my house of 9 years for sale and sold it.
• Paid off my debts. I sleep so much better now.
• Left NASA after 5 years and 3 months for freelancing pastures. Thanks Eldarion LLC, Revsys LLC, Holdenweb LLC, and Bryan Klein. Being exposed to some of the incredible code and developers on these projects has made me a better developer. Show me more!
• Flew enough in the spring to put me ahead of notorious traveller James Tauber for about 2 months in sheer mileage accumulated.
• Got to reconnect with a cousin and met his lovely wife and handsome son. Also hung out with my Uncle Al and Aunt Sandra.
• Got a tour of Ames Research Center thanks to Michael Sims. He'll probably be presenting at Pycon!
• Attended another NASA wedding by Mark and Ariel.
• Took a cruise to Mexico on a ship that caught fire just months later.
• Said goodbye to Virginia and moved to Lawrence, Kansas to run with the unicorns and 5 months later to Los Angeles, California.
• Road tripped across the Western half of the country! Twice! Spent 3 days in Las Vegas over Halloween!
• Learned fundamentals of Capoeira from Celso Wills. Wish I could learn more from him. :(
• Learned how to drive and bought my first car.
• Worked on another course for Holdenweb LLC.
• Launched Django Packages.
• Presented at DjangoCon 2010.
• Started Muay Thai classes in Los Angeles. I've done quite a bit of it, but these were the first regular classes I've had in about 16 years.
• Brought my son to Los Angeles so I could spend a week with him for the first time in 15 months.
• Almost up to 7 years without a broken bone!
• Worked another year in Python related technologies.
• Started learning LISP and played a lot more with JavaScript (especially JQuery and JQuery UI).

The bad:

• Left my students in Virginia. The young ones were especially hard to let go.
• Had to say goodbye to friends in the DC area. Some people I'll miss are Alex, Beth, Brandon, Chris, Dave, Daye, Eric, Jim, Joe, Katie, Muhammed, Pilar, Rich, Renee, Ron, Sarah, Sebastion, Shawn, Steve, and Whitney. I know I'm missing some names!
• I'm far from all my immediate family: Carla, Ciana, Dad, Doug, Michele, Midori, Mom, Seth, and Timiri.
• Watched NOVA Django falter after I left the DC area. 
• Had to wait 15 months between spending more than a day or so with my son.
• Didn't really practice much Eskrima all year.
• Didn't blog enough. Last year I blogged almost twice as much!
• Frustratingly, haven't been able to finish something that prevents me from writing about certain things. Yes, this is quite vague, and my hope is to clarify it in a few weeks.

Pycon 2010 report III: Sprints

My report for the sprints of Pycon 2010. This isn't a general review of the sprints, just how it affected me.

Pinax Sprint

I don't have a hard count of how many people participated on Pinax this year. Last year's sprint looked like we had a lot more, but last year the Pinax room was home to people doing other things, albeit mostly Django related stuff. In any case, this year we had probably about 10 people working on Pinax, or things that went directly into Pinax.

While James Tauber is the leader of the Pinax community, this year Brian Rosner stepped up and did an amazing job being both a technical resource and director of geeks. The mutual clarity of vision and obvious telepathy between Brian and James is truly a joy to behold.

I also appreciate the entire Pinax community. Besides coaching me on Git branches (work uses SVN so I just don't get enough Git practice) they also gracefully understood that I was a bit distracted this year.

My specific contributions to Pinax

One of the things that had bugged me about Pinax for some time were the individual project tag apps. These were a per project extension of django-tagging, and were used to simply display tagged data. I was never happy about the displays of the tags, the lack of pagination, or that you had to create/modify an entire project level application just to control a display.

So last DjangoCon I wrote django-tagging-ext. What it does is let you control the displays of tags via a root urlconf wiring. It still needs some work (cleaning a query, 100% test coverage, better documentation), but its a big step up from the alternative.

For Pycon I volunteered to go into all the Pinax projects that used tags and replace the tag_app there with django-tagging-ext wiring. I thought it would be relatively trivial, but in practice it was not.

The issue was that immediately prior to the conference, changes had been made to Pinax trunk that caused a small number of errors. All them passed existing tests but failed when you actually clicked through pages. Yeah, that does mean that Pinax code coverage needs improvement, but that is something we are working feverishly on. In any case, what that meant was that by implementing the new tag display system, I got the chance to fix a number of small but poignant bugs.

I also worked some to help the code coverage of tests. Brian Rosner worked with me and gave me some excellent pointers. I feel sad because I think we had a disconnect on what we consider pair programming, and want to assure him that the time he gave me was a high mark of the conference.

In regards to pair programming, I don't mind working with someone until you figure something out, but spending hours and hours sharing a computer drives me nuts. Once a person 'gets it', go do something else and let them go forward.

Volume of Contribution

Looking at the Pinax impact chart on github I can claim that I had the most impact during the sprint. Heck, I even jokingly claimed it on Twitter.

Except that claim is false.

The truth of the matter is that how many commits I did in a brief period is nothing compared to what Brian and James did to equip others to make commits. Or what they've done during the history of Pinax. Or what they might have done to side projects that touch Pinax. Also, during the sprints my work was really focused to a specific area of Pinax, and besides some work I did with Skylar Saveland, I worked mostly by myself.

So that claim is full of hubris and rather silly. If that claimed annoyed anyone in the Pinax community I'll buy your forgiveness with a beer.

Pycon 2010 report II

The first half day report for formal conference activities on February 21.

Plenary: Introduction

I helped in registration so I arrived late to listen to Van Lindburgh start the conference. Which was a shame because I like to listen to him speak. Nevertheless, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I had contributed my time and service to help him launch what turned out to be an amazing conference.

Keynote: Steve Holden

In December Steve had presented to the NOVA-Django a much earlier draft of his speech. As much as his stuff back in December was good, what he did at Pycon was right on the money. He was in fine form, and the conclusion was very much Steve Holden at his best.

The next night Steve was in rare fine form, but that is a story for another day...

Keynote: Guido Van Rossum

Being that I am Guido's biggest fan, and have trouble breathing in his presence, you might think I'm a bit biased. Alas, in this case, Guido's talk was not my favorite of the conference. If memory serves, at last year's Pycon he mentioned a desire to remove the "For Life" from BDFL and this year I think that showed a little bit. It was nice to have him field questions from the Eldarion supplied pycon.djangodose.com feed and the audience, but from Guido I guess I want vision and on-high judgements.

Leafy Chat, et al by Alex Gaynor

Alex Gaynor is great at public speaking. He is unafraid of crowds and speaks with good clarity. His talks are always informative, and this was no different. The downside was that for his talk he had 35 minutes to present a lot of information. So he didn't have the time to explore some of the technical hurdles they overcame in each effort. Nevertheless, it was informative, and by the end it seemed clear that one of the lessons re-learned was to focus on a simple core architectural design and make it work.

A Short Pinax Tutorial by Me

I've given variations of this talk at least three times previously. Once at DjangoCon, once for NOVA-Django, and once for Django-District. So I'm rather practiced at it, which turned out to be a good thing. Because, brand new good luck charm or not, this talk ended up having a host of problems.

First off, we couldn't get any Apple laptop to work with the projector. So we started 7-8 minutes late on a Windows machine. So I had to speak very quickly, especially if I was going to include the technical side of things.

So I finished the majority of slides with time to spare and then things went wrong again. The Windows machine... didn't do what was needed. Displaying Pinax and showing off its tricks just wasn't going to happen. So we ended up with an extended Q&A session.

Not my best presentation, but memorable.

In the works is me giving the talk a least a couple more times. Once with my local friends at ZPUG-DC and once at LA Django.

Managing the World's Oldest Django Project by James Bennett

James is always on the ball when it comes to presentations. His stuff is well researched and documented, and his voice is both relaxing and invigorating. It was good to hear about lessons learned, experiences, and some of the more interesting foibles they've been through.

An Underwater Python: Tortuga the Python Powered Robot by Joseph Lisee

Python powered underwater Robots? I was so excited by this talk!

Yeah, odds are it would have almost no professional applicability, but sometimes you just have to see what other people are doing with one of your favorite tools. I was impressed by the energy and creativity of the students at the Robotics group at the University of Maryland and am trying to figure out how to include robots in my next project.

Pycon 2010 report I

Pycon was an incredible learning experience and networking opportunity. I met many good friends again and made just as many new ones. In addition, this was the first time I presented and did so on Pinax two times. Furthermore, in the name of diversity, this instance of Pycon saw the premiere of the Financial Assistance Grant for Women. We also had a dedicated talk on Diversity as a Dependency. The benefit this focus on diversity was that...

um...

yeah...

like...

uh...

um...

Diversity Rocks

Did I learn a lot at pycon? Heck yeah. Networking was life changing. And unlike previous conferences, I'm in a position to take advantages of opportunities offered. The next few weeks and months will see a lot of changes and challenges for me.

Note: I've got to keep some things under wraps for now so I'm going to have to aggressively moderate comments. Feel free to comment, just don't take comment rejections personally.

Note II: For reference, this post is mostly about Audrey Roy and some about the job offering I got at PyCon 2010.

Eating my own Dog Food

For several years now I've hosted this blog here on blogspot/blogger. Its been both a good and bad experience. For writing out simple posts it has made things pretty easy. However, if I try to post code examples I've got to deal with the various quirks of the blog engine. How it escapes special characters and that you can't easily do color colorization has been really annoying. Yes, I know you can do some hoop jumping to make this work, but I decided a long time ago that if I had to do that then I would host my own blog.

Speaking of which, a few months back I got called out for not eating my own dog food. Yup, as a Python developer shouldn't I use something Python powered? I currently do Django professionally so those are in my tool chest so this should be trivial. Heck I also do some serious Pinax work so why not that?

Whatever I put it under, it would be a nice move. I would be able to format and control my blog to a much better degree. I could easily supply code examples. I could use the hosting to demonstrate pet projects or launch some of the things I've wanted to try for some time.

So which blog to use? Roll my own?

Heck no.

I've got a full-time job, I teach 10+ hours a week, and my consulting efforts eat up a chunk of my free time. So rather than use my energy to reinvent the wheel, I would rather rely on the hard work and labor of others.

With that in mind, I really, really like Django-Mingus. Out of the box it does everything that I want and is a breeze to get up and running. It has a large, active community and it even uses a project that has my name attached, django-wysiwyg (although Chris Adams did most of the work).

Some might ask the good questions as to why I'm not using Pinax for my new blog. In essence, I wanted to do something in the wild that wasn't Pinax powered and my concept projects all use Pinax. So don't worry, I'll be doing Pinax work for as long as I can foresee.

So I've begun working on it during the Blizzard of 2010. I'll have it up today unless we lose power or Internet.

Register for Pycon 2010 already!

Update: I registered for Pycon at the early bird price but did not pay yet. Fortunately, the Pycon site lets you hold the price at the lower amount. Which means later this month when I get paid for some work I did back in the autumn I'll be able to pay for my registration at the early bird price!

The Pycon folks want early registrations because it helps them plan out resources and staff needs, not to mention the visceral thrill of watching attendance numbers go upwards. So help them out and register.

If it helps, I'll be presenting. Twice. I'll be giving A Long Pinax Tutorial with James Tauber. And I'll also be giving A Short Pinax Tutorial (also with James Tauber) during the regular conference.

For once I'm not planning to fill up on tutorials myself. I'll be too keyed up over my own presentations. So I just plan to take James Bennett's Django in Depth Tutorial.

I'll be there for all four days of the sprints. Of course, I'll be focusing on Pinax and Django material.

Of course I'm hoping that NASA has a major presence at Pycon this year. Python related technologies really seemed to take off this year for the agency, both in usage and publicity. Maybe we could have a space themed party or something?

Finally, I'm hoping to get another Capoeira Roda off the ground. We did Capoeira at DjangoCon and it was a blast. Any Atlanta folks want to see if we can get a local school to give us guidance and instruction?

New Year's Python meme

Tarek Ziade blogged this first. I'm just following the herd cause thats what a lone wolf does...

1. What's the coolest Python application, framework, or library you have discovered in 2009?

Django and Pinax. Technically I discovered those in 2006 and 2008 respectively, but it wasn't until 2009 that I got to really dig in. Django was really a blast from the outset of 2009, but it was about five lines of code that made me realize this was the framework to follow. Pinax is like a magical function decorator for Django, what more can I say?

Sphinx rocks too. I don't use it enough!

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2009?

Thanks to James Tauber I really got into JQuery. Thanks to Brian Rosner I really got into Git as a DVCS. Yeah, I know YUI and HG are part of things too, but my dark secret is that part of why I really dig JQuery and Git so much is the guys who got me started on those tools.

3. What's the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2009? What did you do?

Its a toss-up between Django Uni-Form and Pinax.

Django Uni-Form is my first successful open source project and about 75% of the code is mine, plus all the documentation and most of the marketing. Speaking of which, every NASA Django project (except for one) uses Django Uni-Form. Its in use by Discovery Channel, PBS, Washington Post, Washington Times, Richmond Times, and more. Of course, it wouldn't be anywhere near the success it is without the contributions of nearly a dozen people.

For Pinax I haven't done as much of the code as I wanted in 2009. Personal life issues swallowed up a lot of my time and energy, but I certainly evangelized and documented and taught it nearly every day. Pinax is not just me, its James Tauber, Brian Rosner, Jannis Leidal, and the rest of the Pinax and Django communities.

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2009?

Twitter. Certainly there are blogs I really enjoy following, but twitter is where it was at in 2009 for me. I read every blog it seems on Planet Python and Django, but my favorites include (in alphabetical order) Alex Gaynor, Chris McDonough, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Jesse Noller, and Tarek Ziade.

5. What are the top three things you want to learn in 2010?

Driving cars.

How to cook again.

Much more Capoeira.

Something really nifty in Python I don't know yet.

How to count to three.

Recap of 2009

This has been an interesting year. Incredible life changes have meant I've gone between screaming excitement to the doldrums of depression.

The good:

• Made an amazing number of new friends this year. In alphabetical order I can think of Alex, Barbara, Brian, Chris, Eric, Jacob, James, Jannis, Jeff, Jesse, Mike, Niall, Rich, Shawn, Steve, Zain and others I'm certainly forgetting to my undying shame. Thanks for your support and also thanks for opening my eyes to what the world can be really like!
  

• I went to the West Coast for the first time! In California I visited friends in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and San Jose. In Oregon I visited Portland. The fun and food was amazing. California was vacation, Oregon was work.

• Got involved in the Python, Django, and Pinax communities, reviewed talks for Pycon, became a Pinax core developer, started up NOVA-Django, started up the still nascent Django Education Foundation.

• Worked another year in Python related technologies.
  

• Tested for my third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Worked my Muay Thai. Got better at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Learned a little Capoeria.
  

• Almost up to 6 years without a broken bone!!!
  

• Stayed with NASA, for five years total now. Saw good people hired like Chris Adams and Tom Rando. My team set up a collaboration space. Launched a big internal Pinax powered application called SMD Spacebook and am helping on a major outreach application.

• Began my new side consulting efforts which will be mostly educational based. I like teaching anything, from martial arts to technology! Worked on a course for Holdenweb, and am teaching a long tutorial at Pycon!
  

• Reconnected with some old High School and Middle School friends. Am able to give one of them some business.
  

• My son turned 18.
  

• Grew a goatee.
  

• Kept teaching martial arts.

• Got a new road bike.
  

The bad:

• My marriage of 12+ years fell apart. I've lived in a lot of places since, but none of them my own.
  

• Participated in a well done project that lost out to a mediocre project that won because of resource attrition and refusal of customer to effectively market the effort.
  

• Didn't push hard enough to prep my house for sale until December. Going into more debt to finance the work.

• Didn't really practice much Eskrima all year.

• Lost a cat named Ao-Chan to kidney disease on Obama's Inauguration day. She was an aloof, regal, agile beauty who deigned to give us lots of love and affection.

Pycon talks and tutorials

At the Pycon in February 2010 myself and James Tauber will be presenting both a half-day tutorial on Pinax and a 30 minute Pinax tutorial. I'm delighted, honored, and admittedly a bit scared. Not scared enough that I won't be able to function, but scared enough to stay edgy. I've given talks and presentations before, but never before such a group of people that I respect and admire. The short tutorial I've done, although it is changing (and for the better). The long tutorial will be a lot of work, but we've got four months to finish our preparations.

Besides our Pinax stuff, there will be a lot of really incredible material at this conference. In fact, the times I will be working at this conference, I fear something will be scheduled that will be the talk of a lifetime. Indeed, there were a few times I hoped our Pinax proposals would be discarded because so many of the Pycon proposals were just unbelievably awesome.

On that note, I want to thank the other members of the pycon-pc group who contributed their hard work and time to figuring out which talks would be presented. Dozens of people reviewed the presented material using the Pycon website (note: these reviews will be made accessible to the authors of the proposed talks). By my unscientific count at least 2 dozen participated in the IRC meetings to determine who made the final list.

Quick Pycon Talk workflow

1. Talks reviewed on pycon site. Talks with at least one champion got moved to next stage. Talks without champions but no negative votes also got moved to next stage.
2. IRC discussions on each talk. Champions argued for the talks. If champion not available on IRC someone else would champion the talk. Brandon Rhodes and Doug Hellmann did a fantastic job as substitute champions. Yay/Nay votes then counted for simple majority.
3. When we had too many talks we used a Pycon Thunderdome method of whittling things down. Three-to-five talks of similiar bent were listed together then each person named the ones they wanted to keep. The ones with least votes were removed.
   

Some serious stars in the process were: Jesse Noller who busted serious hiney as chairman, Doug Napoleone provided incredibly responsive technical support for the site, plus Doug Hellmann and Brandon Rhodes for amazing levels of participation. So many others I respect were there in the web reviews or IRC that it was like a python geek fanboy's fantasy. What was also wonderful was how the reviewers would vote for, and often champion, for things that competed with their own pet project. This sense of keeping alive friendly competition was wonderful and demonstrated the solidarity of the Python community.

Some of us had talks in the system. We all left the meetings during those times. If a talk didn't make it through, there were no hard feelings. We just crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Some people who participated quite a lot had their talks canned, so favorites certainly were not played.

Unfortunately, some talks did not make the cut that I think would have been outstanding contributions. There were times I felt real disappointment when something did not make it through. Unfortunately, as much as I believe the people in the pycon-pc meetings should follow my every whim, they do not.

Some were suggested to be resubmitted as tutorials. Any talk that did not make it through should be submitted as a poster session. Heck, if your talk got refused you can always present it in the open hallway track!

27 more posts to go!

Update: Doug Napoleone corrected me in that we only make the reviews public to the specific talk authors.

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.

I want to give a class or talk at Pycon 2010

For Pycon 2010, classes/tutorials would be pretty easy are easy to cook up. I can think of two I can do, right after each other:

• Django fundamentals
• Pinax fundamentals

The first class gets you started with Django core bits and pieces. The second would show you Pinax and what things you can do with it.

The problem is that I'm not sure what to do when it comes to talks. Current ideas:

• A reprise of our upcoming Pinax tutorial at DjangoCon
  
• How to suffer through SOAP web services using Python even though REST is so much better (I might be too bitter for this one).
  
• Why I like stupid template languages (expanding on a tangent of this article).
• Lets move widgets into HTML templates and out of python code! Modern JavaScript libraries makes this easy!
  
• Using JQuery + Django to make 508/WAC compliant AJAX applications

Thoughts? Suggestions?

NOVA-DUG August 19th summary

People were already there at 7:24 pm when I showed up at the Nature Conservatory lobby. They kept filtering in until 8 pm. We had another three new people show up - and all the regulars. I want to thank everyone who came, and Eric Coffman for hosting us yet again.

Some notes:

• We introduced ourselves several times. How does one handle this when each person showing up is awesome and you want everyone to know each other throughout the meet up?
• I did my two stock Django presentations. I need to not only touch them up and extend them, but practice them more. Thanks to the next bullet I was a bit flustered when I presented.
  
• Yup, I was star struck by the presence of Steve Holden. Its funny how I can easily deal with large numbers of people but my fan boy nature screws me over when someone like a python rock star enters the room. Steve was down-to-earth though, and did an ad-hoc presentation on testing that impressed the heck out of me.
• If Steve flusters me, what happens if I have to ever have to present with Guido in the room?!? I am Guido's biggest fan...
  
• As a group, we talked about testing, wonders of django, pitfalls of django, virtualenv, and many other things. I think one presentation a night and more general talking might be good.
• Johnny Dobbins of Media General showed up. They are in the midst of converting many newspaper and media sites to Django/Pinax from various other systems. He said once they converted everything over they would be releasing some of their code as open source.
• Afterwards we sat outside and had drinks. We talked the state of python in the DC community and what could be done to enhance it. More on that to come!

What comes next:

• Meet on August 30th for a Northern Virginia day of coding Pinax!
  
• Meet two weeks from today on September 2, 2009 at the Nature Conservancy.

NOVA-DUG meeting notice for August 19th

Wednesday, August 19th, we are planning to get together from 7:30-9:00
pm at the Nature Conservatory building in Arlington, VA.

Location
The Nature Conservancy
4245 North Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22203

Agenda

• Meet and greet!
• PHP-to-Django by Eric Hoffman
• Django-Haystack part II by Daniel Greenfeld
• Plan the Django weekend get together
• Show and Tell

NOVA-DUG scheduling

I need to post about NOVA-DUG more frequently, no?

NOVA-DUG is postponed until next week (August 19th). I'm working with Eric Houghman of the Nature Conservancy to work out a formal long-term calendar. More this evening.

NOVA-DUG April 29th summary

For the second meeting there were four attendees besides myself. Again it rained, three people from last week were out of town, and my co-leader was at home tending to an injured spouse, so that knocked down our numbers. Yet I'm fine with that, as I realize it can take time for these groups to grow. Attendees (first name only for now - I will update if attendees contact me and request their names/jobs):

• Andrew
  
• Cory
  
• Matt
  
• Ross
• Danny (me!)

We went over the reasons behind founding the group and had everyone meet each other. Then we discussed the DC Branch of the Euro DjangoCon Sprint. I've summarized it here at my DC branch of the Euro DjangoCon Sprint Presentation. One thing I tried to make clear about our upcoming local area sprint is that we want it to be very inclusive. If you go, we'll try to give you as much guidance as you need. :)

After that I presented my first draft of my testing in Django presentation. Yeah, I've gone a bit mad with Google Presentation recently. Some day I wouldn't mind making this into an actual conference presentation, but it needs more work and experience from yours truly. The guys asked some good questions, and made some excellent observations that will go into future changes of this effort.

Then we went over in detail various bits that individuals are working on. I think Cory might be a good resource for Django scaling issues, and is also into security. Matt is working on a custom CMS tool for his job that sounds pretty interesting. Ross is the guy behind DC Tech Events. I got asked questions about Pinax.

There was more. Lots more. I probably need to talk less and let things go of their own accord. :P

Sweet spots of Plone

Yes, I am posting this with Django and Pinax tags because I think my Django and Pinax friends can learn from the lessons of Plone.

I'm admittedly more interested in doing Django these days yet I keep myself firmly aware of the things for which I think Plone (and its components and relatives) is unsurpassed in the Python framework world. Arguing these things to Djangonauts is interesting, because so many times they just reject things out of hand (just like certain Zope zealots I know). And I think that is to their loss. When you hit Plone's sweet spot, things get interesting.

Standards
I've ranted about this before. In essence Plone follows a subset of the Dublin core. Any database object in Plone has certain fields you can rely on in searches, views, and business logic. You don't have to introspect the objects to find these stock fields. Until I went back to entirely developer defined models with Django, I forgot just how much I had taken this for granted.

Workflow
Years ago some madman integrated DCWorkFlow into Plone. You can build custom workflows either in script or via the UI. The scripts and interface to use it has been unpleasant until recently, but then name a workflow engine capable of handling complicated workflows that is fun/easy to use? Thanks to Martin Aspelli his product called collective.wtf, Plone workflow management has become much, much easier. As far as I know, nothing in Django (or TurboGears or Rails) compares except maybe GoFlow, and I don't speak French.

Object Oriented Database
I like the Django ORM. I like SqlAlchemy. Until I run into the edges of the fact that they are modeling table records as objects. Object Relational Impedance Mismatch anyone? Ouch the pain! I do recognize that relational databases are very useful and powerful, but sometimes I wish things were different. One day, when I'm indepedantly wealthy and own my own private tropical island I plan to get the Django ORM running with the ZODB.

ACLs
Groups and Users permissions in Plone are implemented really well. Object oriented databases handle hierarchies and references very well, so the whole parent-child ownership thing is done easily. This is critical in CMS work - ownership and control. Other frameworks have this built-in, but it is not automatically attached to each content object that you create. You get very used to it being magically done for you in Plone.

Finger method of judging graphic design

Katie Cunningham mentioned this in her blog post today. Since I was asked what that was meant by several people I decided to write it up so you can see one of my rants.

The method is simple:

• Put your design on a screen.
• Your hand goes on the screen with fingers horizontal. Ignore the thumb.
  
• Count how many fingers it takes from the top of the screen to content. If you run out of fingers on one hand that means your wonderful design is going to force users to scroll to content. Maybe not on your huge desktop monitor, but on the sort of desktop monitor or laptop that has become ubiquitous, absolutely!
• I have tiny hands for a guy. So for you people with big hands, try it with two or three fingers.
  

Now lets take a look at how the Python community matches up to my finger method.

• http://python.org is just one of my fingers! Python.org FTW!
• http://djangoproject.org is two of my fingers! Good job Django!
• http://plone.org has a new and improved site that is two to three of my fingers, depending on the location. Plone does good!
• http://www.turbogears.org jumps between three and four fingers. Acceptable.
• http://code.google.com is two and a half fingers to content on project pages. Definately workable!
• https://github.com gets it with three fingers.
• http://pinaxproject.com is over four fingers to get to content? Boo!
  
• http://code.pinaxproject.com makes up for the parent site with two fingers to get to content.

So the Python community does pretty well on average. So does Facebook, Twitter, and the other good social networking sites. Now think about the sites that never went anywhere and how my finger method applies.

How about some some abject failures from outside the python community?

• CSS Zen Garden is lovely. And yet the designs are often unworkable to anyone outside of a group of graphic designers looking to hand each other design awards. You get designs that take ten (10) fingers before you get to content. WTF?
• http://www.apple.com/mac fails at over four fingers.
  
• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/help-how-to.aspx goes over four fingers and includes my thumb.
• http://www.adobe.com is as bad as the stuff on CSS Zen Garden.
  

Is this scientific? Heck no. Yet it is a quick and cheap gauge as to why you rarely get repeat visits to your site or why they only visit your download pages.