DC Sprints location is changed!

Cosi seemed great. Decent food, internet, pleasant seating.

Except they blocked the really useful ports. SSH, Git, you name it.

So we have switched to the Arlington Central Library, just two blocks away.

http://www.arlingtonva.us/departments/Libraries/about/LibrariesAboutCentral.aspx

DC sprints location is official!

All the details can be had by following this link:

http://groups.google.com/group/NOVA-DUG/web/dc-branch-of-the-eurodjangocon-09-sprints

I'm rather excited by this event. It is the first in what I hope becomes a DC tradition of doing 'local mirrors' of python conference sprints with involvement from all the area python groups. This way, more people get to contribute, our community works better together, and the networking opportunities can abound.

On the other hand, I wish I had found more time to organize this event. And that I had found a good location inside of Washington, DC. I suspect this first effort will have a low turnout, but I won't mind being pleasantly surprised. ;)

My hope is that this year alone we might be able to exploit similar efforts in 2009 for the Euro Pycon, DjangoCon, and Plone Conferences.

With that in mind, I'm going to insist that these local mirror sprints be completely framework and tool neutral. For starters, under the hood, aren't we all just doing python? Plus, I'm of the very firm belief that any major system with initiative has things to teach, be it lessons learned or neat ideas. For example, Jacob Kaplan-Moss uses zc.buildout, which grew out of the Zope community. And while we might not have the ability to listen in on actual conference sessions, think about the chances we'll get to look at each other's tools and methods.

NOVA-DUG April 15th summary

Forour first meeting there was seven people and several cancellations. Not bad for short notice and rain. Attendees (first name only for now - I will update if attendees contact me and request their names/jobs):

• Eric (possibly providing meeting space!)
  
• Sal
  
• Jack
• James
• Cory
• Katie
  
• Danny (me!)

There was talk of Django projects still under development, with one public effort exposed by Sal:

• https://www.concentrateme.com Django powered search analytics tool.

We explained Pinax to Sal. In return South was mentioned by Sal as a functional Django migration tool (thanks to everyone who pointed me at the right place). Corey talked about the limitations of the Django ORM compared to SQL Alchemy. I think we agreed to disagree about templates. Everyone griped about the quality of the Panera coffee shop's wireless network.

Upcoming planned events:

• EuroDjangoCon US-DC area sprint (May 7-8)
• Django Dash get-together (May 30-31)

We chatted about a bi-weekly schedule. We may have to do some juggling to avoid falling on the same weeks as ZPUG-DC or Django District.

Future format ideas include user presentations, voting on the open source django presentation of the week, and planned attacks on user problems.

I missed a class taught by Lennert Regebro?

http://regebro.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/what-is-wrong-with-the-course/

It was way back in January. I never heard of it! Did they not advertise?

I doubt I would have gone because at 1500 GBP (about $2900) plus travel expenses (about another $1000) for three days it was way too much to either pay myself or get NASA to fund. Especially since the Plone boot camp is $500 for five days and was held locally.

Still, if I had known, I would have contacted him and begged for a more affordable class held in the Washington, DC area. I bet I could convince ZPUG-DC to host him and Jorgen, I'm sure of it. It would be worth it because Lennert is a really great guy and maybe if I had hung out with him more at Pycon I would be a better plonista today.

Later today if I get a chance I will email him and see what can be done.

Sprint!

I'm at Panera's in Friendship Heights, Maryland (near Chevy Chase I think) working in a Plone sprint with ZPUG-DC. And I'm working on the Plone Software Center with other nutty Plonistas.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for:

• My wife and son
• My students
• Everyone who helped out when my bike got stolen
• Only two minor injuries this year
• My friends
• My family
• My crazy coworkers
• The trip to Italy
• My NASA customer
• Python
• The Plone and Zope communities
• Good training partners
• Good teachers

ZPUG-DC Report 2007/11/07

Got a good presentation on repose.zope2 by Chris McConnough, which lets you deploy easily in virtualenv with just a few commands. Paste is used a lot, of course. This repose thing lets you use WSGI, which means you can use middleware of choice. Chris shared evalerrer with us, which promises to be a great middleware for any developer.

I like this sort of development because the easier it is to install independent versions of things with variations quickly and without a lot of fuss. So you can try new things, discover you don't like them, and try something else. And you don't need to know a lot to make this work.

Sure, knowing the stuff about how it works is important, but this serves as a nice tool for understanding why. It lowers the barrier for entry, which in the Zope (and Plone) world is important.

Afterwards had great discussions with ZPUG at some bar in DC. Talked to Paul Everitt, Matt Bowen, Chris McConnough, Kapil, and some others. I was very sleepy so I was not as sharp as I can be, but I learned some interesting things.

Kapil agreed with a growing suspicion I have about Grok. I'll post about that in the future. Its mostly positive but it does have a couple critiques.

Kapil reinforced my feelings about Pylons vs Django. Another item for a future post.