Omaha Python Users Group, Dec 5, Notes

Burch has arranged for us to meet at Rosken's Hall on the University of Nebraska at Omaha's campus. Watch for more specific details to follow on the mail list and on the website.

Jeff gave a presentation/overview of functional programming in Python

Eli talked about:

• Google's MapReduce - a software framework implemented by Google to support parallel computations over large (greater than 100 terabyte) data sets on unreliable clusters of computers.
• HardOCP - Hadoop implements MapReduce, using the Hadoop Distributed File SystemHDFS) MapReduce divides applications into many small blocks of work.
• glusterfs - a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes.

Jeff gave a short presentation on anecdotes about optimizing Python code.

1. Premature speed optimizations are the root of all evil
2. Enhanced readability is an optimization
3. Follow pep8 and use structured code — you get an automatic speed up by just keeping your name spaces clean and local
4. Know where your code is spending it's time and optimize their first — when in doubt, optimize the inner loop first
5. Remove the dots - short circuit lookup intensive operations. i.e. _lstappend = lst.append
6. Check out shedskin — although it can compile entire programs, it is perhaps most useful at speeding up a targeted area of code. ShedSkin makes writing an extension module very simple — see "optimize the inner loop first"

We enjoyed some decent pizza and shop talk between talks.

The door prize, "Python in a Nutshell" was won by Burch. A big Thank You to O'Reilly for the door prizes at our meetings. Thanks to you to Marsee!