Global Python Sprint Weekends

(a distributed gathering)

WHEN:

• May 10th (Sat) face-to-face meetings
• May 11th (Sun) online collaboration
  
• Jun 21st (Sat) face-to-face meetings
• Jun 22nd (Sun) online collaboration

Saturday is nominated as the day for Python usergroups to meet up in person.

Sunday is geared more towards an online collaboration day via IRC, where we
can take care of all the little things that got in our way of coding on
Saturday (like finalising/preparing/reviewing patches, updating tracker and
documentation, writing tests ;-).

WHERE:

At a Gathering of Your Local Usergroup

For User Groups that are planning on meeting up to collaborate, please reply
to this thread on the python-dev mailing list at python.org and let everyone
know your intentions!

In the #python-dev IRC Chatroom

As is commonly the case, #python-dev on irc.freenode.net will be the place
to be over the course of each sprint weekend; a large proportion of Python
developers with commit access will be present, increasing the amount of eyes
available to review and apply patches.

WHY:

To build on the successful sprint/bugfix weekends in the past, and the
sprinting efforts at PyCon 2008, let's collaborate remotely and tackle some
of those nasty bugs or cool features for pre-releases of Python 2.6 and/or
3.0. Or improve the documentation.

All contributors that submit code patches or documentation updates will
typically get listed in Misc/ACKS.txt; come September when the final release
of 2.6 and 3.0 come about, you'll be able to point at the tarball or .msi
and exclaim loudly "I helped build that!'', and actually back it up with
hard evidence ;-)

WHAT:

Not sure what to work on? For those that haven't the foggiest on what to
work on, the Python Bug Tracker is the best place to start. Create a login
account and start searching for issues that you'd be able to lend a hand with.

For those that have an idea on areas they'd like to sprint on and want to
look for other developers to rope in (or just to communicate plans in
advance), please also feel free to jump on this thread via the
python-dev mailing list and indicate your intentions.

Read more on the Python Bug Day wiki page, such as about the version
control repository.


We hope to see you there!

DFW Pythoneers, 2nd Sat: Topics We Covered

Here in Dallas we had our 2nd Saturday (April 12th) meeting at the Nerdbooks.com store. We covered a diverse set of topics, as follows:

• the Texas Python Community and regional conference planning
• the Pasta Theory of Software
• what is so bad about Potato Programming
• a New Edition of The Python Papers
  
• a survey of cool Twisted technologies, many not so well known
• Athena - a best-of-breed approach to developing interactive JavaScript (AJAX / Comet) applications
• Vertex - a better concept for a peer-to-peer technology
  
• Imaginary - simulation engine re role playing, interactive fiction, and multiplayer dungeons
• Mantissa - an application server over Axiom db, Nevow templating and Athena
  
• Axiom - an innovative database object relational mapper
  
• Nevow - template language, form processing and really cool STAN, a Pythonic DOM for XML
  
• talk and demo of the Google AppEngine
• The Decorator Module

Much of the time was on the Google AppEngine, the darling of the blogosphere at the moment. A couple of us managed to get accounts so we went through the demonstration site provided with the Google SDK, and create a trivial application at http://dfwpython.appspot.com. The AppEngine infrastructure allows one to grant development privileges to other people, so we opened this application up to experimentation by other user group members.

For more information about our group, check out our user group wiki.

-Jeff

pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, April, 9th, Announcement

The next meeting of pyCologne will take place

Wednesday, April, 9th
starting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pm
at Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)
University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, Germany

Agenda:

• Talk: Use of Python in Enterprises (Ralf Schönian)
  

At about 8.30 pm we will enjoy the evening in a nearby restaurant.

Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:
http://www.pycologne.de (Sorry, this page is in German only)

V GruPy-SP meeting in São Paulo - March, 24th

The GruPy-SP (São Paulo Python User Group) March meeting happened at Google's office in São Paulo. The meeting was attended by about 60 people and we had 5 talks. This was a very special meeting because we had talks from Guido, Alex Martelli, Collin Winter and Cary Hull (all by video conference).

Talks:

• Rodolpho Eckhardt - "PyCon 2008 Trip Report" - Rodolpho made a very nice report of his experience going to Chicago to attend PyCon 2008. It certainly made some of us think about going to PyCon 2009.



• Cary Hull - "Divmod's Axiom" - Cary Hull talked about the Axiom ORM, it was a fast talk introducing it features and benefits.



• Alex Martelli - "Callback design patterns" - Very good technical talk. Details about the use and implementation of Callbacks.



• Guido van Rossum - "Python 3000" - Probably the talk that everyone was waiting, It was the same talk that Guido made at PyCon 2008, he showed the main changes that will happen in Python 3000 and what to do to be prepared to change your code from Python 2.x to 3000.



• Collin Winter - "2to3" - Very good talk from Collin Winter about how the 2to3 conversion tool works, where it does and where it doesn't work.

The next meeting will be held on May. We will not have a meeting in April because of FISL (Free Software International Forum) that will happen on April 17th, 18th and 19th at Porto Alegre.

Thanks to everyone who attended, specially to Rodolpho who organized the meeting.

Omaha Python Users Group, April 2, Notes

We met at Rosken's Hall, Room 402 on UNO's campus courtesy of Burch. Thanks Burch!

• BeautifulSoup by Eli Criffield
• Tkinter and PMW by Chad Homan

Eli gave a great presentation on the basics of BeautifulSoup and used his sipie project and ipython to help demonstrate the power brew which is BeautifulSoup.

Chad gave a presentation about the advantages of Tkinter on platforms with limited resources. He also demonstrated Python MegaWidgets - PMW. PMW builds on Tkinter to provide things like tabs and notebook metaphors to UIs who use Tkinter.

For more information about our group and when we meet, please see our website.

IV GruPy-SP meeting in Santos - Feb, 22 and 23

The GruPy-SP (São Paulo Python User Group) February meeting was held at SENAI Santos. It was a two-day event, one day for talks and the other for the Python Bug Day.

First day - Feb, 22 - Talks

Luciano Ramalho and Pedro Werneck talked to approximately 140 students, professors and professionals at SENAI Santos.

Luciano talked about Python being used by big companies as a “secret weapon”, he showed some Python code including PyGame and Django examples and interactive sessions using the Python console.

Pedro showed some of the versatility of Python presenting a script that manipulates a device plugged in the computer parallel port, some web apps and a GUI application using Tkinter.

Most of the audience was not familiar to Python and this was their first contact with the language.

Second day - Feb, 23 - Python Bug Day

14 members of the GruPy-SP went to Santos to work on the Python Bug Day.

The sprint started at 10h00 led by Luciano Ramalho and Rodrigo Bernardo Pimentel (RBP). We listed the bugs that we thought we could fix and then started working in pairs. The sprint went until 16h00 and we fixed five bugs.

Thanks to everyone who attended, specially to Sandro Fernandes and Ricardo Guinody who organized this meeting.