Python BarCamp April, 17th at Cologne, Germany organized by pyCologne

Design by Thomas Richter

Authors: Reimar Bauer, Thomas Lenarz

On April 17th, 2010, pyCologne, the Python-User-Group of Cologne, Germany, welcomed about 20 participants at the first German Python-BarCamp at the site of GFU Cyrus AG in Cologne.

GFU, a Cologne based IT training company (http://www.gfu.net/), provided a set of three conference rooms, their cafeteria, and an assembly hall, which built up a perfect venue for the barcamp.

O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.de/) sponsored selected Python-books, which were raffled in addition to a special Barcamp T-Shirt among the participants. The start of the event was awaited with eager anticipation since at a barcamp the participants themselves take care of the content. pyCologne took care of the organizational preparations.

After a warm welcome from Reimar Bauer and Muharem Hrnjadovic on behalf of pyCologne and a brief round of introductions, planning of the slots using the prepared Flipcharts started immediately. Planning just finished, the participants swarmed out to join the different sessions: PyPy, Plone, MoinMoin-2.0, Django, imap2xmpp und bildout. Couchdb, from frameworks to libraries, 3D-graphics programming, Midi as well as Python and Java found enthusiastic participants, following the scheme "presentations last as long as it takes or the next slot is about to start".

To get motivated again after the lunch break with pizza and drinks, Christopher Arndt invited the participants into the sunny assembly-hall for the lightning talks: speakers talk for five minutes max, the goal is to entertain. After four minutes the moderator signals that their is one minute left and breaks off the talk after five minutes unconditionally.

Topics were: Coworking Project Cologne, pyCologne@FrOSCon, PyPy, RPX für Plone und Twitter, Zotero, html2wiki, Web-Development Client vs. Server, scriptutil for fun and profit and Django OR-M im Backend.

Again keen for action, the afternoon started with further sessions. Easily noticed by the noise of the keyboards many of the new learned topics were transferred immediately to the internet. Using the hashtags #pybar and #pybarcamp everybody from inside and outside the camp could follow the event.

After the closing session and the group-photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/12317756@N08/4530807440/sizes/o/) it was time to say goodbye to GFU.

The participants enjoyed the rest of the evening at the restaurant "La Mäng" in a cosy atmosphere having food and drink and friendly conversation.

pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, April, 14th, Announcement

The next meeting of pyCologne will take place:

Wednesday, April, 14th
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:

• Organization of the Cologne PythonBarCamp taking place on April, 17th.
  Please refer to http://wiki.python-forum.de/PythonBarCamp
  

At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of
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, the web-links are in German only.)

Best Wishes
Thomas

P.S.: Due to spare-time issues on my side the regular announcements of our meetings will be taken over by another pyCologne-member. All the Best, Thomas

pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, October, 14th Notes

The Python User Group Cologne (pyCologne) met on October, 14th at the computer centre of the University of Cologne. The meeting was attended by 19 people. German speakers might want to refer to our wiki page which you can reach at moment only on http://wiki.python-forum.de/User Group Köln/

This time we had two talks about Google Wave. Many thanks to Alexander Benker and Andi Albrecht:

Overview of Google Wave (Alexander Benker)

Alexander gave a detailed overview of Google Wave. He presented the elements of Google Wave (Wave, Wavelet, Blip) as well as its architecture. Furthermore, he described Wave's extensibility using Robots and Gadgets and presented some examples among them a Robot for Syntax-Highlighting.

The full talk is available on Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/abenker/20091014-google-wave


Google Wave Robots in Python (Andi Albrecht)

Andi showed how to program robots for Wave using Python. As an example he presented a robot which sets the color of a certain letter sequence to red while typing a text.

• Robots run within Google's App Engine
• The Python API documentation can be found at: http://wave-robot-python-client.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pydocs/index.html

You can have a look at Andi's example robot watching the screencast.

Google Wave, Discussion

There developed a lively discussion and Q&A about Wave's technology and possible use-cases.

SetupTools vs. Distribute

Christopher Arndt encourages discussion about using SetupTools or Distribute.

The cause are recent blog-entries by Phillip J. "PJ" Eby:

http://dirtsimple.org/2009/10/clarification-or-two.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2009-October/013822.html

The minutes of the meeting in German language can be found here.

The next meeting will be held on, Wednesday, November, 11th.

Most of the participants enjoyed the rest of the evening in our usual italian restaurant having food, drinks and friendly conversation.

pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, October, 14th, Announcement

The next meeting of pyCologne will take place

Wednesday, October, 14th
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:

• Google Wave (Andi Albrecht, Florian Scheel)

At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.

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

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

The next meeting of pyCologne will take place

Wednesday, September, 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:

• Hacking and reverse engineering with Python (Stefan Pielicke)

• Development status of moin-1.9 (beta3++) (Reimar Bauer)

At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.

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

pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, August, 12th, Announcement

The next meeting of pyCologne will take place

Wednesday, August, 12th
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:

• How to automate and extend Windwows-Applications with pywin32 (Andreas Schreiber)

• MIDI-Programming using Python on Linux/ALSA (Christopher Arndt)

At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.

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