Omaha Python Users Group

Location - Gordmans Office Building in Aksarben thanks to Aaron Keck.

Meeting starts at 6pm, Wednesday, 1/21/15

Parking and entry details:

The building is the northwest corner of 67th and Frances and the Gordmans entrance is next to the “g” sign, about midway along the East side of the building. There’s parking directly out front, but it sometimes fills up in the evenings. The garage around back is open to the public after 5:30 or 6 as well.

The building doors lock at 5, so Aaron will be standing by to badge people in starting around 5:45. If you’re running late, or early, just shoot him or the list an email.

We had a great meeting which included a raffle of the awesome Python book, Learning Python 4th Edition.  Thanks to O’Reilly Publishing.

Further topics included, in no particular order:

• Tox – a generic virtualenv management and test command line tool
• Bitbucket – for private remote repositories
• Virtualenvwrapper - a set of extensions to Ian Bicking’s virtualenv tool.
• Django Data Migrations in 1.7
• Moving from Django 1.2 to 1.7.
• python-social-auth – an easy to setup social authentication/registration mechanism with support for several frameworks and auth providers.
• yamjam – a multi-project, shared, yaml based configuration system.
• dhp – A collection of handy modules, almost guaranteed to get you into trouble.
• dennis python package – a set of utilities for working with PO files to ease development and improve quality.

Merry Christmas to all!

Tonight’s Meeting:

Tonight’s meeting:

Steve talked about the book he just read, “Start Small, Stay Small“.  The premise is fast is good.   Jeff talked about the book he was reading, “Programming Collective Intelligence”.  Conversations then turned to SQL, and good resources.   It was pointed out there are a number of really good references on the web and that it is probably best to just do it, keeping in mind that every table needs a primary key and to never depend on the user to give you information that you would use as part of the primary key without checking.

Jeff was motivated by the PyCon video, “Python and Robots: Teaching programming in High School“.  He actually went out and got an S2 and Fluke board and is now actively teaching his kids how to program robots in Python.

More talk about the results from the survey were discussed.  Focusing on “events” and moving away from traditional “user group” seemed to be popular and something we want to move forward and try.

Next “Event” is in May — See you then.

Talked about pycon videos on blip, some of the videos mentioned were:

Results from Surveys discussions –

• More timely  notifications for the meetings.  A 2week/1week pattern and a 1week pattern were discussed.
• Coding by example is one of the most requested topics.  However, we need steady access to a projector to make that work.
• Vary content over the meeting from Beginner to Advanced
• Win lottery and split proceeds with others interested in Python, then they can retire and have time to attend.
• Noticed lots of Python envy from perl coders.  (Can’t we all just get along?)
• Lansky’s has as many benefits as negatives.  We are game for any venue with more pluses — Looking for ideas and offers.
• Usage (most to least): WEB, SysAdmin, DataBase, Desktop, Other, Games, CompSci, Hobby, Academic, Mobile, Robotics, Scientific
  • Other includes: rapid security tool dev
• how many times have you attended: 46% – Never, 30% 1-10, 15% 24, 8% – >24

We met at Lansky’s @ 7pm.

Meeting notes to be added.

We continued our focus on testing tonight looking at TDD, BDD, unittest, nose, freshen and lettuce.  BDD is TDD with a little different syntax aiming to make building the tests more natural.  Freshen and lettuce were inspired by a Rails project call Cucumber, which has some good documents on how BDD works.

We discussed the possibility of starting a lunch meet-up to sharpen our skills by building a fun project.  From the topics of the night Jeff suggested creating Conway’s Game of Life and have it tweet updates.  Please chime in on the email list if you are interested or have suggestions.

A few of the projects discussed were:

• how to create a lot of tweets and schedule them to be sent at certain times or intervals.
• how to sync Facebook and Twitter updates
• cURL - command line tool to transfer data with url syntax

I failed to take notes so please add to the comments for what I forgot!

The next meeting will be tonight, September 20th @ 7 pm.  The meeting will be our first attempt at a virtual meeting.  Please join in with us @ DimDim https://my.dimdim.com/pythonomaha

Tonights topic will be Testing in Python and specifically unit testing in Python.  If everything goes well, we’ll all learn new things about both.

Can’t wait to see you there!