Omaha Python Users GroupIn case anyone is wondering, we are still alive. We had a very well attended meeting at the undisclosed Google office in a neighboring, not to be named state. Thanks to all the guys who hosted!
Details on the March meeting coming soon.
March 14, 2012
December 19, 2011
Omaha Python User Group Meeting December, 2011
Meeting is canceled for Christmas. See you next month.
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November 22, 2011
Omaha Python Users Group Meeting, Nov 21, 2011
Tonight’s Meeting Topics:
- Django
- Django and RESTful interfaces via Piston and XML-RPC
- Message Queuing – specifically RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ and STOMP and the 5 primary usage patterns. And integrating MQs in Django with Celery.
- We also had a “follow me” presentation on getting started with Selenium2‘s webdriver. The following are my notes on the presentation:
-- Selenium2 --
Selenium RC vs Webdriver -
Selenium - http://seleniumhq.org/
- http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.html
Why - http://seleniumhq.org/docs/appendix_migrating_from_rc_to_webdriver.html
Firefox, Chrome, Ie, iOS, Android, Opera
-- Setting up an environment --
virtualenv --no-site-packages Se-Pres(entation)
cd Se-Pres
source bin/activate
easy_install selenium
Now fire up an interpreter:
python
from selenium import webdriver
b = webdriver.Firefox()
b.get('http://www.google.com/')
b.page_source
dir(b)
b.name
b.get_cookies() (a list of dicts, each containing a cookie and support info)
b.current_url
>>> b.find_element_by_name('q')
<selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement object at 0x874b22c>
>>> sbx = b.find_element_by_name('q')
>>> sbx.send_keys('omaha python')
>>> sbx.submit()
>>> b.title
u'omaha python - Google Search'
b.find_element_by_name('foo')
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException
-- Other Helpful things --
unittest - http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html#
nose - http://readthedocs.org/docs/nose/en/latest/
nose-testconfig - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/nose-testconfig/
The meeting concluded about 9pm when the venue closed but we continued with a 15 minute parking lot track that included references to Code Complete and general development concepts. Great Meeting! and everyone is looking forward to the next.
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July 18, 2011
June 20, 2011
Omaha Python Users Group Meeting, June 20, 2011
Tonight’s Meeting:
Joe talked about the 2 semester course he attended at Iowa Western on Linux Engineering.
Steve talked about Code Like a Pythonista, by David Goodger. He thinks it is a great resource. I agree with him. (So much I did a presentation on David’s material back in 2008). Steve also liked the Python Challenge. He has made it though the first 5 or 6 so far and hopes to make it all the way through.
Joe brought up the fact that Full Circle Magazine – has released two specific Python issues, Issue 1 and Issue 2.
Jeff brought a Code editor that he likes, Editra. It is a very nice, rapidly advancing development environment. If you are in the market you should take a look if Komodo or PyCharm are turning your head.
A non-python, learn how to program environment is MIT’s Scratch. Joe likes Snake Wrangling for Kids.
April 18, 2011
Omaha Python Users Group Meeting, April 18, 2011
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.
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Omaha Python Users Group Meeting, March 21, 2011
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
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February 21, 2011
Omaha Python Users Group Meeting, Feb 21, 2011
The users group is meeting tonight at Lansky’s as normal.
- Review Steve’s Survey for the group.
- Here is our survey, created at the meeting. We will be emailing it to the group. Please participate by taking the survey, your thoughts and comments are important.
- We plugged the lunch meet-up with the focus on working together building interesting python apps championed by Steve
More details to follow.
Other Notes: We updated wordpress so if you notice any glitches please let us know.
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January 21, 2011
Omaha Python Meeting, Feb 17, 2011
We met at Lansky’s @ 7pm.
Meeting notes to be added.
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November 15, 2010
November 15, 2010 Meeting Notes
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!
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