I regret now that I did not make it over to Manchester, looks like I
missed some interesting talks.
I will try to be there next month.
Martin
On 18/02/2011 16:54, [email protected] wrote:
Hi All,
Please find below meeting notes from yesterday's meeting. It was
great to see you all and I'm looking forward to next month's coding
meetup. You can find these notes and past notes at http://pynw.org.uk ...
The Python Northwest meeting on Thursday 17th February was a talks
meeting held at MadLab which saw us returned to the top floor loft
space. There were 11 attendees and it was great to see a mix of
familiar and new faces.
Talks:
* Safe Hammad: Python Idioms. Safe got the ball rolling with a review
of some of the code constructs which distinguish ordinary Python code
from good Python code and can help make your code clear, concise,
performant and "Pythonic". Examples included how to build strings in
linear rather then quadratic time, the use of the "in" keyword for
iteration and for testing membership, and "Easier to Ask for
Forgiveness than Permission" versus "Look Before You Leap".
* Chris Lyon: CouchDB. Chris walked us through the benefits of using
CouchDB versus traditional SQL databases. We saw how CouchDB was a
good fit for capturing sensor data with it's lack of structure and
intermittent bad values. We were shown how Javascript MapReduce
functions could be run via the "Futon" web tool to query that data and
pondered how these functions might be written in Python. We debated
the efficiency of MapReduce for massively distributed computing over
very large datasets versus smaller datasets.
* S Anand: Image Generation and Processing. Anand treated us to a
display of attractive and densly informative reports generated using
Python and SVG. The SVG was generated by injecting data into Tornado
templates and converted to PDF using wkhtmltopdf. We discussed how
the Tornado web server was very suitable for tasks constrained by IO
rather than CPU and debated the benefits and drawbacks of allowing
embedded Python code in a templating language.
Many thanks to all the speakers for their time and effort and to
MadLab for allowing us to use their space.
AOB:
Next month's meeting will be at 7pm on Thursday 17th March at MadLab
and will be a coding meetup. We discussed possible ideas for the
meetup and suggested we could post them to the list. Suggestions
included improving our understanding of the Python Core and trying our
hand at coding in Python 3.
After the talks we decamped to a local pub for a bit of geek talk.
Topics discussed included but were not limited to:
* The virtues of gevent, a library built on top of libevent.
* The use of Fabric as a generalised task execution environment and
not just a deployment tool.
* Django deployment.
* Good Python tutorial web sites and texts.
http://diveintopython.org/, http://diveintopython3.org/ and The Python
Cookbook were mentioned.
* Apache Tomcat and SpringFramework.
* The state of Computer Science education at the Manchester universities.
* And finally, a little bit of cell biochemistry!
Cheers,
Safe
Safe Hammad
http://safehammad.com
@safehammad
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