Hi all, I enjoyed last night's meeting and thought that all three talks were high-quality and informative. As I mentioned at the meeting, Tuesday (Feb 22nd) is the next meeting of Python Sheffield, from 19:00 - 21:00. We've got 18 people registered and the schedule is as follows:
Katie Fenn: PyGame lightning talk Safe Hammad: Introduction to Django Dave King: Django development tools lightning talk Python Sheffield is held at the GIST Lab, which is directly opposite Sheffield train station and behind the Showroom cinema. If you'd like to join us then please register for free at http://pysheff1102.eventbrite.com. More information on Python Sheffield can be found by following @pysheff on Twitter or the Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/python-sheffield Thanks, Daley Chetwynd On Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:54 +0000, "[email protected]" <[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 [1]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. [2]http://diveintopython.org/, [3]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 [4]http://safehammad.com @safehammad -- To post: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] Feeds: [5]http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west/feeds More options: [6]http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west References 1. http://pynw.org.uk/ 2. http://diveintopython.org/ 3. http://diveintopython3.org/ 4. http://safehammad.com/ 5. http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west/feeds 6. http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different... -- To post: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] Feeds: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west/feeds More options: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west
