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EuroPython 2010: Registration, Call for Papers and Call for Volunteers

Planning for EuroPython 2010 is well underway. Both registration (Early Bird) and the talk submission system are open, and we need your help!

As well as the core conference itself there are tutorials before the conference, development sprints afterwards and Python Language Summit and a Python Software Foundation meeting (first one in Europe) during the conference. Confirmed speakers include Brett Cannon and Raymond Hettinger. We also have some exciting keynote speakers that have yet to be announced.

There is lots to do and we need your help! Ways you can help:

• Come to the conference! Seriously, register now.
• Join the EuroPython Improve Mailing List and introduce yourself
• Submit your talk, tutorial and sprint proposals
• If your company uses Python then they need to sponsor EuroPython. Hassle your boss today
• Publicise EuroPython in your community

EuroPython 2010 - 17th to 24th July 2010

EuroPython is a conference for the Python programming language community, including the Django, Zope and Plone communities. It is aimed at everyone in the Python community, of all skill levels, both users and programmers.

Last year's conference was the largest open source conference in the UK and one of the largest community organised software conferences in Europe.

This year EuroPython will be held from the 17th to 24th July in Birmingham, UK. It will include over 100 talks, tutorials, sprints and social events.

Registration

Registration is open now at: http://www.europython.eu/registration/

For the best registration rates, book as soon as you can! Early Bird rate will apply until 10th May.

Talks, Activities and Events

Do you have something you wish to present at EuroPython? You want to give a talk, run a tutorial or sprint?

• Go to http://www.europython.eu/talks/cfp/ for information and advice!
• Go to http://wiki.europython.eu/Sprints to plan a sprint!

Help Us Out

EuroPython is run by volunteers, like you! We could use a hand, and any contribution is welcome.

• Go to http://wiki.europython.eu/Helping to join us!
• Go to http://www.europython.eu/contact/ to contact us directly!

Sponsors

Sponsoring EuroPython is a unique opportunity to affiliate with this prestigious conference and to reach a large number of Python users from computing professionals to academics, from entrepreneurs to motivated and well-educated job seekers.

• http://www.europython.eu/sponsors/

Spread the Word

We are a community-run not-for-profit conference. Please help to spread the word by distributing this announcement to colleagues, project mailing lists, friends, your blog, Web site, and through your social networking connections. Take a look at our publicity resources:

• http://wiki.europython.eu/Publicity

General Information

For more information about the conference, please visit the official site: http://www.europython.eu/

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A Little Bit of Python: Episodes 5 and 6

Two more episodes of A Little Bit of Python have been posted. A Little Bit of Python is an occasional podcast on Python related topics with myself, Brett Cannon, Jesse Noller, Steve Holden and Andrew Kuchling.

Episode 5 is a round table discussion of some of the new things coming in Python 2.7. This includes a discussion of the changes coming to the logging module and distutils (with rambling side discussions at every point of course). Episode 6 is the first of a series of interviews I recorded at PyCon. This interview is with Van Lindberg, who lists amongst his achievements being the PyCon chair this year [1], being the PSF lawyer and a PSF member, and also the author of Intellectual Property and Open Source. In his spare time he works as an intellectual property lawyer. In the interview, recorded after PyCon 2010 had finished, we discuss how PyCon went, what we can look forward to in PyCon 2011 and a bit about his book and his work.

• Episode 5: A Little Bit of Python (mp3)
• Episode 5: A Little Bit of Python (m4a)
• Episode 6: A Little Bit of Python (mp3)
• Episode 6: A Little Bit of Python (m4a)

General links for the podcast feeds and a webpage with an embedded flash player:

• A Little Bit of Python mp3 rss feed
• A Little Bit of Python m4a rss feed
• Podcast homepage (currently redirecting to a temporary home)

If you have feedback, insults or suggestions for new topics you can email us on: all@bitofpython.com. We don't yet have the podcast listed on iTunes; we'll set that up once our permanent online home goes live.

We do have a twitter account, so for news on new episodes follow @bitofpython. A Little Bit of Python is also syndicated on Hacker Public Radio (although they're only up to episode two so far).

[1]	I previously stated, incorrectly, that Van had been the PyCon chair for the last three years. Van was the PyCon chair in 2010 and in 2008-2009 was the sponsorship coordinator. David Goodger was PyCon chair in 2008-2009.

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A Little Bit of Python Episode 4: A Pre-PyCon Special

A Little Bit of Python is an occasional podcast on Python related topics with myself, Brett Cannon, Jesse Noller, Steve Holden and Andrew Kuchling.

The website is in progress and apparently nearly ready, thanks to Jesse and various other people who we will thank as soon as it is done. In the meantime, episode 4 is out. PyCon 2010 is only ten days away and it is the highlight of the year for many of us in the Python community. This episode is a pre-PyCon special where we discuss some of the things that will be happening at the conference and how to get the best out of it.

• Episode 4: A Little Bit of Python (mp3)
• Episode 4: A Little Bit of Python (m4a)

General links for the podcast feeds and a webpage with an embedded flash player:

• A Little Bit of Python mp3 rss feed
• A Little Bit of Python m4a rss feed
• Podcast homepage (currently redirecting to a temporary home)

If you have feedback, insults or suggestions for new topics you can email us on: all@bitofpython.com. We don't yet have the podcast listed on iTunes; we'll set that up once our permanent online home goes live.

We do have a twitter account, so for news on new episodes follow @bitofpython. A Little Bit of Python is also syndicated on Hacker Public Radio (although they've only released episode one so far).

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A Little Bit of Python Episode 3

A Little Bit of Python is an occasional podcast on Python related topics with myself, Brett Cannon, Jesse Noller, Steve Holden and Andrew Kuchling. We still don't have our own website although that is due to land any day now. Meanwhile episode 3 has just gone live. The topics covered include the Python transition to using Mercurial, the release of the first alphas of Python 2.7 and the furore caused by comments on the Python Package Index.

• Episode 3: A Little Bit of Python (mp3)
• Episode 3: A Little Bit of Python (m4a)

General links for the podcast feeds and a webpage with an embedded flash player:

• A Little Bit of Python mp3 rss feed
• A Little Bit of Python m4a rss feed
• Temporary webpage home for A Little Bit of Python

If you have feedback, insults or suggestions for new topics you can email us on: all@bitofpython.com.

We don't yet have the podcast listed on iTunes; we'll set that up as soon as we have a permanent home for the podcast.

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New Year's Python Meme

This is the blog entry I had nearly finished when I started messing around with Mock on Saturday. Started by Tarek Ziade, five short questions on you and Python in 2009 (or in this case me and Python)...

1. What's the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2009?

   One of the biggest things that happened in my life in 2009 was leaving Resolver Systems to become a freelance developer working for a German firm Comsulting.de. I'm still working with IronPython, but now developing web applications with Django on the server and using IronPython in Silverlight on the client. It's great fun and although I'd used both Silverlight and Django a bit previously I'm now using working with them full time.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2009?

   At Resolver Systems we all took responsibility for architectural decisions. It was a great team to be part of and a great way to work. In my current project I've largely been responsible for building the application myself, although my colleague who is an excellent designer has recently been able to join me in the coding. That means I've made the architectural decisions for the application. This has stretched me and structuring large applications is something I want to explore more.

3. What's the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2009? What did you do?

   Well, in 2009 I became a Python core-developer and the maintainer of unittest. The work I've done on unittest is definitely the most valuable contribution to open-source in 2009. That reminds me, there are a bunch of open tickets with my name on that I really ought to be looking at instead of doing this...

   Other than that I worked on a bunch of little projects of my own.

   • Try Python

     This is probably the project I'm most proud of: a Python interpreter and tutorial that runs in the browser with Silverlight. As Silverlight comes from Microsoft, and last I heard was installed on around 30% of the world's browsers, Try Python isn't a runaway success but I think it is very cool. Moonlight is now out, so in theory the site could work on Linux machines - but there is an issue with the version of IronPython I use. Hopefully I'll get around to updating the site soon and will also add an IronPython tutorial to the Python tutorial.

   • ConfigObj

     A Python configuration file reader and writer that is easy to use but with about a gazillion extra features not found in ConfigParser. This is the most widely used code I've ever released, but I don't use it much myself these days. Thankfully it takes little maintaining, however I have done a bunch of work on version 4.7 which is just waiting for me to pull my finger out and release.

   • Mock

     A simple mocking library for testing Python code, that makes a great companion to unittest. In my day job I'm now focusing on integration testing and not doing much unit testing, so I don't use Mock as much as I used to and it hasn't got the attention it deserves. It was nice to finally add support for magic methods so that you can mock numeric types, containers and so on.

   I also wrote a lot of articles on IronPython and supporting example code to go with them.

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2009?

   Like many of the other folk who answered these questions, I tend to keep in touch with Python news through Planet Python (in fact this year I sort of became responsible for some of the administration of the Planet when I joined the Python webmaster team). I enjoy a lot of the bloggers on the Planet and find it invaluable for keeping up to date with the Python world. There really are a lot of great bloggers contributing to the Planet so I'm only going to call out one: Jacob Kaplan-Moss. A great blogger, both fun and on the ball technically. Of course like the rest of us he needs to pull his finger out and blog more often.

   In fact in 2009 I went old school and (re)discovered the joys of IRC. I'm often on #python-dev and various other Python related channels. Twitter is also still growing and I've had a lot of fun and learned a lot from the many tech folk I follow there.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2010?

   I'd like to learn more about web programming, in particular I want to get deeper into Django (and perhaps Pinax) and properly learn Javascript. There are lots of programming languages I'd like to learn (C so I can contribute to CPython and just because it is everywhere, Haskell so I can get functional enlightenment [1], maybe F# so I can achieve the same thing but in a language that might actually be useful, Erlang because all the cool kids are doing it and it seems to have the most practical approach to concurrency of the 'modern' languages, Lisp to see what all the fuss is about and probably a load more languages). In reality I'll only learn a programming language that I actually need to use, so I think Javascript is the programming language I'm most likely to have the opportunity to really dive into. Although I've tinkered with Javascript (who hasn't) I haven't fully appreciated what it means to idiomatically program with a prototype based language so it is definitely of value.

   There are a huge number of libraries and frameworks I'd love to learn, including Twisted, multiprocessing and other web frameworks. I'd also like to do mobile application development either for the iPhone or Android. That would give me a reason to use another language, but I have to say that Objective-C is more appealing than Java.

   I doubt I'll find time to do any of this in 'hobby-time', so hopefully they'll come up in a work context.

[1]	Using functional programming techniques is one of my favourite Python tricks, but I still have a hard time seeing how a pure functional language can be useful for application development. The only way to get round this is to actually use one of the damn languages...

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A Little Bit of Python (Podcast)

Myself and several co-conspirators have started an 'occasional podcast' on all things Python, and the first two episodes are now online. The podcast is called A Little Bit of Python and stars:

• Michael Foord (me, author of IronPython in Action and maintainer of unittest)
• Andrew Kuchling (creator of PyCrypto and one of the python.org webmasters)
• Steve Holden (PSF chairman)
• Dr. Brett Cannon (author of importlib amongst other things)
• Jesse Noller (maintainer of multiprocessing)

All of us are Python Software Foundation members [1], we are all (or have been) core Python developers and we're all full time programmers in one way or another (Brett is still a student and Steve does a lot of training as well as programming). We're also all talkative and argumentative, so it should be a fun series. The website (bitofpython.com) isn't up yet, so the first two episodes are available from a temporary location, but we'll setup redirects as soon as we're properly up and running:

• A little bit of Python: download links & flash player
• A little bit of Python: MP3 Feed
• A little bit of Python AAC Feed

The first three episodes cover topics like the new Python moratorium, PyCon, Python 2.7, and the great PyPI comments debate (debacle?). We'll generally be discussing anything newsworthy or of interest affecting the Python community.

If you want to send fan mail, hate mail, or suggestions for topics then you can already email us at: all@bitofpython.com

We're still working on the technical details, so audio quality will improve. In particular the audio of my voice is very poor in the first two episodes but should be better in the third episode that is being edited as you read this and will go up soon. We're finding our stride, both in the audio technology and in finding our feet - recording a podcast with five people makes for interesting group dynamics. Be gentle on us for these early episodes.

Thanks to Andrew for motivating this and for handling the editing. Thanks to Jesse for doing the website work which I have every confidence will be online shortly...

[1]	But this is in no way an official podcast. Brett in particular wanted to make it clear that he swears a lot (although he's curbed himself so far) so it may not be suitable for minors...

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Fuzzywuzzy Beard

In my last post I mentioned my fuzzywuzzy beard not once but twice. Here's a great picture of me and my fuzzywuzzy beard drawn by Scott Meyer, the creator of the Basic Instructions webcomic.

You can order your own custom avatar for $10.

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Innapropriate Python

Python is not always appropriate in every circumstance. As if proof was needed two recent news stories confirm it:

• Man bites Python (sounds like self-defense though)
• Real life snakes on a plane (Pythons naturally)

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More Fun at PyCon 2009

PyCon 2009 was awesome fun, as many others have charted. The highlights of the conference were, as always, meeting and mixing with such a rich combination of clever and fun people - all of whom I have Python in common with. It was a mix of new friends and old friends, far too many to mention all of them.

The Hyatt hotel in which PyCon was held in had the rooms on all four external walls, interconnected with a grand structure that someone nicknamed the fragatorium:

The tenth floor made an ideal launching point for the balsa aeroplanes being given out by the Wingware guys.

The fleet:

Mr. Tartley getting ready to launch:

We did manage to get one to the other side, and even caught a photo of plane in flight.

Unfortunately I'm rubbish at remembering to take photos, about the only genuine conference photo I took was of the VM panel discussion.

During the sprints there was much ridiculousness around the Django Pony, that somehow ended up with the domain ponysex.us being hosted on my server! As an added bonus I was elected to membership of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) during the conference. This means two things in practise; a new opportunity to bikeshed on the PSF mailing list and new opportunities to volunteer for extra work! D'oh.

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Essential Programming Skills: Reading and Writing

As a programmer there are two basic skills vital to your productivity: how fast you can type and how fast you can read.

On typing, Steve Yegge said it best of course in Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret.

I often mock Mr. Tartley for being a hunter pecker, but he can really type quite fast with his two fat fingers. I taught myself to touch type with Mavis Beacon back when I was selling bricks and found it enormously freeing. Being able to type without having to look at the keyboard makes a massive difference.

There are a host of tools that will help you learn or practise touch typing. I've just discovered (via Miguel de Icaza) a fun web based one, that you can fire up at any time. You race against other players typing short passages from books, with visual cues when you make mistakes. It even lets you setup private games to race against a set of friends. My only criticism is that there isn't enough punctuation to really practise typing for programmers (programmer specific version anyone?):

• play.typeracer.com

The combination of competition, short doses and interesting passages make it fun, addictive and actually useful. My average WPM is 52 at the moment, but I reckon if I practise a few times a day I'll pick up speed.

The correlating skill essential for programmers needing to browse countless pages of documentation and information from blogs that may or may not be useful is speed reading. The following tool is great for practising, but I'm also finding it useful for quickly reading long passages of text.

• Eyercize: Online Speed Reading Training

It shows you the text a line at a time, moving the focused part quickly (at a speed you can configure and control from the keyboard) from left to right. This mirrors (unsurprisingly) the way I skim read blogs etc. The problem is that I often involuntarily skip passages whilst skim reading - this tool is good for practise but also helps me to read quickly without missing bits.

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Supporting Free E-books with Book Donation

Here's a really good idea that someone should do.

Cory Doctorow likes giving electronic versions of his books away free; he believes in it and his publisher doesn't really mind because there isn't a lot of money in selling ebooks anyway. He isn't the only one, there are several prominent authors, and many not so prominent ones, who give away their ebooks free under a creative-commons license.

The problem is, what to do about the people who want to donate after reading the ebook. He can't accept donations because it screws with his tax and makes his publisher unhappy!

He had this brilliant idea of matching up people who want to donate with schools and public libraries that would like a copy of the book. That way giving away the electronic version directly drives more sales of the paper book and more people get access to the book. He started this program with his last book Little Brother.

The downside is that vetting people who request the book and administering the system costs Cory money. However, it could be centralised, with vetted individuals eligible for books from any of the committed authors / publishers.

Income could come from Amazon referral fees - and possibly a small charge either to the publisher per book or to the vetted individuals. It would certainly be cheaper than what Cory is currently doing as the vetting is the main cost and you only need to do that once. It is potentially a profitable idea, but would be better run as a not for profit so that it could take donations of money and people's time.

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  IronPython in Action is the first English book on IronPython. It is for Python and .NET programmers interested in making the most of Python on the .NET framework and Mono.

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