Myles Braithwaite

This month's PyGTA we will have three presenters talking about their upcoming PyCon talks. Leigh Honeywell will be presenting Teaching Python in Your Community -- her experience teaching a Python class at HackLabTO. Greg Wilson on What We've Learned From Building Basie -- what a bunch of undergraduates accomplished building a Django-based replacement for Trac called Basie. Mike C. Fletcher on Debating 'til Dawn -- will be presenting some of the best discussion/ideas/talks at PyGTA the last three years in his attempt to make PyCon cool again.

Remember to bring your laptop because Mike will have a Real-time feedback tool for chatting with the presenters and give feedback on their talks (he has been") working for the last three months).

Last night at PyGTA, Mike gave a short talk/demo about his findings using Tornado and CouchDB to write a real time chat and voting application for his PyCon talk.

Tornado is a lightweight non-blocking web server created by FriendFeed and Open Source by Facebook. The API is similar to web.py and App Engine's webapp framework. Mike's ending comments was that Tornado can out perform Twisted. But he found he had to write a lot of code to do things that were built into Twisted (or any other modern web framework) already.

His thoughts on CouchDB:

I'm really beginning to regret the choice of CouchDB for the back-end. It's working perfectly well, but I have literally dozens of pieces of code hanging around for doing SQL-based paging... none of which are applicable to CouchDB.

*Referenced: Things I'd like to play with (given enough time)*

This website (and a few other sites I manage) will be moving from Apache 2 and WSGI to Tornado and Nginx #. It will still be built on top of Django thought so most of the issues Mike was talking about wouldn't apply to me.

Other people who wrote about this event:

• Tom Low-Shang -- Tornado

Last night PyGTA was a Exceptional Conditions round table, like most PyGTA meetings it went philosophical side of programming.

My personal philosophy, in web development, is to log exceptions, not found pages, and performance to almost extreme levels. Then weekly I take the logs and analyzes them with a script which puts them into a database, which groups the results. If an error happens more than five times in the given week the script creates a ticket in the issue tracker for me to work on later. I log all not found pages by real people (not search engine bots) to try and understand why they navigated to that page. The performance log is how long the system took to generate the page and SQL queries and time it took to execute them.

Mike took some good notes so if you are interested you should definitely check it out.

On 21 April 2009 at 7:30 pm I am going to be giving a talk about Google App Engine at the linuxcaffe.

Google App Engine is a platform to building and hosting web applications on Google's infrastructure (which is sometimes called PaaS¹). It has a pay-for-what-you-use payment level but anything below 5 million pageviews a month.

PaaS

Platform as a Service is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service.

Last night at PyGTA we talked about our Personal Programming Mantras and came up with an interesting list, my personal favorites:

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

Have a vision before you start coding.

Nothing is sacred.

No one owns any piece of code.

Keep it simple, smartarse.

Sometimes the solution really is simple.

You are wrong.

About optimization.
About planning.
About everything.

.2% of reusable code is reused.

DRY gone wild, wet-T-shirt edition.

I'm an idio-nius.

Constant self-doubt is good/bad.

Standard naming, but no naming Nazis.

Don't trust standards.
My standards are good.
Yours suck.

Prototype in the target language.

Power Builder Sucks

Be a programmer, not a DBA, dammit!

Leave sysadminning to the sysadmins.
Leave DBA-ing to the DBAs.
I like my bubble.
Limit your knowledge, avoid doing the dumb things.

Space-Nazi's suck.

It doesn't fucking matter about spaces... Please just leave me alone.

Also I am going to be doing the PyGTA presentation in January on CouchDB, the first 30 miniutes will be a quick overview of my GTALUG presentation and the rest will be looking at using CouchDB in Python.

I released Django Basic Tumblelog 0.5 so you should definitely download it, the only really change is that I switched from the save() method in the model to the signals.

• Zip
• Tar.gz

*.arific.com was a project I started about a year ago to house some of really cool ideas I might have. Most of them haven’t really be published because doing the setup is to much work. Those in a effort to fix this I am moving everything (Email, Websites, Chat, and Project Management) to Google’s Cloud. Currently the only thing that is running on any of my servers is DNS and a redirect from `arific.com` to `www.arific.com`.

I released version 0.1 of Django Basic Tumblelog in zip and gzip tar, if you interested please download a copy today.

I am currently working on a new project called Django Photo Gallery which is a port of Stopdesgin Movable Type Photo Gallery Templates to the Django python framework. I am working on it about an hour everyday to try and get it to a releasable state by the end of June.

If you are interested in contribution to the project please email me at me[at]mylesbraithwaite.com and I will add you to the subversion repository. If you don’t have any programming or design skills add a feature request.

P.S. I am trying to blog at-least five times a week now.

Today Ajaxian.com 2006 Survey Results came out and I saw a suppresing amount of Python users. Which made me think what is the most used Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit that Pythoners use?

Not much difference against the whole with Prototype still winning but it is interesting that Dojo is the second most used. I use jQuery the most so I am a little disappointed that it is some what last.

And when did Django and TurboGears become a Ajax Framework?

I have converted most of my Wiki to Yaki today now just this blog and I am done.

If you don’t already know I am going to be presenting PyGTK at the next PyGTA meeting today! I will try and have slide up afterwards and even some more demos that I wont be showing at the meeting (because of the screw up at the last).

I will be presenting IronPython at the next PyGTA meeting.

Newsgroups: comp.lang.python.announce
From: “Mike C. Fletcher” 
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:15:27
Subject: Python in a strange land: IronPython and ASP.NET at the next PyGTA


	
IronPython is a native implementation of Python on the Microsoft .NET platform.  The implementation is from Microsoft and the language is well supported by the Visual Studio development environment which has always been one of the Microsoft platform’s strengths.  Though Python is often associated with the Free and Open Source communities, consultants and developers frequently need to solve real-world problems using Python on the .NET platform.  IronPython makes using Python in these situations a natural choice for the Python programmer. 

	
Our speaker for the evening is Myles Braithwaite, a local consultant and developer.  He is going to give us an idea of how developing a web application using ASP.NET looks when using IronPython instead of C#, as well as his impressions of the platform. 

	
As usual, we will hold the presentation at Linux Caffe, gathering for introductions at 6:30 PM, with the formal presentation beginning at 7:00 PM.  We normally head out around 8:30 PM for beer, coffee and/or ice cream.  You can find directions and maps to Linux Caffe on the wiki: 

	
http://web.engcorp.com/pygta/wiki/NextMeeting

Update

I have the Presentation and Demo files at my wiki: /Presentations/2007/PyGTA-IronPython

I install IronPython’s module for ASP.NET on one of my Windows Boxes to see how it would work. Here are some simple sinpplets of the differentces bettween Python, C#, and Visual Basic.

I have moved this page to my wiki.

I just read today that RedHat/JBoss has trademarked “Hibernate” (USPTO #3135582 look it up here).