The Mouse Vs. The Python

PyCon is a conference that is run almost entirely by volunteers. Do you know what that means? It means that they need you! Last year, I volunteered and it was a mostly good experience. You can check out the staff list to see if there’s any responsibilities you’d like to take over. If so, be sure to join the pycon-organizers mailing list. Here is the primary Volunteer page and following is a copy of what they currently need help with onsite:

• Registration desk volunteers
• Swag bag stuffers
• Session Staff (Note: we need to setup a way for session staff to volunteer for particular sessions; Stay tuned!)
• Tutorial day help
• Electrical cord tapers / untapers
• Last minute helper mob

You can read about these positions here. You can read about my experiences as a session chair here. I was a little nervous when I did it, but I think it went alright.

The main thing to remember is this: If you see someone who obviously needs help, don’t just stand there like a dope! Get over there and help them out!

Last year, it was popular for bloggers to write about the five talks that they most wanted to see at PyCon. I don’t know if I’ll be going to PyCon this year, but if I did, these are my picks in no particular order.

• Everything You Wanted To Know About Pickling, But Were Afraid To Ask! by Richard Saunders. This not only sounds interesting, but it’ll be fun to see people’s faces when I say I went to a pickling talk.
• Javascript for people who know Python by Ian Bicking. This is an Extreme talk by one of Python’s luminaries. I don’t like Javascript, but maybe Bicking’s talk will change my mind.
• Python and Robots: Teaching Programming in High School by Vern Ceder. I have read Ceder’s name in multiple places and I hear he teaches Python and he’s written a book on the subject too. Besides, robots are cool and getting kids interested in programming is neat!
• Using Python 3 to Build a Cloud Computing Service for my Superboard II by David Beazley. I’ve been following Beazley’s blog off and on lately and it’s always interesting, even if I don’t always understand what he’s doing. He also teaches Python classes from time to time, so I expect this talk to be well put together.
• Hidden Treasures in the Standard Library by Doug Hellman. I don’t remember if I’ve ever been to one of Hellman’s talks, but I enjoy his blog quite a bit.

Of course, there are more than 5 that I want to see and I’m sure that there will be plenty of them that happen at the same time, so I won’t get to see them all anyway. Alex Gaynor has a couple talks that I’d like to see and Martelli is giving another cerebral presentation. Wesley Chun has a couple talks too. I don’t see anything by Jeff Rush, which is a shame. I’ve enjoyed him in the past. Anyway, what are the talks that you want to see? Let me know in the comments!

It’s time for another edition of the “weekly Python news”! What happened this week in Python world? You’ve come to the right place to find out. We missed the announcement last week about Germany’s Python Academy’s course schedule, so be sure to check that out. This week we have a lot of news from the Python web world (again) as well as news about a great new Python book.

• Working with Django Settings files – I don’t do much with Django right now, but this looks interesting.
• The Hudson project is supposedly going to get forked. The new fork is called Jenkins. You can read all about it on Greg Turnquist’s blog
• The Pyramid project is a new development from the Pylons people. In this blog you can learn about Pyramid’s Auth API.
• Did you know about ep.io, a new Python hosting service? Well you can read about it here if you like
• Enthought recently added PySide support to some of their products.
• Mark Lutz and O’Reilly have released the 4th edition of Programming Python, which is updated for Python 3. You can buy it from Amazon right now!
• Wingware’s latest 4.0 beta is now out. You can read about it here and here

If you think that some news is missing, be sure to drop me a line via the comments or the contact form. Have a great week!

Another week, another set of Python news items. This week

• Andrew Kuchling received a PSF Community Award
• Doug Hellman also received a PSF Community Award. Congrats to the both of you. I just wish that the PSF blog was a little more verbose about why these guys got the award and how one gets selected.
• Sean Reifschneider created a new CookieSession to the bottlesession library
• kitchen 0.2.2 was released this week. According to the blog, “Kitchen is a python module of small, useful snippets of code. It has functions to help with internationalizing applications, working with unicode and byte strings, iterators, and a whole bunch more.”
• PyCon 2011 Tutorials are up
• 2 Python and the Cloud articles: The Promise of the Cloud and Cloud Snakes
• The Sphinx project had a new release this week.
• PyCon 2011 has a listing of their accepted talks up (finally!)

Lots of web technology releases this week. Everyone seems to be getting more and more pumped about web apps, so I suppose I will have to start digging into the various Python-related web frameworks and learn their inner workings.

Just to mix things up a little, I’ll include a few random Twitter tweets I found:

• luzifer1984: New Experimental #Python #GAE Datastore API via GVR>> http://goo.gl/agx9T
• lashingpumpkin: RT @ojiidotch: Dear #Python Developers: Stop putting your downloads somewhere else than pypi. Thank you!
• szul: #FF for app building @appcelerator @ActiveState #titanium #python #javascript

Have a great week!

Today I received an email from the O’Reilly School of Technology that was touting their new “Python Programming Certificate”. It appears to be an online set of four courses created by Steve Holden, current Chairman of the Python Software Foundation and owner of Holden Web.

Here is what their website says about the four courses:

The first course introduces the Python language, and by the end of the second you have created graphical user interfaces, accessed a relational database and analyzed email messages. The third class increases your language mastery by explaining some of the secrets of the interpreter “under the hood”. The fourth rounds out whole experience, providing you with a holistic knowledge of Python that will leave you ready to continue your programming career confident in your command of Python.

And here are the four course titles:

• Python 1: Beginning Python
• Python 2: Getting More Out of Python
• Python 3: The Python Environment
• Python 4: Advanced Python

The certificate is actually issued by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was unable to discover if one could CLEP out of any of the classes or not for a reduced price. Anyway, this is an FYI to all you aspiring Python Professionals that would like to be “certified”.

To my knowledge, this is the first and ONLY Python Certification program. As I recall, Steve Holden mentioned that people were wanting Python Certificates a couple of years ago in his column in the now defunct Python Magazine.