Meeting tomorrow.

[Scott Blevins]

Hey all! Tomorrow is PySGF and I wanted to send out a message to see
how everyone was feeling about the activities we have been doing
lately.

Recently we've been working on our project site "planesofmagic.com".
Everyone is, of course, welcome to keep working on that. I am planning
on having a list of things people could work on for that project
outlined by the meeting tomorrow.

We are also exploring a few other options for activities that we could
do during meetings. A few suggestions I've heard recently are:

- Fork a project and make it compatible with Python 3
- Create a game
- Explore various Python libraries
- Learn another web framework like Pyramid
- Make a PySGF website

If you have any other ideas or suggestions please share them! Also, I
would love to hear which of these, if any, people were most interested
in.

Scott

[Joe Black]

I am a firm believer the competition breeds innovation and excitement.
In the PySGF's github there is BrainTank repo that Matt Thompson wrote
and is just waiting to be used. Anyone interested in that?

Thanks
-Lee

[Scott Blevins]

I'd love to work with that! Any other interest?

Scott

[C Nelson]

I would definitely like to have a braintank competition.

[Ryan Martin]

Sounds awesome to me too.

[Ben Hayden]

I like the idea - are we thinking maybe pairs or solo? As long as there's awesome robot music going on, I'm game.

[C Nelson]

I'm all for pairs. :D

[Joe Black]

Well originally what I was thinking (Matt feel free to chime in) there would be a tiny introduction on how to program the tank brains. Once everybody is comfortable we all go home and start programming the tanks. Then on the next meet we have an official competition.

To make this interesting we can't just plug in if statements or create a simple state machine. What I am hoping for are some implementations of A* or other path finding/collision algorithms to make them interesting. I might be taking this too far but what I had in mind.

Ben to answer your question either way. Keep in mind to implement and test drive some of the algorithms will probably take longer than the PySGF period.

Thanks
-Lee

[James Vann]

Hi- I'm a beginning Python programmer, and I'm interested in coming to
the meeting- can you tell me when and where it is held?

[Joel Faucett]

509 W. Olive, inside of Intuitive Web Solutions' office. If you are facing the building, use the leftmost door facing Olive.

It's from 7-9pm.

[Scott Blevins]

Hey James,

I am happy to help out a beginner. Just let me know how much and what sort of help you will need. :) Welcome to PySGF!

-Scott

[James Vann]

Darn, I didn't get your message until today. I think I had Google
Groups configured to send a summary once a day, rather than sending
messages immediately, so I got it a day behind. I'll try to make it
next month- I might recomend sending a reminder about the meeting a
few days ahead. The IWS building is right down the road from me, so I
hope to meet everyone next month.

@Scott - I'm not sure what I need at this point, but I'll use this
group to get ideas and ask questions, if everyone doesn't mind. I
have worked through most of Learn Python the Hard Way, but struggled a
bit with the unit tests and test driven development. I like the idea,
but I think I lacked proper motivation to absorb it correctly. I have
written a command line program that used the PySerial module to read
data from an Arduino. I am now thinking about writing a framework to
automate some of my web server administration tasks. I think I'll use
Python 3 this time and I hope to release it as open source at some
point. (Bu since I'm a beginner, it'll probably suck and no one else
will want to use it :)

[Matthew Scott]

On 2012-03-28 15:13, James Vann wrote:
> I am now thinking about writing a framework to
> automate some of my web server administration tasks. I think I'll use
> Python 3 this time and I hope to release it as open source at some
> point. (Bu since I'm a beginner, it'll probably suck and no one else
> will want to use it :)

If you are a beginner, you may want to consider using an existing
framework for that, such as Fabric. See http://fabfile.org/ for more info.

With Fabric, you write a python script called fabfile.py, adding
functions to it that make use of the tools from the fabric package.
Then, you run the fab command, giving it information about host(s) you
want to operate on, and the commands you want to run against said hosts.

Fabric takes care of many of the lower-level details, not the least of
which is managing SSH connections.

Unfortunately, Fabric is still marked as red on the Python 3 Wall of
Shame. https://python3wos.appspot.com/ So while it's a useful tool, it's
probably not a good vehicle for learning Python 3 instead of Python 2.

--
Matthew Scott
ElevenCraft Inc.
http://11craft.com/
+1 360 389-2512

[James Vann]

Yeah, I looked at Fabric- it looks really cool, but like you said, not
Python3. Also, I think it might be overkill for what I need. So I
might try to do my own simple framework in Py3. I haven't decided
yet. I have to get some time to spend on it.

[Scott Blevins]

Yeah, that sounds like a fun project! I think a simple Python 3 project sounds good.

[David Vestal]

James,

It obviously depends completely on the full extent of the web server administration tasks that you mentioned, but I would like to offer a suggestion.  Especially since you are a beginner, I would highly recommend that you start your Python (and Py3) learning on something that "doesn't matter" for a business purpose.  You could start with one of the games or a utility application that you personally use.  If you create something and some business processes rely on it then you have a much higher risk of losing something or experiencing downtime due to an unexpected bug/issue.

Fabric, while not yet Py3, is a framework that is very well suited for doing the bulk of typical on-going administration tasks.  Personally, I use Puppet (not Python, I know) for the vast majority of my server orchestration and I use Fabric for some daily / weekly and one-off type of management tasks that have to be executed across a range of servers.  Fabric might seem to be overkill, but I would argue that it's not likely to be once you get your hands dirty with it.

Some may argue with me on the statement, but personally I would feel that, when learning Python, the differences between 2 and 3 won't make nearly as much of a difference as actually just learning the language itself.

Thank you.
David Vestal

[Ben Hayden]

Some may argue with me on the statement, but personally I would feel that, when learning Python, the differences between 2 and 3 won't make nearly as much of a difference as actually just learning the language itself.

+ 1 

[Matthew Scott]

On 2012-03-29 16:45, Ben Hayden wrote:

Some may argue with me on the statement, but personally I would feel that, when learning Python, the differences between 2 and 3 won't make nearly as much of a difference as actually just learning the language itself.

+ 1

Especially for those who have written in other languages, more important than learning the syntax of the language would be discovering, learning, and using the common idioms and tools offered by the language's structure and standard library.

Ned Batchelder, a respectable Pythonista of many years, gives an example of why learning Python's idioms is good in his recent blog post about breaking out of the inner loop of nested for loops.

http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201203/breaking_out_of_two_loops_at_once.html

The code examples he gives there are very instructive, and the comments dig even deeper for those who are ready for "itertools" and such, but here's a teaser from the end of the post:

"""
As with any language, you can approach Python as if it were C/Java/Javascript with different syntax, and many people do at first, relying on concepts they already know. Once you scratch the surface, Python provides rich features that take you off that track. Iteration is one of the first places you can find your Python wings.