Montreal Python

During the last packaging sprint, we were kind of clueless. Tarek Ziade is coming to the rescue, and will be coaching us live from Dijon, France.

Thanks to his support and the many questions you will be able to ask him, we hope we can bring some real improvements to Python packaging (distutils2, distribute, and PyPi). That way we’ll be able to make a real contribution to the community, and bring the future of Python packaging closer.

We recommend everyone to read carefully The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Packaging and to ask any questions you may have on the mailing list before Saturday.

Next saturday (2010-05-22), from 2pm to 1am, we will be holding the next packaging sprint, at Brasseurs Numeriques (1124 Marie-Anne, bur. 11). Every Python programmer looking to help is welcome, whether it is to help on code or documentation.

Bring your laptop or make a pairing arrangement on the mailing list beforehand. We have a capacity of 12 seats, please RSVP on the wiki. We don’t have any sponsors for this sprint, but this won’t stop us. Bring your refreshments, and we will place a group order for supper around 7pm.

Attendance at the second packaging sprint was very good with a total of eight showing up:

• Pior Bastida
• Alexandre Bourget
• Nicolas Cadou
• Yannick Gingras
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• George Peristerakis
• Cyril Robert
• Jean Schurger

Tarek was kind enough to coach the beginning of the sprint remotely and to produce a list of bugs that are not too hard to undertake and that are not already assigned.

Unfortunately, it was not the most productive sprint that we’ve had. The complicated state of the packaging in Python and the convoluted Setuptools code made it hard for people to get started and all too tempting to get side tracked on other computer related tasks, such as demonstration of Typeracer in instadeath mode and Nethack strategy coaching. I have to be honest; I deserve my share of the blame.

As far as I can tell, no one got to go beyond making themselves familiar with the code during the sprint proper but it’s by learning from our mistakes that we progress. We therefor plan to have the next packaging sprint on a Saturday in order to make it easier to sync with Tarek. Our tentative date is 2010-05-22. Hopefully, we’ll be able to gather enough local knowledge to have local coach for the subsequent sprints. One thing that is sure is that for future code sprints, we will ensure that there is an expert on site.

Thanks to Tarek’s coaching during the last packaging sprint, many of us were able to undertake a journey deep into the Python packaging internal and to hack some code that is now widely deployed, such as the PyPI site itself. This is great and we don’t want to stop there.

Next Monday, on 2010-05-10, we’ll have a sprint on Packaging at Brasseurs Numériques’ office: 1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11, from 18h30 until 1am or something very close to it. This is a sprint for anyone who deploys or installs Python packages and there is a very wide range to tasks that that we can undertake, from documentation to core code on the Python 3 branch.

Bring your laptop or make a pairing agreement on the mailing list before hand. Attendance is limited to 12 sprinters so please RSVP on the wiki. We don’t have a sponsor this time but that won’t stop us. Bring your own drinks and expect a group order for food arond 19h.

The fourth Django translation sprint was very productive. The group is now experienced and we can at last spend more time strugling with the language than with the tools. Anyone knows a good translation for “file handler”?

We hope to launch a new sprint a few weeks from now; watch the blog or the mailing list for the announcement. Thanks to AUF for the food and the drinks and thanks to Brasseurs Numériques for hosting the event. Congratulation to all the sprinters for their good work:

• Pior Bastida
• Thibault Cohen
• Yannick Gingras
• Benoît Grégoire
• François Lapierre-Messier
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• Jonathan Marcil
• Cyril Robert
• Jean Schurger

Given the popularity of the last Django translation sprints, we decided to keep going. The next sprint will be on 2010-05-03 at Brasseurs Numériques’ office:

1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11,  Montréal, QC H2J 2B7

We warmly thank Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie for supporting the event with food and drinks for every participant.

The sprint begins at 6pm and ends once everyone is too tired to type.  Bring your own laptop or make an arrangement for pairing on the mailing list beforehand.  We only have 15 seats so please use the wiki to RSVP.  If you can’t join us physically, you can still participate on IRC, on #montreal-python on irc.freenode.net.

We are happy to annouce the list of flash presentations for Montréal-Python 13 next Monday:

• Hao Deng on Pointfree Functional Programming in Python
• Pierre Thibault on ipython
• Alexandre Bourget on WebUndo
• Sébastien Pierre on a surprise topic
• Yannick Gingras on the Montréal-Python wiki

Thanks to everyone who took part in the latest translation sprint of the Django technical documentation of Django on March 31 at Brasseurs Numériques‘ office.

We were seven motivated Pythonistas and we progressed very quickly in this endeavour.

More than that, numerous contacts have been made with the French Django community (Django-fr).  We now try to coordinate a little bit more with them because with the release of Django-1.2 we’ll need to keep up the good work, ideally with more and more people.  So far, we’ve completed the translation 12 files from the documentation.

Another sprint will be organized in the following weeks in the hope that we gather more people and to have fun with this work.

Thanks to the Brasseurs Numériques for their good hospitality.
Thanks to the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie for the food and the drinks.

Congratulation to our sprinters:

• Davin Baragiotta
• Cyril Robert
• François Savard
• Antoine Reversat
• Yannick Gingras
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• Jean Schurger

Montréal-Python 13 will take place at UQAM, on Monday 2010-04-26 in room SH-3420 of the Sherbrooke building. The SH building is located at 200 Sherbrooke west, Place-des-Arts metro station.

Here is our schedule for the evening:

• 18h00: Opening
• 18h20: Announcements
• 18h30: Flash presentations
• 19h00: Break
• 19h20: Main presentation
• 20h30: Discussions and refreshments at Benelux

Flash Presenters will be:

• Hao Deng on Pointfree Functional Programming in Python
• Pierre Thibault on ipython
• Alexandre Bourget on WebUndo
• Sébastien Pierre on a surprise topic
• Yannick Gingras on the Montréal-Python wiki

Our main presenter is going to be Andrew Francis and he’s going to talk about Implementing Go’s select in Stackless Python.

Google’s introduction of the Go language raised eyebrows in the Stackless Python community. Although very different languages, Go and Stackless Python’s concurrency model share a common ancestor: the Bell Labs family of languages (i.e., Newsqueak, Limbo). The common feature are channels: a synchronous message passing mechanism based on Tony Hoare’s Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).

Both Go and Python have channels. However with the select language statement. Go has the ability to wait on multiple channels simultaneously. Stackless Python does not have this feature.

This talk discusses implementing a Select like feature in Stackless Python. The technique will be to prototype the feature with stackless.py – the PyPy’s project implementation of Stackless Python written in Python!

Along the way, audience will learn Stackless Python basics and get a glimpse at greenlets and PyPy. In the process, the audience will see how Stackless Python’s API reflects philosophical differences between Go and Stackless Python’s approach to concurrency.

Living in Montréal, Andrew Francis has an academic background in the humanities, computer science, and management. Professionally, Andrew has worked at companies such as BNR, Omnimark, and Adobe Systems in California. Ever since 2005, Andrew has been playing with Stackless Python, as a part of his work with WS-BPEL, and he has never looked back! At Pycon 2008, Andrew gave the talk “Adventures in Stackless Python/Twisted Integration.”

We still have a few spots for flash presentations so don’t hesitate to contact us if you have something that you would like to present.

Thanks to our sponsors for making Montréal-Python 13 possible:

• UQAM
• Benelux
• Savoir-faire Linux
• Ecometrica
• Apress

Given the popularity of the first and second Django translation sprints, we decided to keep going. The next sprint will be on 2010-03-31 at Brasseurs Numériques’ office:

1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11,  Montréal, QC H2J 2B7

We warmly thank Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie for supporting the event with food and drinks for every participant.

The sprint begins at 18h and ends once everyone is too tired to type. Bring your own laptop or make an arrangement for pairing on the mailing list beforehand. We only have 12 seats; use the mailing list to RSVP. If you can’t join us physically, you can still participate on IRC, on #montreal-python on irc.freenode.net.

We are happy to annouce the list of flash presentations for Montréal-Python 12 next Monday:

• Antoine Reversat — Python for Sysadmins
• Francis Piéraut — Jython and Tomcat
• Sébastien Pierre — Rugg: crash-testing for your hard drives
• Hadrien David — Déploiement sur AppEngine
• Gary Haran — Montreal, from Ghetto to Hub