April Meeting
Join us on Tuesday, April 23rd at 6pm at The IMT Group in West Des Moines. The team from IMT (Brandon Williams, Joel Taddei, Toran Billups and Matthew Morrison) will be presenting their preferred stack for building modern web applications.
At varying levels of detail, the following things will be discussed:
Hope to see you there!
February Meeting
IMPORTANT UPDATE! This meeting was previously scheduled for February 21st but has been rescheduled to March 4th!
Our February meeting will be at WebFilings in Ames on Monday, March 4th at 6pm. Mark your calendars! We are going to have a very special guest speaker in person giving his talk for PyCon 2013.
Carl Meyer
Carl Meyer builds web applications in Python for OddBird and helps maintain Django, pip, and virtualenv. When he’s not chasing a more elegant algorithm, he chases frisbees, hockey pucks, and a five-year-old son.
Past conference presentations include Reverse-engineering Ian Bicking's brain: inside pip and virtualenv (PyCon 2011, video), Taming dependencies with pip (DjangoCon 2011, video) and Testing and Django (PyCon 2012, video).
TALK DESCRIPTION
The hardest part of testing is getting the ball rolling. Once you've picked your tools and started writing tests, the added confidence you have in making changes to your code, and the time you save in repetitive manual testing, can quickly become addictive! If you never got over that initial speedbump, or you've tried testing but it hasn't yet clicked, this talk is for you.
ABSTRACT
Topics:
-
Picking a testing framework: unittest, nose, py.test. (Don't waste time on this, just pick one).
-
Writing your first test.
-
Unit tests and integration tests.
-
Outside-in vs inside-out testing.
-
Do I have to write my tests first?
-
Mocking: why to do it, why not to do it, and tools that can help.
-
Testing persistence code: fixtures and object mothers.
-
Measuring code coverage with coverage.py; using code coverage as a driver to know what tests you're missing.
-
Using WebTest for integration testing of web code.
-
Introducing tests into an untested legacy codebase.
January Meeting
We will be meeting at 6pm at the IMT Group in West Des Moines on Thursday, January 10th. The topic will be Django's ORM. There will be free pizza and soda for all who attend.
December Meeting
December 11th at 6pm at the IMT Group in West Des Moines
We've got a really great topic ready for our December meeting: Code Editors. In addition to a great topic we also have some great prizes. We will be drawing for a dead tree copy of one of Mark Lutz's O'Reilly books and also drawing for a free pass to PyCon 2013 in Santa Clara California.
There will be 4 speakers taking turns demonstrating different Python code editors in action.
November Meeting
This month we will be meeting on Thursday, November 8th at 6pm at WebFilings in Ames.
Distributed Programming in the Cloud
Processes that run in a distributed environment face very different challenges from traditional databases. In some cases distributed problems mean different requirements must be defined, such as restrictions about accuracy and timeliness. These challenges require one to conceptualize solutions to problems in different ways. Solutions must take into account the overhead and restrictions imposed by parallelizing processing. Problems must be approached from the standpoint of how resources can be shared, how the (natural or artificial) divisions in the inputs, and the desired outputs, influences how the data can be most efficiently processed. This talk covers several core decision points, such as consistency, accuracy, and timing requirements, and how they impact the choice of solutions. We also discuss how multiple patterns may be combined to realize the benefits of each, or to develop very rich and powerful workflows.
Robert Kluin - tend's to look for projects involving challenging problems related to data schema design and data processing. He's frequent contributor on the AppEngine mailing list and message boards and is extremely active in the community. Robert was "knighted" by Google at a recent Google event and is well known by the AppEngine team and community. He currently resides in Ames, IA and works for WebFilings.
Beau Lyddon - a senior developer on the WebFilings server team and one of its most avid python developers. Beau helped lead WebFilings’ move from SVN to GitHub and is a contributor to numerous GitHub projects.
Hope to see you there!
October Meeting
The October meeting will be on Tuesday, October 9th at 6pm at the IMT Group in West Des Moines.
Matthew J Morrison will be talking about the Django web framework. Matthew works for the IMT Group and has been using Python and Django for the past few years. Matthew also has experience in a variety of other languages including Java, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and Ruby. Matthew blogs semi-regularly at mattjmorrison.com about Python and software development in general. He also tweets @mattjmorrison.
Django Topics that will be covered include:
- ORM
- Models
- Forms
- Views
- Templates
- URL Routes
- Middleware
September Meeting
Joel Taddei will be talking about his website tecmofantasybowl.com. Joel is the sole developer of tecmofantasybowl.com where he utilizes the seemingly neverending power of Python to reach down into the nintendo memory files to extract the stats which drive you and your friend's fantasy football experience. Contact him @ jtaddei@gmail.com.With the football season approaching many people are scrambling to set their lineups on their fantasy football teams - but would you believe that the NFL isn't the only place to get your fantasy football fix? A cult following of a 21 year old Nintendo game called Tecmo Super Bowl has retro gamers, sports nuts, and programmer geeks all convening in a game of Fantasy Football driven 100% by computer simulations using Tecmo Super Bowl as the stat engine.
August Meeting
The August Pyowa meeting will be on Wednesday, August 8th at 6pm at The IMT Group in West Des Moines.
Toran Billups will be discussing iOS development.
Are you writing web apps today in python/ruby/c#/java? Are you interested in learning about the iOS development ecosystem?
If you answered yes I can only assume you are curious about what the native iPhone development story looks like from a 10,000 ft view and I plan to do just that ((well more of a brain dump really) … wait I got it -organized brain dump).
I'll show some objective-c specifics (and how they might / might not have a python equivalent)
- strings
- numbers
- booleans
- conditionals
- loops
- switch statements
- blocks
- pointers **or what little I know about them
- MRC + ARC (memory management)
I'll also show a few examples of the general "eco system" around iOS (including)
- location
- maps
- assets
- how to make a phone call
- SQLite on the device
- working with photos
- interface builder
- properties
- navigation
- global state
- tooling
- testing
- how do you publish to the app store?
- can I do beta testing without the app store?
- what about the iPad
- what if I want to write ruby instead of objective-c? **ruby motion PSA
If I can get through this in under 2 hours I'm sure we will have room for a few questions (including everything I missed above)
July Meeting
June Meeting - Thursday, June 7th at 6pm
We will be meeting at the IMT Group office in West Des Moines on June 7th at 6pm. The IMT Group will be providing food and beverages.
May 2012 Meeting
Tonight was our big meeting with WebFilings. You can check out some picture here. I have to admit that the turnout exceeded my expectations. Not only was our room packed, but we had tons of viewers online as well.
Among the online attendees were Steve Holden, Van Lindberg, and Guido Van Rossum.
WebFilings ended up giving away not 1, not 3 but 5 iPads!
The video of our meeting should be posted shortly here. Also, you can check out all of the example code here.