Recent Entries

PyCon US: apply for travel/ticket grant by Feb. 16th

PyCon US (mid-May in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) is an excellent learning and networking opportunity, and has a job fair. While the language that people use in code samples is Python, I know people who treat it as a general tech conference -- you don't have to know Python to get a lot out of the talks (last year's schedule, for example). And it offers generous travel and childcare grants and complimentary tickets to enable people to attend. And if you can't come in person, you can get a free online-only conference ticket.

Up to USD$1500 in domestic travel ($2,000 for international), plus free conference ticket, plus a daily allowance for food. I've successfully requested travel assistance several times before and am happy with how easy the process is.

Apply by Feb 16th (tomorrow):
https://us.pycon.org/2024/attend/travel-grants/

PyCon US has a stronger health and safety policy than many conferences this year, mandating masking: https://us.pycon.org/2024/about/health-safety-guidelines/

And it is genuinely a good social experience, with significant gender diversity among presenters and other attendees. I've written about how to navigate PyCon in particular and enjoy it: http://harihareswara.net/posts/2023/your-first-pycon-but-not-your-first-convention/

(Also: conference registration includes the question: "Would you be interested in Childcare during PyCon US 2024? Yes/No? We are determining interest before securing childcare services. If you are interested we will reach out to you individually." So that's a possibility too.)

Python 2 sunset next year

I'm trying to get the word out about the end of support for Python 2 next year.

Want to help me communicate about the sunset of Python 2? I'd love help with these small documentation tasks:

* http://python-notes.curiousefficiency.org/en/latest/python3/questions_and_answers.html#what-are-or-were-some-of-the-key-dates-in-the-python-3-transition timeline
* https://bitbucket.org/ncoghlan/misc/issues/17/no-mention-of-cmp-in-python-3-q-a
* https://bitbucket.org/ncoghlan/misc/issues/18/add-arcgis-pros-adoption-of-python-3-to
* https://bitbucket.org/ncoghlan/misc/issues/8/clarify-need-to-rely-on-third-party

No Bitbucket account? Use this Etherpad https://pad.sfconservancy.org/p/python3-q%26a-updates to put bits of useful text.

Current Mood: excited

pygame 1.9.5 released into the wilds

I've been waiting to post this here ever since joining Dreamwidth in December last year. After many months of work, the Pygame library has a new release, that paves the way to a bright future for people who use Python to make games. To quote the official announcement:

Every single source file has been heavily modified and moved in this release. Initial (source code only) support for SDL2 has been merged in. We also support compiling with SDL1 in the same code base, so the migration to pygame 2 is easier. pygame 2 will be released with SDL2 being the default backend when some remaining issues are ironed out. The 1.9.x releases will continue with SDL1 until then. Also, the C API of pygame is undergoing a transformation with lots of cleanups. Then there have been plenty of other cleanups all throughout the python code as well. There's still lots to clean up, but things should be significantly easier for people to contribute (👋 hello and thanks new contributors!). The documentation has been improved with better examples links, search functionality, and improved navigation. Support for older Macs, and newer Macs has been improved. The mask, midi, draw, and math modules have gotten lots of polish with rough edges removed.

Click through to read the thank-yous and detailed changelog. I'll add that the switch to SDL2 means future versions will be able to run on Android, and also have new features such as supporting multiple windows where possible. Other additions are being planned, that should make Pygame more useful than ever. Hopefully more popular too, wink, wink.

SecureDrop seeking a senior developer

SecureDrop is an open source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Its parent nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to:

> be responsible for development tasks related to the current SecureDrop server and Tails OS workstation code, as well as the next-generation SecureDrop Workstation based on Qubes OS.

If you have 4+ years of experience working with Python, check it out? FotPF has offices in New York City and San Francisco, but this position is open to remote work from anywhere. I'm working with FPF right now to help get the word out to a diverse pool of candidates and to particularly encourage non-binary individuals, women and minorities in tech to apply. They're happy to do short informational calls with potential applicants who want to find out more to see if they're a fit. I know multiple people at FPF and they're great.

Python packaging

Those of you who use the Python Package Index (PyPI), especially as package maintainers: there'll be some changes coming this year, so you might want to subscribe to the new pypi-announce mailing list for (very occasional!) announcements.

I'm working on the website replacement, Warehouse, which will make Python packaging more reliable and serve as a better foundation for future PyPI improvements.

2017's Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, and Pythonic ways to participate

Yesterday, Google announced who the mentoring organizations will be for this year's Google Summer of Code, "a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school." This is a paid internship program open to students 18 years or older who are admitted to or enrolled (part-time or full-time) at an accredited higher education institution, in most countries. (So, community colleges are fine, and grad students are fine. Full eligibility requirements here.) No previous software industry experience or CS classes are required -- novice programmers are welcome and we particularly want people who have little or no experience contributing to open source projects.

If you're eligible, and you want a 3-month paid, mentored internship where you write code that real people will use and that you can share in your portfolio later, this is a pretty great opportunity. Here's more about how it works.

Several mentoring organizations are asking for people who know some Python. I'm currently doing some contract work with one: Zulip got accepted as a mentoring organization for GSoC for the second year in a row. I've been contracting as a community coordinator for Zulip for about a year, and I love that it's a project where we nurture new contributors inclusively and have high standards of engineering rigor. (I profiled the maintainer, Tim Abbott, in this post about kind negative code review, and I posted about it in this community last year.) Zulip is a group chat web app with desktop and mobile clients; you can try out our chat if you want to feel it out.

Apply: Here's the getting-started page. We encourage applicants to get started on their applications right away, since getting familiar with our development workflow is part of the application process -- we'll help you through that. Application deadline: April 3, 2017.

Outreach: If you want to tell other students and professors about this, the GSoC site has flyers you could put up and a presentation template. And feel free to introduce me to students you know who might want to know more.

Volunteer: Zulip and other mentoring organizations can use as much help as you can offer, from big commitments to small. Some options:

co-mentoring a student for several months: several hours per week and 1- or 2-day email turnaround time

hanging out on mailing lists and in chat rooms to help newer programmers figure things out, maybe offering light code review: a few hours' initial investment getting the hang of the project, then as much or as little time as you can offer

Try setting up our developer environment and write up a short discovery report to tell us what went smoothly and what tripped you up, so we can fix problems facing GSoC applicants: maybe 4 hours

English tutoring: 90 minutes

Reach out to me if you want help getting matched up with a mentoring org that could use your help; I'll default to Zulip but also consider other projects.

What about non-students and non-code contributions? Outreachy is a similar paid 3-month internship program helping new people get into contributing to open source. Programming, documentation, marketing, design, release management, and all sorts of other internships are available. Eligibility: people from several groups underrepresented in the industry:

Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. We are planning to expand the program to more participants from underrepresented backgrounds in the future.

You can spread the word with flyers and pre-written emails/posts.

The deadline for applying to Outreachy is March 30th, 2017. Zulip is not participating in the coming round, but there are great projects that are, and I'm familiar with some of them!

I'm very familiar with GSoC and Outreachy, as I've helped organizations work with them since 2011. Feel free to ask questions here in comments and I'll do my best to answer!

New zine: "Playing with Python: 2 of my favorite lenses"

On my main blog I just posted a scan of my new zine which introduces Python programmers to bpython and python -i. Even people who have used Python a lot sometimes don't know about these -- check it out.

Zulip: open source Slack alternative, written in Python, friendly community

If you're a Python enthusiast looking for an open source group chat application, you might be interested in Zulip. (I'm consulting for Zulip right now so I'm biased, but I was using and enjoying Zulip for years before I started working on it.) It's newly open-sourced, as of late last year. And the community is friendly and I particularly enjoy working with the lead maintainer, Tim Abbott (blog post with more details). It works in production now, and has iOS, Android, and desktop clients. You can self-host it right now, and Tim's aiming on standing up a software-as-a-service organization sometime soon.

A few interesting things:

* It's a Django application; if you want to understand how a Django web app does realtime stuff, check out the Zulip architectural overview and "life of a request" narrative.
* There's a mature code base, with a lot of test coverage, which is easier for a new programmer to get started with, and the developer setup docs are clear and well-tested.
* Zulip uses mypy for optional static type checking, which is an interesting way of balancing the flexibility of Python's duck typing with the error-checking of static typing.
* There's a live instance right now where you're welcome to come, lurk, ask questions, give your opinions on the product roadmap for 2016, and get help troubleshooting. If you want to make sure you're there sometime when other users and developers are there, come to the upcoming "office hour" on Monday, August 1, 1700-1800 UTC.
* Unlike Slack, Zulip lets you have individual threads ("topics") within channels ("streams"), and you can mute those threads to reduce notification noise.

Check it out!

Audio processing in Python

skud linked to a video tutorial by

theleadingzero about Audio Processing in Python, seemed like a nifty thing to share about here!

Simple HMTL generation for a folder of images

Don't know if this could be useful to anyone else, but I just wrote a wee script that generates the HTML for images in a directory on my web server, to make it easier to post about them to my journal:

import Image, sys

if len(sys.argv) < 3:
    print "Usage: %s [baseurl] [filename] [filename] ..." % sys.argv[0]

# put this in front of each image file name
baseurl = sys.argv[1]

# cycle through all image names given on the command line
for imagefile in sys.argv[2:]:

    try:
        i = Image.open(imagefile)
        ( width, height ) = i.size
        print '<img src="%s/%s" width="%d" height="%d" alt="" />' \
          % ( baseurl, imagefile, width, height )
    except IOError:
        print "Could not process %s" % imagefile

( Example of running it: )

.vimrc specifically for Python

Apparently, Python has a .vimrc file (which specifies how the command-line vim editor works) specifically for coding in the recommended Python style:

http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Misc/Vim/vimrc

I put it as .vimrc-python and included it in my main .vimrc like so:

source ~/.vimrc-python

Dear python shell:

Most of the time when I want to quit using you, I do something like this:

>>> exit
Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit

I am not sure why, if you know enough about what I want to give me a warning message about what I should Properly Do, you couldn't just exit and save me the headdesking trouble!

Other than that, I love you, so I am hoping you have a Really Good reason for this that I just don't know about.

pycon

Anyone going to Pycon 2010 (in Atlanta)? Submitting a talk? Proposals are due in less than two weeks.

I can't go this year, unfortunately, but I've been to two previously and have had a good time.

Code like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python

I kind of wish I had this article when I was first embarking on Python, but it's still useful to me even later in the game:

Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python

Subclassing a dictionary

Makes me love Python. I needed an class for a test suite for the DWMinion module I'm making to make it easy to create DWAccount objects on the fly. I figured out that I could do this by subclassing the dict class.

( Code here )

Python icons based on XKCD

I love XKCD

I especially love http://xkcd.com/353/

So I made three icons, which you are free to use.

and

And animated version of that comic might be even better, maybe I'll do that later.

roll call

Hey, everyone. I just posted a roll call for women in python over here, because I'm curious whether there just aren't a lot of women using python, or if the ones who are are just pretty quiet about it, and not very involved with the larger python community. I think those are both important issues, but they're very different ones.

Could you help me spread the word? And, of course, raise your hand if you're a woman! Thanks in advance.

Django and other frameworks that use Python

If you're interested in doing web development in Python, their wiki has a list of frameworks.

The Python web framework I've been developing in lately called Django, and I just made a community for it at

django_dev.