montrealPython

The second event in our series of Distutils2 sprints was again a success. We’ve managed to fix some interesting issues and we’ve gained some experience points at dealing with the black magic of the packaging arcane.

We would like to thank TP1 for hosting the sprint at their nice Downtown Montreal offices and also for the pizza. Pierre Paul, our host, wrote a longer post relating the event.

Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on Distutils2 sprints.

Special thanks to the sprinters:

• Julien Courteau
• Jonathan Fernandes
• Patrice Gauthier
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• Pierre Paul Lefebvre
• Alex Parij
• Kim Pettersen

Stay tuned this week for the announcement of the next sprint.

Here’s a glimpse of patches being born:

Divine inspiration:

Pythonistas

The last workshop in French for the winter 2012 season is this Wednesday. We wish to remind you that there is still plenty of places left, and, especially, that the room we have for the workshop is not SH-R810 as announced, but SH-2420, also in the Sherbrooke Pavillion of UQÀM.

Here are all the details:

Django : monter une application web en Python

• Date: Wednesday 16th of May, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (please come at 5:30PM if you need help setting up your computer)
• Place: UQAM, Sherbrooke Building, 200 Sherbrooke West, room SH2420
• Sign up: on Eventbrite
• Workshop’s wiki page
• Workshop’s original post

Last minute news :
Qt community have a Qt Meetup today at Notman House, it is all about Python for Qt. It’s a hands on workshop so bring your PySide questions and your handsets!

See : Meetup’s page

Hey honey, take a walk on the PySide!

Ta-ta-ra-ta-taaaaaaaaaaa!
Pythonistas, Montréal-Python Rugby League needs your help!

Here comes your confrontation with Django… a bit postponed since we absolutely wanted to hold this event in a UQAMian stadium. If bad weather occurs, we’ve took our dispositions : we’ve found a covered stadium near UQAM.

So, let’s stop kidding, here’s what you need to know about our last workshop in French of the Winter 2012 Session :

Django : monter une application web en Python

• Date: Wednesday 16th of May, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• Place: UQAM (hourra!), Sherbrooke Building, 200 Sherbrooke West, room SH-2420
• Subscription: on Eventbrite

• Workshop’s wiki page
• Workshop’s original post

Please, install what’s needed before the workshop or show up at 5:30 PM to get help.

Don’t forget to subscribe even tough it’s free!

Be there!

The first Distutils2 sprint, held on the 21st of April at RadialPoint’s office, was a real success.

That afternoon marked the renewal of Montréal-Python’s contributions to this vital project of the Python ecosystem. Indeed, two years ago, sprints were organized here at the very beginning of Distutils2, which aims to replace Distutils with a more powerful tool that implements the new specs (PEPs) that all packaging tools will comply with in the long term.

We’re pleased that a dozen of volunteers were part of this first sprint!

I spent some time with every participant and I think everyone learnt something from the sprint, be it knowledge on packaging, a first experience in free software development or the writing test suites. I’d like to thank everyone who came and opened Pandora’s Box in order to fix bugs for the benefit of the whole community.

The complexity of the code explains the fact that only two patches were done at the end of the sprint, but the other patches started by the other participants could certainly be completed during the next one.

In order to keep the pace, a second sprint will be held Saturday the 12th of May. TP1 will host this sprint and provide us with some pizza. Keep in mind that our deadline is the release of the first beta version on the 24th of June. We have until that point to close bugs and implement some useful features still missing.

Contributing to Distutils2 will help the whole Python community. Be part of it!

Second Distutils2 Sprint:

• Date: Saturday, 12th of May 2012, from 12:00 to 19:00
• Place: TP1, 1410 Stanley street, office 500 (map)
• Registration is optional but recommended
• Setup instructions (can also be done on site)

Just a quick reminder : tomorrow is the Django Workshop in English at McGill.
There’s about 35 places left, so don’t be shy and let’s have a nice hands on Django together.

Our subscription service (Eventbrite) was automatically close yesterday because the auto-limit of 40 places were all reserved, but in fact there’s nearly 85 places (so near 35 left now)!

So, sorry for the inconvenience and subscribe now if it’s not already done and/or show up tomorrow!

• Date : 2012-05-02 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• Place : McGill, Rutherford Building, room 118, 3600 University Street
• Subscription : http://montrealpython-workshop-20120502.eventbrite.ca/

See you!

N.B.: exact place for the same workshop in French next week will be soon announce here.

Extra, extra!
Read all about it!

Montréal-Python 29, Mythomaniac Meme, is next Monday!

• Date : 30th of April, 6:00 PM
• Place : RadialPoint, 2050 de Bleury street, 2nd floor

It’s gonna be a hell of a night!
Another free edition, open to all! It’s all about the Web!

Be there!

Pythonistas, let’s continue our magnificent journey on the Pythonic Way. It’s now time to dive head first in web development using Django, a Python web framework. Our last workshop [1] of the Winter 2012 series will show you that “Beautiful is better than ugly” and that “Simple is better than complex”. — Zen of Python

The Montréal-Python Rugby League (MPRL) [DoesNotExist] cruelly needs a web app to manage its teams and its season. In only 3 hours, we’ll make this happen.

Let’s code this together Wednesday on May 2nd at McGill University.

• Date : 2012-05-02 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• Place : McGill, Rutherford Building, room 118
  3600 University Street [2]

The workshop will be in English but all nations are welcome. No need to know rugby nor having attended previous workshop. Our workshops are free and open to all.

The prerequisites, the technical setup and the content of this workshop can be found on the workshop’s wiki page :

Django : building a Python web app

Please take time to install the softwares (Python, Django [, South, IPython]) before the workshop. If you bump into any issue during the installation, don’t panic, Montréal-Python team will there at 5:30 PM to help you setup your laptop for the workshop, whatever OS you are running. The installation procedures are on the wiki page.

To be part of the scrum, please confirm your presence:
Subscription : http://montrealpython-workshop-20120502.eventbrite.ca/

N.B. : This workshop will be held in French the following week. Date and place to be confirmed here in a separate post.

Ready? So…
Crouch! Touch! Pause! Engage!

[1] We originally planned 4 workshops for this Winter 2012 series, but supporting the student strike movement made us reorganize things. Lucky you, you might see yourself following the 4th workshop in the very first Montréal-Python Summer Workshop series!

[2] The room of this workshop is sponsored by : the Network Dynamics lab.

Montréal-Python 29 “Mythomaniac Meme” will be held the 30th of April. We’re very proud to announce that our meeting will be held at the RadialPoint offices at 2050 Bleury Street, 2rd floor.

This meeting is all about the Interwebs and the technologies making Internet so funny and so Pythonic.

Here’s the program of the evening:

• 6:00 PM : Door opening
• 6:20 PM : Announcements
• 6:30 PM : Beginning of the show (Flash presentations)
• 6:50 PM : Pause
• 7:00 PM : Resuming the show (other presentations)
• 9:00 PM : End of the evening at Bénélux

In order to have a first class evening, we’re inviting you to submit us your talk proposal. We still have places for 5, 10, 15 or 25 minutes talks.

Flash presentations :

• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel, “Module of the month”
• Pierre Paul Lefebvre, “Courte description sur l’utilisation de Fabric pour pousser des données entre différends environnements web”

Our main presentors:

• Gabriel Gosselin “Quick, powerful ReST with Django”
• Didier Rano “Implémentation d’un mini moteur de recherche avec Redis, Python, Django, gunicorn, supervisor”
• George Peristerakis, “Semantic Web. Stepping away from the table”
• Alice Bevan-McGregor, “WebCore”
• Éric Araujo, “Hot in Python Packaging; distutils2 and you”

A big thanks to our sponsors, RadialPoint, Savoir-Faire Linux and also the Benelux for the free beer

Be there or be square!

Pythonistas,

Distutils2 is looking for love, and you are the group who are going to give it! The Montreal-Python user group is hosting, on the 21st of April, a sprint in Montreal to work on Distutils2 with Éric Araujo, Python core developer and distutils2 maintainer. Bring your laptop and your magic fingers, and we will provide the food and the good times. No previous knowledge of Distutils2 required, just general Python skills.

Distutils2 is the official successor of distutils. It aims to be a better, more flexible and more featureful packaging tool for Python authors, as well as a reusable library for packaging tools developers. Distutils2 is included in the Python 3.3 standard library under the name “packaging”, the module named “distutils2” is the standalone backport for Python versions 2.5 to 2.7, and 3.x. The first beta versions of Python 3.3 and Distutils2 are coming in June, and we are planning a series of sprints to make it ready for the release.

A sprint is simply programmers meeting together face-to-face to work on the same project. Previous sprints held in Montreal have improved Distutils2, why don’t you come along for the next one and put your mark on a Python release?

The good folks at Radialpoint have graciously provided us with space and free pizza. Come join us on Saturday, the 21st of April, from 12pm to 7pm.

The address is:
2050 Bleury Street
Suite 300

Registration here is preferable but not required.

For hacks and glory!

Montréal-Python is proposing you to finally discover, in French this time, your obsessions on Twitter (or those of others) by reading and analysing Twitter feeds with Python. Yes finally, after more than 1 month of waiting in order to support the strike movement at the science faculty of UQAM, the workshop will be held next week.

Since we would not force you to cross the picket line, we’ve asked for help from our friends at Google Montréal: they are inviting us to their offices next Wednesday, April 4th, to continue our Python introduction workshop series.

Our workshops are open to all of you and are absolutely free. No need to have attended the previous ones to come. Only a minimal knowledge of Python is required (example: basic types).

Bring your laptop and try to install Python and ipython before the workshop. If you have any issues, the Montréal-Python team will be there to help you before the event (arrive early)

The installation procedure and all the needed informations about the workshop is in the wiki page of the workshop at :
Atelier 2012-04-04 : Python : notions plus avancées et exploitation de l’API Twitter

Atelier 2012-04-04 : Python : advanced topics and using the Twitter API

• Date : 2012-04-04 6:30pm to 9:00pm
• Place : Google Montréal, 1253 McGill College, Montreal, QC H3B 2Y5

The schedule for the evening :

• 6:00pm Doors opening and technical support
• 6:30pm Begining of the workshop
• 9:00pm End of the evening at Bénélux

Warning, only 30 places are available for this event, don’t wait too long before subscribing!

Subscription : http://montrealpython-atelier-20120404.eventbrite.ca

À la r’voyure!

Disclaimer: This review is for the paper version only.

This is a review of The Quick Python Book second edition. by Vern Ceder at Manning Publications. The book is an introduction to Python with the focus on the core language features. There is what did I think of the book.

The book does a great job overall to bring you up to speed on how to program in Python in a pythonic way.

The author makes some assumptions about its audience. First, you must have grasped the concept of object oriented design and data structures. Because the book avoids the theoretical explanations and goes directly to the implementation.

When you first pick up the book, you will notice how thin it is compared to other introduction books. And that is because it is terse in presenting the content and examples. The focus is the core Python language and some commonly used libraries found in the standard library. The book also covers some rudimentary GUI programming using TKinker, just enough to create a simple form. The book follows the same rudimentary explanation with the database and networking chapter. The book’s strong points are its thorough explanation of the core language and program structure. Which in turn, promotes a pythonic way of programming and engineering your code.

At the end of the book, the reader will have learned to implement a modular tested python application whether it be a desktop or a daemon, which can distribute and run anywhere.

The only problem I have with the book is it does not provide links to reference sites. You could argue that those links are supplemental, but for an introduction book, the links are essential to complete the chapters. Also, adding syntax highlighting to aide in reading the example code, would make following the code easier.

Overall, I’m happy with the book. If you are a programmer with some experience and interested in learning Python, I highly recommend this book.

Thanks for Manning Publication for providing us some free copies of the book. For more information, you should refer to the Manning Publication’s website at http://www.manning.com/ceder/

People get ready, as a welcome back for our delegates at PyCon, mid-March will be electronic and Pythonic. We’re proud to announce for the 19th of March, Montréal-Python 28 : Lithographic Lobotomy, Electronic special issue.

The event will be held in collaboration with Foulab, pure electronic freaks : they’ll give a good show for sure.

The meeting will be at the magnificient Notman House, 51st Sherbrooke West.

Here’s the program of the evening:

• 6:00 PM : Door opening
• 6:20 PM : Announcements
• 6:30 PM : Beginning of the show (Flash presentations)
• 6:50 PM : Pause
• 7:00 PM : Resuming the show (other prenstations)
• 9:00 PM : End of the evening at Bénélux

Our valorous presentors:

• Michel Gallant, “pyserial and how it is used in tweletype”
• Pablo Duboue, “Using freecad for grammatically designing makerbot objects in python”
• Philippe Chretien, “Build your own PyGame wireless controller and play with a web controlled robot!”
• Paul Pereira-Brunner, “MyHDL”

As always, we’re glad to benefit from the support of our sponsors, involved in our Python community.

Thanks to :

• Ludia
• iWeb
• Benelux
• OSMO foundation, Notman House
• Radialpoint
• Savoir-Faire Linux

ConFoo organizes tomorrow a communities cocktail. It’s an opportunity to celebrate with the speakers and the sponsors.

Come tell us what are the advantages and the benefits of your preferred language at the Hilton Bonaventure hotel.

• Where: 900 Gauchetière west.
• When: Thursday, March 1st
• How much: Free

Hope to see you there!

http://confoo.ca/en/news/2012-open-activities

Atelier 2012-02-27 : Python : notions plus avancées et exploitation de l’API Twitter

This workshop in French, planned to be held at UQAM next Monday, is postponed due to the strike voted yesterday by the Association étudiante du secteur des sciences de l’UQAM (AESSUQAM). To show support, Montréal-Python will respect this strike.

The workshop should be postponed in March, the exact date will be soon announced.

However, the workshop in English, tonight at McGill, is maintained.
See : Workshop 2012-02-23 : Python : more advanced notions and use of Twitter API.

Montréal-Python apologies for this situation and thanks you for your comprehension.

See you soon.

Montréal-Python’s team

This month, Montréal-Python (in conjunction with McGill’s Network Dynamics lab) will let you discover your obsessions on Twitter (or others’ obsessions) by reading and analysing Twitter feeds with Python. This second workshop of our Winter 2012 session will be the occasion to discover new Python goodies while playing with data from Twitter.

Our workshops are open to all and absolutely free. No need to have attended the previous one to attend this workshop. Only minimal knowledge of Python is required (e.g: basic types).

Bring your laptop and try to have Python installed before the workshop. If you have trouble with the installation, the Montréal-Python team will be able to help at the very beginning of the workshop.

Installation procedures and all the information on this workshop are on the workshop’s wiki page :
Workshop 2012-02-23 : Python : more advanced notions and use of Twitter API.

Workshop 2012-02-23 : Python : more advanced notions and use of Twitter API.

• Date : 2012-02-23 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• Place : 3630 University (Trottier Building) room TR1100
• Instructors: Mathieu Perreault and Prof. Derek Ruths, from the Network Dynamics lab.

Here’s the program for the evening:

• 6:00 PM Workshop
• 9:00 PM End of evening at Bénélux

Places could be limited, register now!
Registration : http://guestlistapp.com/events/90219

A workshop in French with a similar content will be help at UQAM the following Monday.
All the information on the workshop in French at UQAM :
Atelier 2012-02-27 : Python : notions plus avancées et exploitation de l’API Twitter

Be there!

Next Thursday, MTLStartupTalent, will showcase what Montreal has to offer best.

They already have a great selection of startups looking for talent: CakeMail, Ziliko, 2XM Interactive, Crescendo, Pheromone, CrowdtTwist and more.

There’s some very great Pythonisthas out there that we would like to celebrate.

As such:

• are you a talent?
• what amazing things are you doing?
• which achievements are you the most proud of?

In front of a large crowd, come tell us why you are so proud of your preferred language and community. Did you win at a recent Startup Weekend? Is your github project forked by many others? Did you win a design award? Are you a star on Twitter? Do you want to present a weekend project you’re proud of?

We want to celebrate all those small and big achievements that makes Montréal a great city for innovation and creativity. And the Python community is definitely part of it.

Take your ticket at http://mtlstartuptalent.eventbrite.com/ and communicate with us if you would like to share you experience at this event mtlpyteam@googlegroups.com

Hello Montreal hackers

The cloud robotics week-end is happening the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of March.

Come hack on robots and web services to create cool projects in robotics. See   http://roboticshackathon.com/ for more information.

We are waiting for you if you would like to create a team Montreal-Python and if you would like to join us for this week-end of hack and programming.

Hacking Health is on February 24 and 25 in Montreal. Our goal is to pair health and technological entrepreneurs so that they can develop solutions to front-line healthcare problems.

By emphasizing hands-on work on small projects which can be tackled in a short period of time, participants can quickly test assumptions, build teams, and generate momentum for promising ideas in healthcare.

There’s a limited number of places and they are leaving very quickly: http://physiqa.wufoo.com/forms/hackers-form/

For more information or to sign up, visit http://www.hackinghealth.ca.