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(photo cour­tesy of Sean MacEn­tee via flickr)

Some inter­est­ing bits and pieces (left­overs) from the week­end — I have a ten­dency to queue up a pile of “read later” stuff or email­ing myself a pile of things to talk about/link to/etc. Some­times, I actu­ally get to go through it all. Today — I get to share it to!

First up — Michael Foord (fuzzy­man) did two excel­lent posts — the first is on pri­vacy in Python — not big-P pri­vacy, but rather the programming/object pri­vacy. It’s a good read because it reen­forces the point that even if you think you’re being clever and hid­ing some­thing in a clo­sure to make it pri­vate, you can still get access to it. Remem­ber too — dun­ders (__foo) are just name-mangling. In Python, noth­ing is pri­vate (insert bad tast­ing joke about Python being face­book here).

Michael’s sec­ond post is on the Named­Tu­ple ker­fluffle that was stirred up Krist­jan Valur’s post on the use of exec() and named­tu­ple (short ver­sion: named­tu­ple cre­ates a string defin­ing the class and then calls exec to cre­ate the object. I think Michael is spot on — I think exec() gets a bad rap frankly, sure — it’s some­thing of a hand-grenade, if you use it wrong, you’re going to get hurt, but in this case I have to agree with Ray­mond in his com­ment on bug 3974 — the cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion is clear and main­tain­able. I don’t like the stern­ness of the reply — but he is right. Kristjan’s use-case is an inter­est­ing one, but I don’t think it’s one that war­rants the removal of the exist­ing imple­men­ta­tion. I’m won­der­ing if a “fall­back if exec doesn’t exist” is worth inclusion.

Then again, I’ve spo­ken to peo­ple who refuse to use named­tu­ples because they now know how the sausage is made. I still think the sausage is deli­cious.

Next is a pretty inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on a pre­sen­ta­tion that came out of Pixar on get­ting over embar­rass­ment in order to get things done — I don’t have much to add above the com­ments on hacker news, except to say I think the same men­tal blocks they talk about for ani­ma­tors apply to pro­gram­mers, writ­ers, etc. We hide from code reviews, we hide our writ­ing until we think it’s “Pitch Per­fect” — when in real­ity, we shouldn’t. We should be shar­ing, dis­cussing and col­lab­o­rat­ing ear­lier, more fre­quently and more often.

Share and Ship early and often — see also “Don’t Go Dark”.

Finally, I was happy to see the “Quick and Easy Debug­ging in Python” post from Jeet Suku­maran — it’s always nice to evolve past sprin­kling print fairy dust all over your code for debug­ging — even if we all still do it despite know­ing or using PDB. Just to add to his post, if you want to increase your PDB-Fu, I rec­om­mend this “Debug­ging in Python” post by Steve Ferg, and the offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion for PDB. We should really add a HOWTO for this.

p.s. For addi­tional good-reading, check out “Pri­or­i­ties Don’t Exist in a Vac­uum” and “First Care”- while not ger­mane to what’s I’ve already writ­ten about, they’re a good essays on pri­or­i­ties. Thanks to the lat­est “Back to Work” pod­cast.

(photo courtesy of Sean MacEntee via flickr) Some interesting bits and pieces (leftovers) from the weekend - I have a tendency to queue up a pile of "read later" stuff or emailing myself a pile of things to talk about/link to/etc. Sometimes, I actually get to go through it all. Today - I get to ...

Pre­am­ble

There’s been some recent dis­cus­sion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speak­ers should have to pay for admis­sion as well — see Chris Wanstrath’s (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Con­vore thread for exam­ples. Obvi­ously, as PyCon is the “big dog” so to speak for Python con­fer­ences, every­one looks to “us” for a model to work from, or how we man­age things. I’ve seen a lot of poop slung towards the Djan­go­Con orga­niz­ers, mainly due to a lack of know­ing “why” cer­tain poli­cies (such as “Every­one Pays”) exist for Djan­go­Con, PyCon, and other conferences.

As co-chair and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair last year, and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair the year before, and now chair for the next two years — I fig­ured it might be good to take a moment to explain the ratio­nale behind PyCon’s approach — as well as some sta­tis­tics about the bud­get. I’m not going to state that this pol­icy is per­fect; nor that it won’t be changed; I also will not release the bud­get pub­licly — I don’t think giv­ing every­one a spread­sheet with­out the con­text of the hun­dreds of man hours of work that go into it is use­ful, at all.

Impor­tant Note: PyCon is orga­nized and man­aged by the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion — this means that, as part of being a 501c3 char­ity, some of the finan­cials from past PyCon is avail­able as part of pub­licly acces­si­ble finan­cial doc­u­ments of the foun­da­tion. You can find those on the PSF’s site.

The same rea­son­ing may not apply to a con­fer­ence that is orga­nized by a com­mer­cial entity or is done for profit. OSCON is a com­mer­cial con­fer­ence, so hav­ing speak­ers get in free is gen­er­ally expected. DjangoCon.us is in the mid­dle — it is orga­nized for profit by a com­mer­cial entity, but it also con­tributes heav­ily back to the Django Soft­ware Foun­da­tion. DjangoCon.eu is man­aged dif­fer­ently as well.

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Preamble There's been some recent discussion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speakers should have to pay for admission as well - see Chris Wanstrath's (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Convore thread for examples. Obviously, as PyCon is the "big dog" so to speak for Python conferences, everyone looks to ...

I had a bit of an idea that almost turned into another crank based on yesterday’s blog post “On Fam­ily, Crank­ing and Chang­ing” — the “code equiv­a­lent” for the idea stem­ming from the Artists Way’s con­cept of “Morn­ing Pages”/750Words and the Writ­ing Down the Bones con­cept of “Keep­ing the Hands Moving”.

I made the mis­take how­ever, of ask­ing on twit­ter — never, ever ask a bunch of pro­gram­mers quote “What do you think the char count or line num­ber of a rea­son­ably sized Python mod­ule is?” — never. Just don’t. I’m not even ask­ing that here. Instead, I’m giv­ing you a sim­ple idea for a web appli­ca­tion. Take the imple­men­ta­tion of github’s gist’s/paste­bin, mash it up with a built in code edi­tor (such as Ace), and kick out a programmer’s ver­sion of 750 Words. The goal is not to force peo­ple to share code pub­licly — if they want, let them flip that bit (or just post/link to github’s gist sys­tem). The goal is to encour­age programmers/hackers to explore/write some new:

• code
• tests
• docs

And I mean new — not some­thing bogged down by their every day projects. It could just be a clever one liner ala Raymond’s python tips. It could be a few-hundred-line piece of code that just tracks how many times they’ve watched their favorite show using some cool mod­ule. Just keep the hand mov­ing; just take 3, 10 or 30 min­utes a day and keep a pri­vate code jour­nal of new ideas, con­cepts, etc. Write some morn­ing pages.

Project Euler is algo­rithm prob­lem solv­ing, so it doesn’t ful­fill the goal. Code Kata’s come damn close (see also Cod­ing Horror’s take) — but again, those are focused on pro­vid­ing a prob­lem, and then hav­ing some­one come up with a solu­tion. I’d like some­thing that just sets forth the ideas exposed for writ­ers above, and sets it in a pro­gram­ming context.

If you want, allow users to seed it with sug­gested ideas. So that when a user logs in, they might have set a “pre­ferred pro­gram­ming language(s)” and get a a lit­tle javascript popup with a prob­lem sourced from another user, like say “use python threads” or “write an appli­ca­tion that forks”. This lat­ter part ties into an idea I had stem­ming from Zed’s orig­i­nal “Learn Python The Hard Way” post­ing — too many of these prac­tice sites focus on algo­rithms and math­e­mat­i­cal things that prob­a­bly won’t help you in the next 8 hours. Some­thing that had prob­lems like “send a receive UDP mes­sages from a socket” and the like — focus­ing on com­mon, prac­ti­cal things.

Any­ways so what are the require­ments for “XXXcode” or “xxxlinesaday”/etc:

• Allow signup/signin
• Allow pub­lic shar­ing of journals/non public
• Allow sub­mit­ted “ideas”
• Out­line the idea stem­ming from the Artists Way/Writing Down the Bones.
• Make it look decent (I’m tired of ugly pro­gram­mer sites. Go get some­thing from the­me­for­est if you need it)

There ya go. Take it and run with it if you want. Just stop both­er­ing me about lines of code in a mod­ule. Man you guys can be pedantic.

I had a bit of an idea that almost turned into another crank based on yesterday's blog post "On Family, Cranking and Changing" - the "code equivalent" for the idea stemming from the Artists Way's concept of "Morning Pages"/750Words and the Writing Down the Bones concept of "Keeping the Hands Moving". I made the mistake ...

Intro­duc­tion

Some­time on May 6th — over two weeks ago now — I shot out a innocu­ous tweet ask­ing what might be a good blog topic. I think I said some­thing like “python, fam­ily, .…” — the over­whelm­ing major­ity of them responded with “write some­thing on fam­ily”, iron­i­cally, as I was read­ing those responses sit­ting at a stop light (yeah, I know — don’t yell at me) I got a phone call from my wife ask­ing me to come home imme­di­ately. You see, my wife is very, very preg­nant with our sec­ond child, and it’s not been an easy preg­nancy for her. We’ve had a lot of scares, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time in and out of our local hos­pi­tal — so when she said “come home right now” — you can expect that every­thing else pretty much evac­u­ated my brain except that.

I guess the twit­ter responses acted as sort of a cos­mic hint as to what was com­ing — the abbre­vi­ated ver­sion being that my wife, bless her soul, was deemed “high risk” and admit­ted to the hos­pi­tal on the 6th — with the expec­ta­tion that she would not leave until she gave birth. Fast for­ward two weeks in the hos­pi­tal, a myr­iad of tests, blow­ing out bud­gets on gas (what the hell) and being a “Sin­gle Dad” for most of that that time, and I can hap­pily report that mommy and baby are sta­ble, but still hang­ing out inside my wife.

These past two weeks taught me a lot about myself, about my fam­ily — some things that I thought I knew were brought to task and tested — heck, some of the things I was going to write about were put to the ulti­mate test. You may not really care about any of this — I’d go some­place else at this point if that’s the case. I do hope to out­line my thoughts on bal­anc­ing things (though I remain ter­ri­ble at it) and find­ing the time. You’re not going to find a cure all, or a hack that will “just make things work” — that doesn’t exist.

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Introduction Sometime on May 6th - over two weeks ago now - I shot out a innocuous tweet asking what might be a good blog topic. I think I said something like "python, family, ...." - the overwhelming majority of them responded with "write something on family", ironically, as I was reading those responses sitting ...

Pre­am­ble

A recent post on Hacker News enti­tled “Why I still don’t con­tribute to open source” raised a series of thoughts in my head — but then, before I could even take the time to gen­er­ate the small­est of replies, Brian Curtin swooped in and made prob­a­bly one of the sin­gle best com­ments in reply, and on the sub­ject of con­tri­bu­tion that I’ve ever read. The orig­i­nal post; and Brian’s excel­lent reply were enough to get me obsess­ing about this sub­ject again — eager to share my thoughts and feel­ings on it.

A while ago (almost exactly a year, oddly enough) I posted a ques­tion here to my blog — “Why aren’t You Con­tribut­ing (to Python)” — the replies to that post, both in the orig­i­nal com­ments, Hacker News, Red­dit and other thought­ful responses by Tim Golden, Yaniv Aknin and Brian Curtin made me sit back and think for a long time what we — as a “python core” team could do to help reduce the fric­tion and over­all bar­rier to con­tribut­ing to core itself. It also made me take a step back and ask myself why I con­tribute to Python — not just via core, but also to PyCon and the PSF.

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Preamble A recent post on Hacker News entitled "Why I still don't contribute to open source" raised a series of thoughts in my head - but then, before I could even take the time to generate the smallest of replies, Brian Curtin swooped in and made probably one of the single best comments in reply, ...

On Fri­day of last week, a new post I wrote for my employer (Nasuni) went up — “Encryp­tion Keys, User Data and Sub­poe­nas”. In that post, I got to out­line, in clear “non slip­pery” lan­guage how my employer man­ages encryp­tion keys, what data they have access to, etc. One of my favorite quotes:

If a cus­tomer has pro­vided their own encryp­tion key(s) — Nasuni, or the cloud provider, do not have those keys, and can not pro­vide them as part of a sub­poena or other legal process. We can not decrypt or access your data. We can not sup­ply a key which we do not have. This is not pol­icy or trust level pro­tec­tion: It’s impossible.

We offer auto-generated and escrowed keys as a con­ve­nience to the user — the ben­e­fits of hav­ing this fea­ture out­weigh the cost. A user or com­pany who knows noth­ing about encryp­tion keys and key escrow can still have strong data secu­rity and instan­ta­neous dis­as­ter recov­ery, they can install a Filer in min­utes and imme­di­ately be up and running.

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On Friday of last week, a new post I wrote for my employer (Nasuni) went up - "Encryption Keys, User Data and Subpoenas". In that post, I got to outline, in clear "non slippery" language how my employer manages encryption keys, what data they have access to, etc. One of my favorite quotes: If a ...

I — like most peo­ple com­fort­able with my rel­a­tively sane (yet lim­ited) knowl­edge of Python — rarely go and read the python docs except when I know what I’m look­ing for. For exam­ple, I have a win­dow open to iter­tools and col­lec­tions open a lot more than I care to admit (I love you named­tu­ple. I loves you so much), but I rarely go off look­ing for new things/stuff that’s changed.

For those few of you (and really, it should only be a few of you) who don’t know — Ray­mond Het­tinger is a python core devel­oper and author/maintainer of quite a few inter­est­ing mod­ules within the stan­dard library (and a con­stant stream of ASPN recipes). Ray­mond is also highly active on python-dev and other lists the sub­ject of this post being python-list (the one list I refuse to join just due to the time/attention tradeoff).

Oh, he’s also a cur­rent mem­ber of the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion board of direc­tors. To say he’s active would be an understatement.

Back to the sub­ject at hand: Docs.

Ray­mond posted some­thing I think should see a lit­tle bit more atten­tion — as I stated in my opener, many of us are guilty of not read­ing much in the way of Python docs unless we are look­ing for some­thing spe­cific. We miss out on gems/updates to older docs that really make them shine. We also miss out on new exam­ples, and other things that really help make Python’s docs some of the best out there.

As I said in my for­ward to Doug Hellmann’s “The Python Stan­dard Library By Exam­ple” -

The stan­dard library’s doc­u­men­ta­tion is good, and con­stantly improving/evolving. Given the size and breadth of the stan­dard library, it’s amaz­ing for what it is. It’s awe­some that we have hun­dreds of pages of doc­u­men­ta­tion con­tributed by hun­dreds of devel­op­ers and users that are used every sin­gle day by hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple to cre­ate things – things as sim­ple as one-off scripts, and as com­plex as the soft­ware that con­trols giant robotic arms.

In Raymond’s post to python-list, he listed some new/newly updated docs that are really interesting:

• Pri­or­ity Queue Imple­men­ta­tion Notes
• Search­ing Sorted Lists
• Writ­ing a Tokenizer
• A Beefed out cmd example
• Ordered Dict exam­ples and Recipes
• The new log­ging howto/cookbook
• A howto on sorting
• collections.namedtuple (I <3 this thing)

The newly added/revised log­ging howto by Vinay (author/maintainer of the log­ging mod­ule) is really good to note (You have vis­ited the python docs how­tos, right? It’s here.). The addi­tional log­ging cook­book nicely com­pli­ments Vinay’s revised log­ging mod­ule documentation.

Oh, and if you were won­der­ing — yes, there is an easy to read list in the “What’s new” doc­u­ment for 2.7 (curated by Ray­mond) that lists out all the new Python 3 fea­tures back ported to python 2.7 for your read­ing plea­sure.

Last night, an addi­tional resource popped up on my radar — pyth0n.org — a site, while need­ing some CSS love (oh, the CSS love it needs) is an excel­lent way to jump to just about any­thing within Python (docs, classes, meth­ods, built-ins, etc). I think I killed it with load from tweet­ing about it last night, so be gen­tle. It really is a cool site, it’s like a uber-index of Python.

As an adden­dum — Ray­mond has also become very active on post­ing inter­est­ing bit of python knowledge/pro­tips on his twit­ter account, which have been a joy to see pop up in my tweet stream (Given how guilty I am of say­ing things that might be con­strued as “noise”). Some of highlights:

• #python fac­toid: random.sample() auto­mat­i­cally chooses an algo­rithm, remember-previous-picks or remove-picks-from-the-population
• #python pro-tip: deque’s optional maxlen argu­ment use­ful for n most recent items, mov­ing aver­ages, slid­ing win­dows, tail­ing files
• #python pro tip: def mean(s): return math.fsum(s)/len(s) # don’t lose pre­ci­sion while adding large num­bers of small values.
• Dirt sim­ple map/reduce util­ity for #python:http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577676

So, take a look around the lat­est docs and fol­low him, and other python devel­op­ers such (Barry War­saw, David Bea­z­ley, Nick Cogh­lan, R. David Mur­ray, Guido Van Rossum) on twit­ter (you can fol­low me if you want). Brett Can­non (another core com­mit­ter) has a twit­ter list of com­mit­ters.

There’s been a lot of work done across the board to improve the docs, add to them and clean them up. A lot of excel­lent peo­ple con­tribute changes almost daily to them. They are a fan­tas­tic resource, and are greatly com­pli­mented by work like the Python Mod­ule of the Week (Doug Hell­mann) and other tuto­ri­als spread across the web.

If you know of a par­tic­u­larly good tuto­r­ial, or expla­na­tion of a mod­ule, you might con­sider sub­mit­ting a ticket cit­ing it, and sug­gest­ing it be included into the stan­dard library docs as well. What are some of your favorite doc­u­men­ta­tion gems, or exam­ples for Python?

I - like most people comfortable with my relatively sane (yet limited) knowledge of Python - rarely go and read the python docs except when I know what I’m looking for. For example, I have a window open to itertools and collections open a lot more than I care to admit (I love you ...

For a 5 month update, check out: “The Stand­ing Desk Exper­i­ment 5 Months in”

For about the past year or two, I’ve been work­ing on improv­ing my “state of being” for lack of a bet­ter term — focus­ing on more pro­duc­tiv­ity, health, etc — I think every­one goes though this at one point or another. Var­i­ous events of the past year — an incom­ing sec­ond kid, badly dislocating/injuring my knee and reha­bil­i­tat­ing that, real­iz­ing that being an over­weight, unhealthy geek prob­a­bly wasn’t in my, or my fam­i­lies’ long term inter­est and see­ing my lit­tle girl grow up faster than any­thing I’ve ever seen (see this excel­lent post by Mer­lin Mann — “Crank­ing”) has trig­gered me to make a series of changes, the most recent of which is directly inter­est­ing to a lot of you — I’ve switched over to a stand­ing desk setup at work.

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For a 5 month update, check out: "The Standing Desk Experiment 5 Months in" For about the past year or two, I've been working on improving my "state of being" for lack of a better term - focusing on more productivity, health, etc - I think everyone goes though this at one point or another. ...

Intro­duc­tion

It’s been over a year since I was elected by the PSF mem­ber­ship to be a mem­ber of the board of direc­tors of the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion — this past week, I was lucky to be reelected. In that year, and even in the years prior to my elec­tion, I’ve long wanted to write down my thoughts and feel­ings about the foun­da­tion. This includes what it is, what it does and what it should do. You’d be stunned how many peo­ple — PSF mem­bers included — who don’t know the answer to these three things. Worse still, you’d prob­a­bly be even more sur­prised to find out many peo­ple who don’t think the PSF should exist — or even that it exists at all.

Before we start, I want to clar­ify a few things:

• What fol­lows is my opin­ion; and may be shared by some — or none — of the cur­rent 13 PSF board members.
• What fol­lows is not the opin­ion of my employer (not that I need to say that…).
• What fol­lows has no rela­tion or bear­ing on my role as co-chair and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair of PyCon.
• What fol­lows may be incom­plete, I reserve the right to amend or make clar­i­fy­ing statements.
• None of this is meant as a crit­i­cism of any past direc­tors, mem­bers, etc.

With that pile of dis­claimers done, I will state this: what fol­lows is my offi­cial opin­ion of the PSF and it’s duties and role in the Python Com­mu­nity as a direc­tor of the PSF — this means that if you are a PSF mem­ber, and dis­agree with what fol­lows, con­sider vot­ing against me when the elec­tion comes up this year. I will state that it is my goal to not only express what I think the PSF is, does and should do but also to pro­vide some­thing that:

• Helps explain the fun­da­men­tals of the PSF.
• Helps explain what the Board of Direc­tors is.
• Helps make the argu­ment why com­pa­nies should become sponsors.
• Helps make the argu­ment as to why you should donate to the PSF.

Much of what I will be writ­ing may be a sim­pli­fied or updated ver­sion of the infor­ma­tion that is also on the main Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion page. I’d like to note that this post has spanned sev­eral months of on-and-off writ­ing — and PyCon 2011 right in the mid­dle of it, so there is some infor­ma­tion shear as time passed.

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Introduction It's been over a year since I was elected by the PSF membership to be a member of the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation - this past week, I was lucky to be reelected. In that year, and even in the years prior to my election, I've long wanted to write ...

I posted the Python Men­tors — Python Core Men­tor­ship site last night. It’s pretty bare/minimalist (inten­tion­ally) right now — if there’s infor­ma­tion you think is miss­ing, or some­thing you would like to see, drop me a com­ment or an email. Feel like hack­ing on the source? Check out the bit­bucket repo — it’s a sim­ple blo­gofile site right now, and I don’t think we need much more for the forsee­able future.

Many thanks goes to OSUOSL for the free hosting.

I posted the Python Mentors - Python Core Mentorship site last night. It's pretty bare/minimalist (intentionally) right now - if there's information you think is missing, or something you would like to see, drop me a comment or an email. Feel like hacking on the source? Check out the bitbucket repo - it's a ...