kiwi pycon 2010 notes
Last week I went to Kiwi PyCon 2010 in Waitangi (New Zealand, of course). I didn't take my laptop and the Kindle isn't really built for notetaking, so I scribbled notes the old fashioned way on a sheet of venue-provided note paper. The following is a dump of what I have.
- Consider Fabric for automating deployment/admin tasks
- A different approach is Chef, which is a declarative language for describing what you want your deployment to look like
- Wikkid is a new wiki, similar to ikiwiki but in Python. It uses repoze.who for authentication, which needs OpenID support.
- lettuce is like cucumber for Python
- Learn Hudson. Probably more well-supported than Buildbot.
- When creating automated test code, prefer anonymous "stock" object creation functions instead of specifying the full content of the object all the time. With the full content, how can you easily identify what's special or important about that object?
- Use an addCleanup style method to localise cleanup of test objects
- Apparently, reduce() is almost always used to sum numbers (now we have sum(), of course). In my code, I seem to have also used it for max(), string.join(), and all().
- Does my Psil deserve to be on PyPi? Maybe.
- Prefer elementtree over xml.dom
- Investigate Mox for mock objects
- Python has a pure functional subset. Write something to identify pure functional code. Introduce a pattern matching decorator. Offer some Erlang-like features for Python (easy message passing, lots of parallel processes, etc).
- Wikkid again. Support Git in addition to Bzr.
- There exists a 3to2 converter in addition to 2to3
- Embed Unicode characters by name: "\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H}ello world" == "Hello world"
- Unidecode claims to be able to convert Chinese characters to Pinyin
- Chardet can auto-detect character encodings
Kiwi PyCon was great again this year! Lots of good presentations and worthwhile discussion. Plenty of excellent giveaways too, nobody went away empty-handed.