[portland] February meeting recap

[michelle rowley]

Hey Pythoneers,

We had a great meeting Tuesday, thanks to everyone who came out! An extra
special shout is going out to Chris & Charles for coming all the way from
Salem. Also, of course, *huge* thanks to our presenters, Adam Lowry, Jason
Kirtland, Kirby Urner and Michel Pelletier - you guys rocked it. Here's a
quick summary and some links:

Michel Pelletier kicked off the meeting with a little demo of the turtle
module (http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html). turtle is part of the
Python Standard Library and can be used to draw shapes and stuff. The turtle
was pretty cute, and he drew half a rectangle for us.

Kirby Urner let the group have sneak peek of his PyCon tutorial slides, and
entertained us with VPython (http://vpython.org/) demos. Kirby uses VPython
to teach young people programming and mathematical concepts at the Saturday
Academy (http://www.saturdayacademy.org/). Check out Kirby's website for
more information about the curriculum he has developed (
http://4dsolutions.net/ocn/index.html) and read his blog post about
Tuesday's meeting (http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/02/ppug-2009210.html)
if you're interested.

Jason Kirtland presented a new open source blogging engine called Zine (
http://zine.pocoo.org/). Zine is built on Werkzeug and is extremely
full-featured considering the latest release was only 0.1. It's easy to
deploy, and supports a bunch of different markup languages for creating
posts, as well as useful plugins like pygments. Even if you don't have a use
for Zine right now, Jason recommends checking out the source code because
it's *that* good.

Adam Lowry gave us a more in-depth look at Werkzeug (
http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/), an awesome WSGI toolkit that Michel Pelletier
introduced to the group last year. Adam talked a bit about how he uses
Werkzeug to create web applications without the constraints of a framework.
He had a series of excellent slides and example code to go along with it. It
isn't up online anywhere as of now, but Adam has said that if anyone is
interested he can make the slides and examples available.

After the meeting most of the group headed over to rontoms (
http://www.rontoms.net/ - hint: select all ;)) on Burnside for continued
discussion, beverages and fondue. Photos of the evening are up on Flickr (
http://tinyurl.com/pdxpy0209) if anyone wants to see them!

If you weren't able to make it out this month, I hope you'll check out the
next meeting on March 10th. Details about the March meeting should be coming
up soon. Also, If anyone has an idea for a talk they'd like to give at an
upcoming meeting, something they really want to hear about, or anything else
PDX Python-related, send your ideas to the list, or to
snakeherders at pdxpython.org.


Thanks. :)

michelle
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