[sapug] Introduction

[Daryl Tester]

Chris Were wrote:

> Not sure if anyone else has joined yet, but I thought I would introduce
> myself - it's great to have a Python SA list!

"Please allow me to introduce myself - I'm a man of wealth and taste".

(well, not really for those that know me :-).

Speaking for myself (as always), I wouldn't mind having an occasional
get together in the style of AUUG or LinuxSA, which is basically a
presentation followed by food and drink, if there is much interest in
such a thing.  I don't have a venue planned yet (if anyone knows of a
place, feel free to post up), but do have some ideas for talks.  I'm
thinking maybe not a regularly scheduled thing, just when there was
a talk planned or something to chat about, but if it was to happen to
have it occur in a regular spot of the month (e.g. 2nd Monday after
full moon).  I'm open to suggestions.

> I've mainly done web programming on and off for the last 8 years, starting
> with Perl, PHP and in the last 12 months writing almost 100% Python. It is
> so much faster for rapidly prototyping ideas and its lack of verbosity makes
> coding in Python much more enjoyable.

There was a very recent thread in LinuxSA about Python IDEs.  I haven't
tried IDLE in a while, but did say that I use vi (well, vim) and (language
equivalent) printf, which is true - one of my code writing styles is
to have two sessions side by side, one of which is editing the code and
the other sitting in the Python REPL loop executing "reload (module)"
and testing the code.  Write a bit, test a bit.  Probably my other code
writing style these days is Test Driven Development, although I still
tend to fall back on my "old ways" and code before the unit tests are
really done.

That is, when I get the opportunity to cut code, which seems to be on
the decline :-/

> What other Python projects are people in SA working on? Any web based
> services?

I've done a couple of XML-RPC based projects (I prefer XML-RPC over SOAP,
because I'm a simple man at heart), and several web scraping applications.
Then there's an ISP management system (with the neat feature of emailing
exceptions when they are thrown so I know when it's broken on something),
an ISO 8583 EFT gateway and test framework, and sundry data manipulation
scripts (only when standard Unix awk doesn't support sockets).  And of
course, my secret pet project, which I get to code in my copious free
time (haha, I crack me up - it's been over a year since I last worked on
it).  There's also Python-related activities, like writing a module for
Freeradius (in C) to emit logging events as pickles over sockets (damn
fun for building event driven infrastructure, as is my wont).

Who else is doing what for fun?


-- 
Regards,
  Daryl Tester, IOCANE Pty. Ltd.