[python-uk] Tell us what you did with Python this year....

[Michael Foord]

Hello all,

I started the year working for a German firm writing web applications 
with Django on the server and Silverlight on the front end. The front 
end application (about 20 000 lines) was written entirely in IronPython 
and running in the browser. Communication with django was almost 
exclusively sending and receiving json.

In September I started working for Canonical, working on web services 
associated with Ubuntu Pay, the new software centre and the single sign 
on services for canonical websites. This is mostly working with django.

unittest in the Python standard library has continued to evolve, which 
I've been heavily involved with along with a few other standard library 
tweaks (my favourites being contextlib.ContextDecorator and 
inspect.getattr_static plus backporting weakref.WeakSet to Python 2.7). 
Python 2.7 was released in 2010 as well as the first alphas and betas of 
3.2. The changes to unittest are available in a backport to earlier 
versions of Python called unittest2 which has gained a surprisingly 
large number of users and will be incorporated in the next version of 
django.

My 'other' testing project is mock, which is approaching a 0.7.0 release 
with a lot of new features. The blocker on getting the final version out 
of the door is a thorough review of the documentation. Hopefully I will 
find time for this over the christmas break. The beta seems to be 
getting a nice level of uptake though and no new bug reports since the 
last release...

ConfigObj is still reasonably popular but I'm not using it a great deal 
myself these days, so I haven't worked much on it this year. A couple of 
folk ported it to Python 3 though, which is fantastic.

In 2010 I attended PyCon US, EuroPython and PyCon Italia. All were 
fantastic and at EuroPython this year we had our first language summit 
and PSF members meeting. I'm currently helping with talk selection for 
PyCon US 2011 and organising the language and vm summits we will have 
there. We intend to repeat the language summits and PSF members meeting 
at EuroPython 2011. The EuroPython 2011 location is fantastic, so 
hopefully see you all there!

All the best,

Michael Foord

-- 
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/

May you do good and not evil
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
-- the sqlite blessing http://www.sqlite.org/different.html