[Texas] brainstorming PyTexas 2011

[Jeremy Kelley]

I love the corewars idea, ++ for that.

Concerning tutorials, (and I don't recall if last year this was done
this way or not) but what if we came up with a list of 4-10 topics
that needed teachers and solicited people to do them?  This is a
little backwards but might help kickstart the topics along with guide
the offerings.  I don't want to encourage others teaching on what
they're passionate about, but perhaps if people see a demand for the
basics more people would step up in an organized fashion to teach?

I'd propose the following list to kickstart:

- newbies hour!
- core stdlib review
- basic text processing
- web framework
- nosql (focus on the python driver, of course)
- threaded / multiprocessing

I'd volunteer to teach a session on just about any of these.

-j


On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 10:55 AM, John Zurawski <jcz2001 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to propose a game programming competition similar to Corewars.
> Competitors would write Python scripts that would compete against the
> scripts written by other players in a virtual arena. Participants would
> write against a high-level API that we provide. It will contain some
> low-level operations and enough high-level behaviors that even people with
> little Python experience should be able to participate. At the competition
> deadline their scripts would be submitted and a tournament would be held
> where the scripts written by two players are matched up against each other
> until a winner is determined.
>
> I have such a game idea already in mind. However, I don’t think the details
> should be shared outside a group of volunteers. This is to ensure fairness
> and build up anticipation for the event. If someone knew too many details
> ahead of time that might give them a slight advantage (or at least the
> perception of). I think it would also be fun to announce it to everyone at
> the same time.
>
> If I understand correctly, we may have the venue at A&M for Saturday and
> Sunday. I think this would be best held on Sunday in parallel with any
> tutorials. This is so that it does not serve as a distraction from the
> talks. I think this is a fairly big project, so I would like to gauge
> sufficient interest before starting to implement something and organize a
> group of volunteers. I participated in a similar competition in the early
> 90’s held by ACM/IEEE at UT and have been interested in holding a similar
> competition of my own since.
>
>> Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:15:43 -0500
>> From: bradallen137 at gmail.com
>> To: texas at python.org
>> Subject: [Texas] brainstorming PyTexas 2011
>>
>> >From Wikipedia: "Brainstorming is a group creativity technique by
>> which a group tries to find a solution for a specific problem by
>> amassing a list of ideas spontaneously contributed its members." (See
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming)
>>
>> Let's use this thread to generate a list of ideas for what might be
>> interesting or fun to do at PyTexas 2011, both on and off schedule.
>>
>> Who wants to go first?
>> _______________________________________________
>> Texas mailing list
>> Texas at python.org
>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/texas
>
> _______________________________________________
> Texas mailing list
> Texas at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/texas
>
>



-- 
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting;
it has been found difficult and left untried – G. K. Chesterton