#dev event

hey all, officially opening the gates to get your second reserve before we open the other gates and open the site. now that we’ve got the subplots up and people are thinking up beautiful ways to get on board there’s good reason to encourage some development posts. 

submit any character-centric post (drabbles, moodboards, playlists, etc.) to the tag (if feasible; tumblr tags seem to hate a lot of us) to earn reserve #2. 

we’d also like to arm you appropriately with app specs! our registration has two stages: an app and shipper, both freeform. quick preview under the cut ;)

On Tuesday, November 18th, I attended another RocPy meetup.

Rich Sarkis opened with a brief explanation of what RocPy is, a recap of the last RocPy meetup, and an overview of the plan for this meetup.

Module of the Month

Next, Ralph Bean (Threebean) gave a "module of the month" talk, in which he goes over a module from the Python standard library each month.  This month he went over itertools.  He split the library into five categories: merging and splitting, converting inputs, producing new values, filtering values, and grouping values.  I had a bit of trouble understanding some of the functions or possible use cases, but there were several that I thought could be useful.  The function itertools.product, which returns the cartesian product of two or more iterators, and can be used instead of nested for loops.  I was also excited to learn about itertools.count, itertools.cycle, and itertools.repeat.  Lately I've been looking into Haskell using Learn You a Haskell for Great Good, and i was excited to see infinite lists using ranges and the cycle and repeat functions.  It's cool to see that Python includes this functionality as well.  I'd give this talk 8 GRUs.

Lightning Talks

Several Lightning talks were given.

Alex Kyte gave a talk on the use of reference counting for garbage collection in Python.

Matt Soucy (msoucy) gave a talk on using Python for prototyping off of a C library

Ross Delinger (rossdylan) gave a talk on the use of consensus algorithms in distributed systems.  The slide deck for this talk is available here.

Ralph Bean (Threebean) gave a talk on Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) middleware, and demonstrated his "raptorize" middleware by using it to add a raptor animation to a default Pyramid application.

Embedding Python in a C Application on a BeagleBone Black

The main talk for this RocPy meetup was given by Drew Moore, and was on embedding Python into a C application on a BeagleBone Black.  The presentation was dry and could have been presented in a much shorter-format talk.  Combine that with the fact that I admittedly had little interest in the topic, and I found it difficult to focus.

CSH held a Game Jam this past weekend.  I was initially going to participate, but unfortunately finishing a project for a class took up too much of my time, and I wasn't able to produce anything worth submitting.  I did, however, get a chance to start working with MonoGame.

Working With MonoGame

MonoGame is an open source reimplementation of the Microsoft XNA framework, which is no longer supported by Microsoft.  I started working with it, and spent most of my time with it learning the basics.  I got as far as rendering some sprites on the screen.  Although I didn't get very far, I like the way it feels, as it allows you to determine how your objects are structured.  The weekend before I had tried working with Unity, which is an engine, rather than a framework.  I think I prefer MonoGame.  While it was faster to get things up and running in Unity, with the physics engine and the tools for defining sprites and collision boxes, I think ultimately I prefer the control offered by MonoGame.  The one downside is that currently I could only get the framework working in Visual Studio on Windows.  I do most of my development on my MacBook.  Luckily, I have access to Microsoft Dreamspark, and was able to get a free copy of Visual Studio Ultimate.  The MonoGame site claims they are currently reworking their Mac and Linux release packaging, so hopefully there will be a solution for working on my Mac in the near future.

Game Jam Games

Several really cool games came out of GameJam.

The second place prize was given to a game created by Michael Moffitt and Michael Swan. It featured fully original sprites, music, and sound, and it was made to run on the Sega Genesis, which was really cool.  It is a two player game in which you jump around the screen and try to punch the other player.  You can dash to move more quickly and avoid punches.  The first player to hit the other a set number of times wins.

On Tuesday, September 16th, I attended my first dev event, a meeting of the Rochester Python User Group, or RocPy, with my HFOSS Dev class. 

The meeting started with an overview of what the group is, what they do, and some of their philosophies, since the class brought in so many new faces.  They also gave a shout out to some other developer organizations in town: LUGOR, the Linux User Group of Rochester, and Interlock Rochester, a local hackerspace/makerspace.  One of the RocPy regulars discussed some Python articles he had come across.  I found the one on "Unpythonic Python" particularly interesting.

Ryan Brown (ryansb) gave a talk on the open courseware on which the HFOSS Dev class is deployed.  The courseware is deployed via OpenShift, and can be found on GitHub.

Several shorter lightning talks also took place.

Ross Delinger (rossdylan) gave one warning not to push your .git directory to production.  He demonstrated how one could reconstruct your source code from your .git.  This could theoretically have negative repercussions if you are working on a project that isn't open source.

Remy Decausemaker (decause) demonstrated software that uses a Markov chain to mix two or more text sources and produces (somewhat) readable result, often to hilarious affect.  Remy uses this software for wupotus.tumblr.com [NSWF], which mixes Wu Tang Clan lyrics and Barack Obama speeches.  It is also used for kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com, which mixes the King James Bible, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby.  The source code is available on GitHub.

Liam Middlebrook (Loothelion) showed a Python script that he created that creates an issue on the GitHub repositories of projects that don't have licenses encouraging the maintainers to create a license.  The source code for the script is on his GitHub.

Of course, there was a shout out for the Software Freedom Day hackathon at RIT.

Overall I enjoyed the experience; I'd definitely go back.  In the future, I'd like to be able to contribute something, such as a lightning talk.  A lesson learned for the future, for RocPy and probably other dev events, is to bring my labtop, so I can be in channel.