#rocpy

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.

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.