Thursday 14 January, 2010, 7-9 pm, at University of Washington. Paul Allen Center, room (TBD).

Attendance: JustinCappos, JohnJacky, ChrisBarker, MikeOrr, DaneSpringmeyer, James Thiele.

We accepted the 8 talk proposals for Northwest Python Day 2010 and scheduled them. We realized that most the talks are about "My Python Project", and that there isn't much for Python beginners or how to do common things in Python. When Dane offered a last-minute talk on GIS, we suggested it be educational to fill this gap, and he decided to do an introductory demo for GIS beginners.

There is interest in another Python Day later this year or early next year, but we don't want to schedule it until after PyCon. Some people suggested that if we have more talks in the regular meetings, a day event may be less necessary. We want to outreach to the local colleges, but first we need to find a professor or student in each one who's a Python fan. We realized that it's too late to improve outreach or increase the educational talks for this Python Day, but we'll keep it in mind for next time.

There was general agreement on having more talks at the meetings. Three suggested topics are:

We need a talk coordinator to solicit talks for the meetings and schedule them.

At the end we discussed people's Python questions. John asked about asynchronous libraries. Twisted and Greenlets were recommended. He asked how to do the event loop if there's no GUI controlling the application. Twisted has an event loop for this; we're not sure about Greenlets.

Dane asked about urllib. On Linux it accepts paths without the "file:" prefix, while on Windows it doesn't. He was asking how to convert some legacy code that resolves "includes" in XML files; the code works on Linux but breaks in Windows. We agreed that if the Linux implementation accepts a path without a scheme, it's probably an accidental feature, and he'd be better off intercepting those and using the standard open() function for them.

January2010Notes (last edited 2010-01-15 07:00:54 by MikeOrr)