Turtle sprint, day 1¶

Tags: nelenschuurmans, python

We’re having a week-long company-internal sprint this week:

• Four programmers.
• Somewhere outside the office (40 km outside the office, more or less). A nice excuse for me for doing a 37km bicycle ride!
• No disturbance by people stopping at your desk. And the implied permission to be rude to everyone who bugs you by telephone. And permission to ignore your email for a week.
• Fully focused on improving the code.

Ok, what’s that turtle? A set of python scripts and libraries for Arcgis, a commercial GIS package. The scripts steer you into using a specific methodology of dealing with your geographic data, resulting in better analysis and better maps.

What are some of the things we want to solve?

• A proper windows installation.
• A graphical export of connected water areas. Basically “graphviz” for those that know that python library.
• Anything we can fix after that is a bonus.

Dealing with arcgis can be a pain. Commercial and closed source, so some errors just stay plain unexplained. No way to debug. A comment by a colleague today is illustrating: it is like going to a bakery and asking for a bread and getting the answer “sorry, we’re out of pork chops”. Aargh, that’s not what I asked for!

What did we get done today?

• I fixed up the python package structure, mostly. Listing requirements in the setup.py. Converting one of the two main products to a proper svn trunk/tags/branches structure.
• Pieter got cracking with a windows installer around our buildouts. Not finished yet, but the buildouts themselves can already be installed. Great work.
• Coen and Jonas introduced us to the code, fixed and closed bugs all day, answered questions. They’re the two main authors of turtle, so they’re happy we’re finally having a full week with the four of us to work on it full-time.

On to four more days!