Djangocon lightning talks day 1¶

From carrots to Django - Kamila Stephiouska¶

She tells about the Geek Girls Carrots community. A community for women interested in new technology. 11 cities, 4 special meetings, 1 sprint, 5 kinds of workshops.

They like to promote women working in IT.

The held a “django carrot” recently: 14 hours, 10 mentors, 23 participants. They try to get special guests. Last week Daniel and Audrey came (the writers of two scoops of Django).

See http://django.carrots.pl

They chose Django because of the community.

Don’t be afraid to commit - Daniele Procida¶

Lots of people work with Django. Lots of people program with it. There are barriers to getting them to work on Django. They might not be effective. They might be afraid. They might not communicate effectively.

You also need to manage your code and your environment. Virtualenv fixes the environment, but you need to learn that first. Version control helps with your code, but you first need to learn version control.

Similarly, you need to learn documentation and tests.

And you need to learn to have confidence when interacting with the community.

He organizes a workshop on the first day of the sprint to help people learn this. Virtualenv, pip, git/github, python tests, sphinx, readthedocs.

After the workshop you can start working on a couple of simple tickets that he reserved for workshop attendees.

See https://github.com/evildmp/afraid-to-commit

Elasticsearch - Honza Král¶

Elasticsearch is cool. Open source, distributed, schemaless, realtime. All the buzzwords. Originally it was for searching, which it still does.

It can also handle faceting (analytics). Aggregating data into facets.

Percolator is new. Trigger-like. A query you store in elasticstore. When you submit something to the store, you can get an alert whether it matched a query.

Stop writing settings files - Bruno¶

We’re django devs, so we like settings files. from local_settings import *, that sort of stuff. The problem is that you can’t add to existing settings, you have to overwrite it.

You can also have multiple settings files, importing base.py and production.py and so. You end up with lots and lots of settings files this way.

http://12factor.net advocates strict separation of config from code. Which Django doesn’t.

So: expose your configuration as environment variables and use that to get them into your settings.

Look at daemontools’ envdir. This lets you put environment variables in files in a defined directory and which sets the variables. You can use the same trick in your settings.py, it is only a few lines of code.

The files can be in version control. Your sysadmin will thank you. Easy to set up with salt/puppet/chef.

Teaching 2.0 - Krysztof Dorosz¶

How teaching should look like. He teaches at a university, so he nows about teaching.

You don’t need to know everything better. You don’t need to make one fixed PDF with fixed text and a fixed exercise.

He makes his classes in github. Everything in .rst files. Students can propose fixes and improvements. And they do!

This way you treat your students as collaborators and parners instead!

Configuring python environments with Puppet - Dmitry Trofimov¶

If you want to test with various python versions, you need to build them all and fit them out with their virtualenv and so. And use various django versions.

He prepared all those combinations with puppet. See https://github.com/traff/python.pp