Month: April 2012

The Python BarCamp Cologne 2012 happened last weekend. It was well organized by Reimar Bauer and the Cyrus office space is just very well suited for this kind of event: lots of space, rooms, equipment, drinks, …

The proceedings of Saturday and Sunday are available on Etherpads.

My most favorite discovery was Sentry – an open-source exception logging tool that has a nice UI and is simple to set up. Kudos to the Disqus crew! I’m looking forward to making this available as a managed component in gocept.net as soon as I get time to do so. 🙂

Other interesting topics that I joined were: a discussion about WSGI servers, parallelization, template engines, debugging and the infamous lightning talks.

Obviously I couldn’t restrain myself and so I offered a session on service deployment trying to answer some questions that people had and presenting some of the code we wrote when extracting our knowledge into batou.

Another session that I tried to foster was about #failure: in addition to talking about the cool things that we found working I wanted to hear about stuff that doesn’t work: software, organisational issues, etc. We kind of got stuck on bashing anything with the label “Enterprise” and the standard library.

On enterprise: the most weird experience I had lately boils down to this video by RedHat about their JBoss offering – say what?

The stdlib bashing wasn’t aggressive at all: we found some specific quirks and tried to get some understanding why things are the way they are. For me, basically, the standard library is what comes out of “batteries included” – it will have something in there that helps you out accomplishing what you want (like a pack of AA batteries) but if you’re serious about it you might need to roll some different module (like a car battery). I don’t think dropping the standard library would be a wise choice and I also don’t think that “one size fits all”.

I also got a surprising invite to presenting at the GUUG meeting next year and I’m pretty excited about that!

So, thanks again to Reimar and the other people organizing and sponsoring this event!

Just a quick note for profiling e.g. Zope views:

class MyView(object):
    def __call__(self):
        result = {}
        cProfile.runctx('result["x"] = super(Body, self).__call__()',
                        globals(), locals(), '/tmp/viewprofile')
        return result['x']

Even though “exec ‘result = super(…) in globals(), locals()’ works, it seems that cProfile does something a little differently here, so that writing to a local variable is not possible.