Saturday, October 30, 2010

John Pinner Receives PSF Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation awarded the second quarter Community Service Award to John Pinner in recognition of his organizational skills and contributions as one of the primary organizers of PyCon UK and EuroPython.

The awards ceremony at EuroPython 2010 was presided over by Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundation. Video of the ceremony is available on the EuroPython channel on blip.tv.

The Python Software Foundation is honored to give this award to this worthy member of the Python community.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Bug weekend Nov. 20-21

The development team of the Python interpreter (a.k.a python-dev) is organizing a bug weekend on Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st of November.

We would like to encourage anyone who feels interested in participating to give it a try. Contributing to Python is much less intimidating than it sounds. You don't need to have previous experience with modifying the Python source; in fact bug days offer a good opportunity to learn the basics by asking questions and working on relatively simple bugs (see "how to get prepared" below). And most core developers are actual human beings!

How it happens

The bug week-end will happen on the #python-dev IRC channel on the Freenode network, where several core developers routinely hang out. No physical meeting is scheduled, but anyone is encouraged to organize one and announce it on the official Python channels such as this one.

Participants (you!) join #python-dev and collaboratively go through the Python issue tracker at http://bugs.python.org . From there, you can provide patches and/or review existing patches. Also, you can help us assess issues on any specific topic you have expertise in (the range of topics touched in the stdlib is quite broad and it is more than likely that the core developers' expertise is lacking in some of them).

Or, if you feel shy, you can simply watch other people work and get more conf ident about participating yourself. Development is public and lurkers are welcome.

What you can work on

Our expectation is that Python 3.2 beta 1 will have been released a couple of days before the bug week-end and, therefore, one primary goal is to polish the 3.2 branch for the following betas and the final release. There are many issues to choose from on the bug tracker; any bug fixes or documentation improvements will do. New features are discouraged: they can't be checked in before the official 3.2 release.

How to get prepared

If you are a beginner with the Python codebase, you may want to read the development guide available here (courtesy of Brian Curtin): http://docs.pythonsprints.com/core_development/beginners.html

There's a small practical guide to bug days/week-ends on the wiki: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBugDay

And the development FAQ holds answers to generic development questions: http://www.python.org/dev/faq/

You can also do all of the above during the bug week-end, of course. Please, don't hesitate to ask us questions on the #python-dev channel.

Monday, October 18, 2010

GSoC Comes to an End

The Python Software Foundation supported many Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Projects this year by recruiting mentors and supporting projects from around the community. As the summer comes to a close, we thought it would be a good idea to let you know how things turned out, so we contacted a few of the participants to ask them about their experience.

pip

Carl Meyer from the pip project told us that "the primary goals for the summer were setting up a continuous integration server for pip, speeding up the tests and making them runnable without network access, and porting pip to Python 3. The first and last got done fully, the middle one mostly done. And Hugo Lopes Tavares closed a number of miscellaneous tickets along the way as well."

Carl also told us that he enjoyed being a mentor for the project. Hugo went on to join Globo.com when GSoC was over and thinks that his experience with GSoC helped him get hired.

rpy2

Laurent Gautier of the rpy2 project also enjoyed being a mentor. His project was to get rpy2 compatible with Python 3 on the C-level and to do some custom R graphical devices with rpy2. They were able to complete their project.

IPython

Fernando Perez was the mentor for the IPython work done by Omar Andrés Zapata Mesa and Gerardo Gutierrez. They worked on separate but related projects that dealt with a multi-process model of kernel hosting for IPython and some client software using the ZeroMQ messaging library.

You can check out the code at http://github.com/omazapa/ipython/ and http://github.com/muzgash/ipython/tree/ipythonqt-km

sympy

The folks at sympy went all out and posted all their GSoC information online. Their projects are well detailed, and they're very technical. Be brave and read them anyway!

PyGame

Julian Habrock, the student for the PyGame project, posted his work as he did it on a blog. He worked on a new draw module for pygame and pygame2 with mentor, Marcus Von Appen. Julian thought the project was fun and he learned how to organize bigger projects and encourages other studentswho have the time and motivation to join GSoC next year.

Tell Us About Your Project

Let us know what your project did this summer! The Google Summer of Code website lists many Python-related projects, but the level of detail online is inconsistent. If you would like to let us know what your project accomplished, please send an email to mike at pythonlibrary dot org.

Learn More

For more information, see the wiki page http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2010.