Lonely Lion

The June chiPy meeting was last night, we had a series of lightning (boooooom!) talks, some planned, some spur of the moment. The meeting was pretty well attended, despite a Server Beach datacenter outage that took the site down from ~ 2pm until after 5.

The lightning talks fell into two categories, stuff we like and want to share, and stuff we made and want to share. Michael Tobis told us about operator overloading, with an example of how he gets around writing regular expressions (he hates them, he’s in the minority). Robert Ramsdell compared Tkinter and wxPython (no clear verdict). I fumbled my way through a half-assed mx.DateTime show. Jason Gessner presented Myghty, and Ed Summers showed us pylucene. Phew.

Then, in the second category, Adrian Holovaty lifted the curtain on chicagocrime.org, and Jason Huggins presented his web testing suite, Selenium.

So, in short, it was a very productive night. Great presentations all around, any of them could have been extended to a full blown meeting.

In addition, here’s some bullets:

• chicagocrime.org uses a custom web framework called Django that Adrian and Simon Willison are going to release next month. From the little that he showed us, it seems like it could be a very slick web kit.

• A as-yet-unnamed Chicago area University (I’m not sure if this is top secret or what) wants to make a bid to host the next Pycon.

• Some guys from Meetro came to the meeting last night, although it’s written Lua, it seems like a neat application.

• A guy from Textura, a web app for construction management written entirely in Python, came. It’s good to see that the business community is using Python, and seeing value in attending the local meetings. Good work Textura

Man. That’s a lot. Great meeting last night.