Alexandre Bourget’s energetic presentation on Pylons is at last online: Pylons, Web development done right.

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We plan to sprint a few time in the coming weeks. Here’s our schedule:

• Thursday 2010-07-29 (packaging)
• Tuesday 2010-08-03 (Django translation)
• Thursday 2010-08-05 (packaging)

All sprints will be at Brasseurs Numériques, at 1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11. Attendance is limited so please RSVP on the wiki. Thanks a lot to AUF for supporting the translation sprint with food and drinks.

update: all sprints start at 6h30 pm EDT (UTC-4) and it’s possible to participate by IRC.

As most of you certainly know by now, Montréal-Python 15 is next Monday. We now have the room number and the list of flash presentations. It will be in room SH-3420 of the Sherbrooke building and flash presenters are going to be:

• Pierre Thibault on ipython
• Dimitry Zolotaryov on dealing with remote API calls
• Derek Mounce on A way-too-short introduction to a new Web framework for Python
• Simon Law on Startup Mistakes in Cloud Deployment
• Wesley Bouarab on skeedy.com

Thanks to our sponsors for making Montréal-Python 15 possible:

• UQAM
• Benelux
• Savoir-faire Linux
• Ecometrica
• Apress

Last Thursday, we ran our 6th sprint on the Python packaging system. Most people worked on distutils2 and its test suite although a few were undertaking the implementation of new features in the 2to3 automated migration tool.

This sprint was a turning point in our sprint series because we managed to get enough notoriety to convince two sprinter to join us remotely despite a massive six hours timezone difference. Alexis Métaireau and Éric Araujo, both living in France and both Google summer of code students on the Python packaging system, joined us util the end of the sprint, around 7am in their timezone. Their participation was very helpful since they were able to answer many questions regarding the road-map and what was in the pipe for various sub-systems of the packaging eco-system. Since they both the commit privilege in the canonical repository, it was very motivating for everyone in Montréal to see their contributions being merged on the fly.

Congratulations to all the sprinter who resisted the call of the terraces to work on the Python packaging system:

• Éric Araujo (remote from France)
• Nicolas Cadou
• Alex Gal
• Yannick Gingras
• Alexis Métaireau (remote from France)
• George Peristerakis
• Luis Rojas

We will have more sprint in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for the announcements.

The last sprint was a productive one, yet we left with a few outstanding issues. In order to correct those while everything is still fresh in our mind, we don’t waste anytime and go for another sprint on the Python packaging system this Thursday, 2010-07-15.

The sprint will be at Brasseurs Numériques, 1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11, starting at 6h30 pm and going as long as there are hackers standing.

Bring your own laptop or make an arrangement for pairing on the mailing list beforehand. Attendance is limited to 12 persons so please RSVP on the wiki.

Last Monday was a hot and sticky day here in Montréal, one of these days when air feels as dense as molasses, when grocery stores run out of ice cream. Yet, a handful of brave Pythonistas decided to brave the heat and to head out to Brasseurs Numériques for the fifth Montréal-Python sprint on the Python packaging system.

The turn out was a bit low compared with previous sprints but this is easily explained by the many regulars who are traveling abroad during the summer. We were also happy to welcome a few new comers.

We took a moment at the white-board to review what was the state of the Python packaging and to define the aspects on which everyone could be contributing.

Alex and Nicolas worked on improving the test coverage in distutils2, a very good way of getting familiar with the code while diving in right away; I, Yannick, gave them a hand by adding test coverage reports as a command line option to the test runner; George and Pior worked on 2to3 migration fixers and on the related test suite; and Davin improved the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Packaging while Michel helped him by packaging a package of his own while following the guide, making sure that the documentation was clear and obvious.

Thanks to the sprinters:

• Davin Baragiotta
• Pior Bastida
• Nicolas Cadou
• Alex Gal
• Michel Gallant
• Yannick Gingras
• George Peristerakis

I also want to personally thank everyone for taking the time to clean their glasses and plates as they were leaving. It was refreshing not to have to do most of the cleanup myself at 1am.

We’re becoming productive during our sprints. One thing that we overlooked when we started sprinting at Montréal-Python is how important it is to have a coach, that is, someone who knows the project reasonably well and who will answer questions from other sprinters. Theoretically, a bunch of hackers could work together, dive in, pry open, and figured out a project as they go. In practice, that does not work very well for a sprint since you get a bunch of people who are not used to work together and the kind of close communication that you need for pair investigation does not have time to kick in during the relatively short sprint. As people are waiting for the investigators to come up with answers to their questions, their excitement dissipates and they get kicked out of the zone.

Another thing that really helps is to have possible tasks with a wide range of difficulty to allow anyone to get busy. An example of great introductory task, as mentioned earlier, is writing unit-test. This requires that setting up a working test environment and producing a coverage report is straight forward and this is what a someone should keep in mind before launching a sprint on a given project.

As it takes some time to setup and to get focussed, one way to improve productivity is to have longer sprint. Hacking during the week-end, especially during nice summer days, is not very popular but dedicated hackers will show up. A good balance between week-days and weekend sprints is key here. Another way to improve is to nail down as many “boiler plate” tasks as possible before the sprint: creating all the Bitbucket accounts and distributing the necessary privileges, assigning tasks, or even setting up a working tests environment.

We have to thank the Python Software Foundation for supporting the sprint by covering the cost of food and drinks. Fuel (food and drinks), is not a requirement for a sprint since dedicated hackers will show up whether they have to bring their own booze or not, but it’s nice to be able to reward sprinters with a savory meal. They deserve it. The sprint sponsorship program is a great thing, not because there is a financial bottleneck to organizing sprint, but because having a common coordinator for Python sprint will help to share the excitement and the knowledge of what works for sprints and what doesn’t. Hopefully, other user groups will join us and make sprints a core element of their schedule.

Montréal-Python 15 is delayed by a week. The new date is 2010-07-26.

Summer is going strong with lots of good opportunities for terraces but we know that beer always feel better after accomplishing something great. This is why we will have a fifth sprint on the Python packaging system next Monday, 2010-07-05.

The sprint will be at Brasseurs Numériques, 1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11,
starting at 6h30 pm and going as long as there are hackers standing.

Bring your own laptop or make an arrangement for pairing on the mailing list beforehand. Attendance is limited to 12 persons so please RSVP on the wiki.

update: We thank the Python Software Foundation for supporting our sprinting effort by supplying food and drinks. You probably recall that not long ago, the PSF announced that it would start a sprint sponsorship program. Montréal-Python is honored to be the first recipient of the program.

This 5th Django sprint at the Google office wraps-up on a great conclusion: things are moving forward!
This is 951 new lines translated by our 6 sprinters:

• Davin Baragiotta
• Pior Bartida
• Alexandre Bourget
• Nicolas Cadou
• Yannick Gingras
• George Peristerakis
• Pierre Phaneuf (from Google)

This new effort of translation brings the French translation coverage of the Django 1.2 documentation up to 18%. We estimate that 77% of the French translation has been made by pythonistas of Montréal.

• 11314 lines translated (18%)
• 52731 lines waiting for translation

Of the translated lines,

• 8759 are by Montreal-Python
• 2624 are by the Django-fr team

Their is still a long road ahead but the Montreal-Python team is more and more efficient and we hope to see you at the next sprint.

Thanks a lot to AUF for the food and to Google and especially to Pierre Phaneuf (@pphaneuf) for hosting us during those crazy six hours.

The 5th translation sprint is changing location. Google kindly offered to host the sprint in it’s Montréal office and we gladly move to the new location, which only one block away from the McGill metro station: 1253 McGill College, suite 250.

Django 1.2 has been released and then 1.2.1. The project moves on and so will be our translation effort. Montréal-Python is organizing a next sprint on 2010-06-28 at Google’s office:

1253 McGill College suite 250

We warmly thank Agence universitaire de la Francophonie for supporting the event with food and drinks for every participants.

The sprint begins at 18h and ends once everyone is too tired to type. Bring your own laptop or make an arrangement for pairing on the mailing list beforehand. We only have 12 seats; use the wiki to RSVP. If you can’t join us physically, you can still participate on IRC, on #montreal-python on irc.freenode.net.

update: the event is delayed by one week. The new date is 2010-07-26.

Montréal-Python 15 will take place at UQAM on 2010-07-26. This will be a scaling and deployment themed edition. We don’t have the exact room number yet but it will be announced shortly.

Here is our schedule for the evening:

• 18h00: Opening
• 18h20: Announcements
• 18h30: Flash presentations
• 19h00: Break
• 19h20: Main presentations
• 20h30: Discussions and refreshments at Benelux

Our main presenter is going to be Stéphane Jolicoeur and he’s going to talk about the architecture of NFB.ca, a platform with open and pythonic roots.

He is going to describe what he and his team at the National Film Board of Canada had to do in order to accommodate the massive increase in traffic that they received after deploying their new Django-powered website.

Technical Lead at the Web department of the National Film Board of Canada, Stéphane Jolicoeur is the architect and the lead implementer of the NFB.ca website.

We still have a few spots for flash presentations so don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a presentation in mind that would fit the scaling and deployment theme.

Montréal-Python 15 is our last meeting of the summer; after a well-deserved break, we’ll be back in September.

Thanks to our sponsors for making Montréal-Python 15 possible:

• UQAM
• Benelux
• Savoir-faire Linux
• Apress

Montréal-Python 14 will take place at UQAM, on Monday 2010-06-14 in room SH-3420 of the Sherbrooke building. The SH building is located at 200 Sherbrooke west, Place-des-Arts metro station.

We are happy to annouce the list of flash presentations for
Montréal-Python 14 this Monday:

• Jeremy Barnes on Recoset
• Chris Hart on the business value of Python
• Michael Lenczner and Daniel Drouet on Ajah
• Sébastien Pierre on FFunction

At last, you can go watch the videos of the Montréal-Python presentations, including the lightning talks, on the dedicated presentations page.

So far, we have:

• Montréal-Python 1 David Goodger on Polyform Puzzler
• Montréal-Python 2 Cyril Robert on Scripting Asterisk with Python and Yannick Gingras on a live demo of PyQt and PyOpenGL
• Montréal-Python 7 Olivier Bélanger on Ounk, an environment for musical scripting
• Montréal-Python 8 Alexandre Vassalotti on Developing extension modules for CPython
• Montréal-Python 9 Andrew Francis on Stackless Python
• Montréal-Python 10 Chris Steel on Web2py

Each video is linked to a page on the Montréal-Python wiki to give the opportunity to presenters and attendees to gather interesting material about the presentation, such as the slides, example code, and related links.

Now we need your feedback on the videos; Theora is quite easy to deal with but H264 is a lot more tricky to transcode properly. If you have trouble enjoying our videos, let us know.

The Python Software Foundation is announcing a new sprint sponsorship programme :
Announcing: Python Sprint Sponsorship.

Montreal Python’s short yet intense sprint experience  gathered pythonistas of all levels in contributing to Python’s ecosystem in different ways, such as Django documentation’s translation, Packaging and Turbogears2.

Sprint sponsorship is good news that should enable us to do more sprints on a wider range of topics.

Andrew Francis, who did the main presentation at Montréal-Python 13, will be presenting at EuroPython. His talk on Implementing Go’s Select will be a slightly shorter version of the one that he did at Montréal-Python. It’s good to see fellow Montréalers presenting at large international conferences.

We learned a lot from past sprints and we want to keep our momentum so without waiting, we launch a 4th sprint on the Python packaging system. The sprint will be on 2010-06-02 starting at 18h. It’s likely to be at Brasseurs Numériques’ but we also have an altenate location in sight. One way or the other, attendance will be limited to around 12 to 18 hackers so RSVP on the wiki.

Bring your laptop or make a pairing arrangement on the mailing list beforehand. We don’t have any sponsors for this sprint, but this won’t stop us. Bring your refreshments and expect a group order for food around 7pm.

The third packaging sprint was a clear success: we closed tickets, seven sprinters showed up, and everyone got to commit something. Congratulation to all the sprinters:

• Pior Bartida
• Nicolas Cadou
• Yannick Gingras
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• George Peristerakis
• Cyril Robert
• Tarek Ziadé (remote)

We were also lucky to have Tarek Ziadé in voice conference from the other side of the Atlantic, which really jump-started our motivation. Tarek gave us an overview of the state of the packaging, he did put the various tickets in a wider context, and gave some orientation to our strategy.

Over all, it was a very good sprint with work that got done on:

• Distutils2, the next generation of distutils
• Distribute, the temporary replacement for setuptools
• PyPI, the website that aggregates Python packages

The motivation is high and we keep going with our momentum. Therefore, without waiting any longer, we already launch the next sprint. It will be on 2010-06-02 starting at 6 pm. Stay tuned to know the location.

It took some time, but at last, the videos of Montréal-Python 10 are finaly online. It took some time but the waiting was well worth it because our new video editing pipeline is a lot more efficient and it allows us to not only publish the main presentation but the lightning talks too.

But wait, there’s more. Given the curent ongoing debate on Flash vs open formats, we decided to more forward and to ditch our current hosting provider in favor of an homegrown solution that allows streaming without Flash, in Theora on supported browsers.

Ain’t that great? Yeah, we thought so too, that’s why we decided to post the annoucement before the trancoding was entirely done. So don’t worry if you don’t see all the videos from Montréal-Python 10 yet; they will all show up before the end of the week (or not very long after that). That’s it for now; stay tuned for the rest of the videos. In the mean time, enjoy:

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5. Please use the download link. If you use Safari and want to use a libre format, install the Xiph QuickTime Component at http://www.xiph.org/quicktime

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5. Please use the download link. If you use Safari and want to use a libre format, install the Xiph QuickTime Component at http://www.xiph.org/quicktime

The 14th Montréal-Python meeting will take place at UQAM on June 14th, room SH-3420 of the Sherbrooke building (200 Sherbrooke west, metro Place-des-arts); it will be an entrepreneurial themed meeting because we received many proposals on that theme and because we sincerely believe that the best way to ensure that you are paid to code in Python is to found your own job.

Here is our schedule for the evening:

• 18h00: Opening
• 18h20: Announcements
• 18h30: Flash presentations
• 19h00: Break
• 19h20: Main presentations
• 20h30: Discussions and refreshments at Benelux

Flash presenters will be:

• Jeremy Barnes on Recoset
• Chris Hart on the business value of Python
• Michael Lenczner and Daniel Drouet on Ajah
• Sébastien Pierre on FFunction

The main presentation slot will be split in two parts:

In the first part, Gary Haran will talk about Four ways to fund your startup:

Second installment of the from ghetto to hub series.

Gary is an entrepreneur active in the Ruby and JS communities. Within seven months he managed to found and sell a company. He wants you to do the same.

For the second part, Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer will talk about Real Ventures and Founderfuel, supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs:

Real Ventures is a new seed fund by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to be
launched this summer, from the people behind Montreal Startup. Founderfuel is an accelerator program to be launched in 2011 in Montreal.

Entrepreneur, venture capitalist and/or angel investor since the late
nineties, with successes and failures as entrepreneur and investor. Venture capital experience include Innovatech, CDP, Vantage Point Venture Partner, Montreal Startupand now Real Ventures. Investments include Net Integration Technologies, Wavesat, Quazal, Terrascale, OZ Communications, Whatsnexx, SocialGrapes, Recoset, to name a few. Startups include Terrascale, Maybenow, SocialBuckets, etc. Father of five.

We still have a few spots for flash presentations so don’t hesitate to contact us if you have something that you would like to present.

Thanks to our sponsors for making Montréal-Python 14 possible:

• UQAM
• Benelux
• Savoir-faire Linux
• Ecometrica
• Apress