Looking back, I have generally been the type of person who lets people dictate to me what it is that I am going to do. I make my desires known, but don’t do anything to make it a point that my desires will be the outcome. Today I took a big step and stood up for myself. After a couple of years of being led to believe that I would finally move into a full time development position, and then being stuck in a designer/analyst position, I laid it all out on the table. I let my boss know that either we start making the move, or I would need to look at other opportunities.
I’m very happy to report that it actually went over well. As I understand, we will be developing a plan to train someone to start stepping into my position as I start stepping into a much more development focused role. It was the perfect time to make the move as I am currently needed and we are about to be in a position that we will be short on developers. I’ll continue to post and update on how things go over the next few weeks. I’m tired of getting stepped on and ready to take my destiny in my own hands.
Only two more weeks left until PyCon! I’m excited to get out and see the greater Python community.
Lesson learned: You don’t get anywhere without taking risk. It was really scary to make a play like I did today, but the outcome may be worth it.
This past Thursday was the first official meeting of the Birmingham Area Python Users Group (PyHam). I volunteered to do the first presentation, which was an overview of unit testing frameworks in Python. I thought the presentation went very well. I’m very interested in testing, and know that I should be, but getting started can be the hardest part. It was very interesting to hear the take others have on the subject and to hear most everyone else admit that they feel the same way I do. The biggest lesson I took away from the meeting is to always make sure you right your code to be tested, or you will never write the test.
The last few weeks have been quite busy. I’ve been preparing for the first PyHam meeting, where I will be giving a presentation on common testing frameworks in Python. I have a tendency to volunteer to talk about subjects I’m interested in, but don’t know much about. This should be interesting. I’ve certainly learned quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. Our first official meeting will be next week (1/21) at Birmingham Southern College, at 6:30pm.
I had some down time over Christmas and decided to use it learning the basics of sqlalchemy. Since I like using the command line to get around and I have been wanting to try my hand at a basic to do list program, I decided I would try to mimic Gina Trapani’s todo.txt.
The commands are slightly different than those used by todo.txt, mostly due to some limitations of using optparse. Currently, the program supports adding task, deleting task (completing them), updating task priority or description, and listing all task or searching the task for a keyword.
Running the program for the first time will create a database and settings file for you. This may be changed in the future to where only the db file is created and the settings file is already included. Additionally, there are some path issues that will be addressed in the near future. Once these issues are addressed, I plan on packaging the program up for listing on pypi.
You can see the source and download the program on github.
The first planning meeting for the new Python Users Group went really well. Our first official meeting will be January 21 on the campus of Birmingham Southern College. I will be presenting a talk on “An overview of current python testing frameworks”. I’ll mostly be discussing unit testing frameworks, however I plan to discuss coverage tools as well.
I’ve reworked pylilydtk a good bit and I’ve integrated it into my drum group website as a Django app! You can now generate rhythm scores directly from the site. I have more features planned, such as a students section, requiring a login. I’ll mostly be using it as a place to store the scores for the music we are working on.
I’ve been seeing a lot of Django jobs advertised on the net. I hope this is a good sign of things to come. As I get more comfortable with Python, I’m growing even more eager to find a job doing it full time!
In an effort to better connect with other python developers I decided it would be a good idea to form a Python users group in Birmingham. There aren’t many of us, that I personally know, but hopefully this will bring everyone out. I’ve volunteered to discuss testing frameworks because I want to learn more about them. I’ve used Nose some, but no where near what I would like to know. I’ve also volunteered to discuss Django and demo the Out of the Darj website code. It’s pretty simple, but it shows how powerful and easy Django can be to use for building a simple, dynamic website. Below is the announcement for the new groups. If you are in the area and interested in attending, we would love to have you!
A new Python users group is forming in Birmingham, AL USA. We will be holding a planning meeting at Roque on December 10th at 5:30pm. See our group page (http://groups.google.com/group/pyham) for more details.. While you are there, join the group and say hello!
It has been a little while since I have posted. I’ve been on vacation for a portion of the last month. I have had the time to bring the pyLilyDTK program closer to completion. I committed some updates this evening which added better command line parsing. The program now supports 2 methods of being called:
1. pyLilyDTK -r “2/4,D-_kD-T-” (or) pyLilyDTK -rhythm “2/4,D-_kD-T-”
2. pyLilyDTK -f input_file.txt (or) pyLilyDTK -file input_file.txt
I’ll also be starting the conversion of both this blog and my personal travel blog (http://epicuriosity.net) to Django-Mingus very soon. From what I have found, there may not be many options for moving data from Wordpress to Django, so this will likely be done as part of my move. I will, of course, post the source code for this on github if turns out to be required.
It looks like I will be attending PyCon this year. Mark your calendars, this will be a great event!
Quite a bit of work has gone into this over the weekend. The program will now read from an input file and generate a lilypond score. I’ve tested it on several 2/4 and 4/4 rhythms and it seems to do well. Special care must be taken for use of rest, ‘_’, to make it formats correctly in some rhythms. For anyone who is interested, check it out on github and leave a ticket or email me if you find bugs. Feature request are welcome!
Tonight, I begin work on a new project, pyLilyDTK. I will be writing a python program to convert the typical d-t-k rhythm notation to LilyPond scores. Thanks to a friend who did a lot of legwork in understanding how LilyPond scores are laid out, I don’t believe this will be a terrible task. It will sure save some time when preparing for my percussion classes! The intended goal is that once it is done, it will be ported as a django app so it can be used directly from the outofthedarj.com website.
The Out of the Darj website is finally ready for release. I still have some work to do to get the media page up and running, but I didn’t want to wait any longer with the rest of the site. The source code for the site is absolutely available if anyone wants it. I haven’t posted it since it is in such a state of flux, but if you want it, leave a comment and I’ll get it to you.
One of the things that makes me utterly passionate about technology is how it is truly an art. Like a painter stepping back to view his creation, a programmer gets that same feeling of creation from what he codes.