“TechStart is TAF’s free, yearlong after-school program for students in kindergarten through 8th grade. The focus of TechStart is providing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) enrichment to underserved children of color through project-based learning and advanced technology tools.”

There were three event themes in Robotics (using Lego Mindstorms), including:

• The Hand Crank Race where students had to build a robot, and power it by crank, and get to the finish line.
• The Wind Turbine Event, where students had studied alternative wind energy and created a turbine connected to a robot. The robot would calculate the speed to determine which turbines had the best design.
• And the Archery Event, where students are given the distance to the archery target when they show up to the event, and then they need to program their robots to try to stop perfectly on the center of the bullseye.

Here are photos from the event.

Also, here is some video from the Archery Event:

This was the first class there to teach JavaScript, taught by Seth Nelson and Susan Evans.

We saw Tic-Tac-Toe, a yo-yo animation, a Magic Eight Ball game, “guess that image”, and even a slot machine.

The students did a fine job, and it was impressive to see what 10th grade students were able to learn and accomplish in a limited amount of time.

Tic Tac Toe in JavaScript

Thanks to 14 Sprinters who came together on July 25, we now have a Django Seattle Website at http://www.djangoseattle.org

Some of our Django Seattle Sprinters

There was a lot of infrastructure work done at the sprint which is still in development and didn’t make it to the live site yet — but the experience of getting to know each other, and learning/sharing Django knowledge was another fine Sprint accomplishment.

Here’s a brief summary of what people worked on:

• Integrated in Blogging, Profile and Calendar functionality from django-basic-apps. Initially Pinax was explored, but had a lot of dependencies and seemed better for creating specific sites genres, but was challenging to incorporate into our existing site.
• Created a Twitter portlet that shows live #djangoseattle Tweets.
• Setup Flatpages for core content, and creating a database-driven menu
• Created a logo and initial site design and templates
• Setup Django on live server
• Used the Django Debug Toolbar while developing the site
• Some were playing with Django for the first time
• Some floated around to help diagnose problems and help those new to Django

Functionality brainstorm

Thank you Sprinters

Our sprinters (in alphabetical order) were: Andrew Beyer, Jon Callahan, Jesse Franceschini, Doug, Brian Gershon, Johann Heller, Paul Pham, Micah Ransdell, Leo Shklovskii, Trevor Smith, Jesse Snyder, Alex Tokar, Ragan Webber, Ben Wilber

Thank you Sponsors

Also a Big Thank You to our sponsors, hosts and organizers.

• Jon Callahan at Mazama Science treated all 14 of us to a tasty PCC Natural Markets lunch, coffee, drinks and snacks.
• Michael Kim at Grapevyn brought in Top Pot Doughnuts.
• Paul Pham hosted us at his coworking space Office Nomads which was a great place to have a sprint.
• Leo Shklovskii at Evoworx and Brian Gershon at Web Collective had a great time organizing the sprint.

We look forward to our next sprint!

As usual, Python is popular in many realms.

Who attended?

We started with quick introductions – a nice mix of folks with some traveling from Portland OR, Vancouver BC and even one from Chicago and DC.  Many folks using Python — several announcing Python job openings.  People were from various organizations such as University of Washington, NOAA, ONENW, Web Collective, NPower, LexisNexis, Microsoft, Sun, and many interesting companies I didn’t catch the names of.

Quick Highlights

We started with a lightning talk with tips on moving your code toward Python 3.0 (running Python 2.6 with -3 option; using __future__, running 2to3).

Then saw a light-weight web framework called Werkzeug – I like its idea of decorating a Python view function with its URL mapping [e.g. @expose('/') to connect a view with the root of the site].

We then heard about the ease of leveraging buildbot for testing.

NOAA started the presentations with their CAMEO Chemical modeling application, “a Pylons-based web app wrapped in a wxPython interface for desktop use.”  There were various complications making this work cross-platform on both IE and Safari, but overall successful.  Chris has high hopes for upcoming wxWebKit (which wasn’t quite mature enough at the time they were developing their app), and might consider pyQT or pyGTK for future projects.

University of Washington’s Beraber was interesting – a way to offer open source cloud computing (via a Python-based VM) by sharing your computer safely with others, and being able to run programs on many computers around the world.

After lunch, lightning talks resumed with Sphinx, an RST based system for writing documentation for your code (used for Python’s documentation).

We then saw NodeBox, “a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie.”  I checked out their website — some cool plugins like modeling of flocks.  You could probably make some very cool desktop wallpapers with this too.

If you’d like to play with virtualization and open source, Derek Simkowiak is working on a program called “vmshell” that allows you to more easily manage virtual sandboxes.  Management of VMs was mentioned as something missing from many open source VM solutions.

Our first afternoon presentation talked about the benefits of high-level languages like Python and benefits over lower-level languages like C++ or Java.  Mark McWiggins presented good arguments for why organizations may want to consider Python over these other languages.

Sage, and its 5+ million lines of code, offers open source math modeling.  For those that need Mathematica, Magma, Maple, or Matlab power, Sage was impressive — from interacting with and showing complex math formulas in Python and Javascript, to live 2D/3D plotting, to importing the library into your own Python program and going to town.  One of its innovative features (from a web dev perspective) is writing a math function (in Python) which you want to interact with it on the web — instead of creating your own web form, you can decorate your function with @interact, which introspects the function parameters and automatically creates a web form for that function.

After having played a bit with Google App Engine, it was nice to hear a real-world experience about using this in a production project.  Web 2.0 apps can be a sweet spot for GAE, though there are differences with other traditional web development methods that may help determine if your app fits GAE or not.  I won an online O’Reilly book on this topic.

I had seen mention of Cython, but hadn’t investigated.  Cython is a way to compile your Python code in C code for major speed improvements.  It has some cool profiling features like an interactive web-based code display that uses light-to-dark color-coding to show which Python code lines are the slowest, and allows you to click on the line to see the actual C code that was generated.

The last presentation was by Sun, who are investing in Python (and other languages in addition to Java) due to their popularity by programmers.  They are also investing in Jython (adding more resources than before) to bring this up to latest versions of Python 2.x, and some work on the JVM to support languages other than Java.

Pycon

Registration just opened for PyCon 2009 (in March) in Chicago.

I plan on attending this year, hope to see you there!

Thanks!

Thank you Seattle Python and the University of Washington for hosting!

We’ve spent the last two years forming and running a Cooperative Business, and hope others consider doing the same.

The combination of organizing as a Cooperative, being part of Plone and other Open Source software communities, and partnering with clients who share our values, have led to a strong year of collaboration and growth.

Here is a brief list of incentives and highlights for others thinking about alternative business models that may include Cooperatives and Open Source software.

Web Collective, Inc recently celebrated its one-year anniversary as a Washington State Cooperative Business.

The dev team inventoried its skills and discovered the expected diversity of platforms, skills and languages for the 30+ back-end developers – PHP, Python, Ruby, and .NET. What strategy do we use to merge our skills and get the product developed?

I suggest Django for its easy of adoption possibilities among a very diverse technical crowd, and I provide a bit of rationale for others to consider:

• We’ve setup a Linux server which likely means LAMP development (PHP, Python, Apache, MySQL) or Ruby on Rails for the final platform this will run on.
• All developers could get setup and be running quickly on all major operating systems with a standard install of Python, Django and any SQL server one wanted, such as the quick-to-install SQLite. I plan on developing completely on my laptop, and getting code to the server via subversion updates.
• I’m a strong Python developer who spends my time primarily in Zope and Plone – and haven’t yet used Django – but there are experts in the room, and anyone who can write an object class and learn some basic Python can get something up and running – or at minimum could read someone else’s code and become productive. I gained some quick familiarity by reading a Django book on the bus ride home tonight!
• There are no technology majorities in the group — but I think everyone ramping up on Ruby on Rails, .NET (if someone brings a Windows Server) or Zope/Plone seem slim for a 2-day event. Django seems like only an hour or two away from general productivity. Plus documentation is on the web.
• PHP could also be possibility, but not sure what framework we’d use.
• Ruby on Rails may also fall into the camp of non-Ruby developers being able to hack existing code setup by Ruby on Rails experts, but I still think it may require more learning than we have.

I’ve been enjoying all the conversations, idea brainstorming, and seeing some familiar faces (such as Josh Livni and Brian Dorsey) while also meeting many new people!

What do you think? Have a look at Django here: http://www.djangoproject.com/

I look forward to seeing what direction we take tomorrow when coding commences!

And special thanks to those who stayed late to setup the server, trac and subversion.

Back in Seattle, we’re looking forward to hearing post-conference highlights at our upcoming Halloween Plone Meeting.

I’m particularly excited for five Seattle-area Plonistas (that I know of) who are presenting this year. After seeing previews of two of these presentations in September, I know conference attendees are in for a treat:

• Andrew Burkhalter, Jon Stahl, and Veda Williams from ONENW are presenting on a nice range of topics spanning from those new to Plone 3 all the way through advanced Plone skinning, development and integration.
• Jonathan Callahan will be presenting Plone for Government Science — How to get buy in from managers, security watchdogs and colleagues.
• Paul Bugni will be presenting Where’s the source, Luke? : How to find and debug the code behind Plone.

Many of us in Web Collective met through our connection with BALLE Seattle and our work around creating thriving local economies. Prior to that I ran across the newly forming national BALLE organization while completing graduate work through the Center for Creative Change at Antioch University Seattle in 2001. Around that time I also stumbled on the world of open source and Zope (and soon Plone) – which quickly became the core of my business. A lot can happen in 5 years!