“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!

Both the Interra Project and Center for Ethical Leadership are clients (and friends) of ours at Web Collective and we’re impressed with the great work they are doing.

We developed websites for them in Plone, including Boston Community Change, Puget Sound Community Change and Center for Ethical Leadership.

This award “celebrates Puget Sound leaders whose vision, commitment and unceasing efforts are significantly advancing social, environmental, and economic justice.”

Tickets are available for the 4th Annual Bill Grace Leadership Legacy Awards Dinner on March 5th, 2009.

The Interra Project “provides consumers with the incentives they need to shift their purchasing habits to support the health of their communities by shopping with locally-focused, environmentally and sustainably-minded businesses.”  I was part of the team that built the Boston Community Change website.  Now there is a  Puget Sound Community Change in our local community.  You can sign-up for a community change card for free and use when purchasing at local businesses, or if you own a business you can offer your services to those who have cards.

My experience with Neighborhood House is through a monthly Multicultural Committee meeting where I live (at New Rainier Vista) where they provide language translation and other great community services. Our community has native speakers from Somalia, Ethiopia, China, and Vietnam.

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!

A recurring conference theme for me centered around agility. Plone has benefited by moving from Zope2 to the more flexible Zope3 Component Architecture.  Zope technologies are being made available as middleware for use on other platforms (via Repoze and WSGI). Grok is a Zope3 framework for projects needing something more lightweight. There were several very useful sessions on Agile Project Management.

There are also continuous improvements making Plone more agile for end-users.  Plone 4.0 aims to make it even easier for end-users to manage their content (including better media support, unified widgets for easier page compositioning, “page centric”, kupu improvements around layout), as well as more through-the-web features done right!

Tuesday Arrival

On my Tuesday Amtrak ride to DC, I connected with some conference folks on Twitter, found my hotel and ended up at the Science Club for a few drinks and mini-reunions. Hotel Harrington wasn’t fancy, but clean, had wifi and was only two blocks from the conference and metro, so I was happy.

Wednesday

“10% Manifesto” was my first session. In Seattle, we’ve been holding a weekly Open Source Friday, which has a lot of parallels to discussions in this session.  We’re all practicing ways of putting that extra effort in to give back to the Plone community in which we all flourish, and also socialize and learn in the process.

I then caught up on the latest happenings with Ecommerce in Plone with the GetPaid project.  This is now being used for a variety of use cases, and its component architecture seems to make it relatively straight-forward to create modules for your own needs.

“When Software is a Service, Will Only Network Luddites Be Free” brings up an interesting question: What does a free [as in freedom and open] computing cloud look like? http://autonomo.us

Thursday

I started the day as a member of the “So you want to be a Plone consultant?” panel.  It’s a big discussion for a short amount of time, but we had a nice variety of panelists and good questions. Geir Baekholt’s discussion of Open Scope contracts peaked my curiosity.

One of the questions asked “How do project come into Web Collective?”  Clients often find us through our existing work with many progressive businesses and non-profits, our contributions of software and presentations in the open source community and Seattle Plone user group, and an interest in working with a company that practices a cooperative business model where all the members are owners of the company.

I was pleasantly surprised by a several tracks on Agile Project Management (”What makes a great development team” by Mike Robinson, and “High performance teams: What’s the secret sauce?” by Gerry Kirk on Friday).  Communication and project management often determine the success or failure of a software project, and tips and tricks in this area are always welcome.

Another interesting session was “Using Grok to walk like a duck” which covered several component architectures (from the limits of subclassing all the way through to the beauty of Adapters) and how Grok (and Zope3) support a dynamic version of Adaption.

After hearing about Deliverance 6 months earlier, “Using Deliverance to theme a website” was a nice way to catch up with the latest happenings here.  If you want to apply themes to multiple sites, this seems the way to go.

Friday

Experiencing some of the complexities and limitations of formlib, I wanted to check out Stephan Richter’s “z3c.form” session. z3c.form seems more refined, and can be used in in viewlets and portlets.

After talking with Jim Fulton at the Plone Summit at Google several months ago, I’ve been anxious to play with ExtJS, but haven’t had an opportunity.  Godefroid Chapelle showed us a rich browser solution using ExtJS and KSS.

“Repoze.bfg: A zope explosion” – Several months ago, we had the pleasure of bringing Chris McDonough to Seattle to talk about Repoze.  It was pretty new back then, and WSGI wasn’t something I had played with.  Since then, and after working with some other platforms such as Django, I was excited to catch up with the latest on this project.  The primary concept is to make Zope technologies available as middleware which could mix’n'match with other Python technologies via WSGI pipeline. In addition to the nice lightweight infrastructure, I think this highlights a longer term vision of being able to share best-of-breed Python technologies across various Python frameworks.

Saturday and Sunday Plone Sprints

Record turnout of people at the Plone sprints!

I was happy to collaborate for a couple of days with Aaron VanDerlip on Plone4Artists Calendar.  I had used this on a recent project, and wanted to help make improvements to what’s becoming a defacto solution for Plone calendaring, including an implementation of recurring events.  I’m relatively new to the project and have been impressed with the product’s architecture and its recent 2.0 alpha release.  I enjoyed lending a hand to help fix bugs and refining some functionality.

I also though the concept of a “Beginner Sprint” was ingenious and helpful for including new people in the community and getting them up and running with everything they need. Nice work Jon Stahl and Joel Burton (and other Plonistas that participated).

Monday, Heading Home

Then a perfect ending — I lucked out on a direct flight to Seattle (pays to get to the airport early) and ended up sitting right next to my friend and fellow Plone collaborator Andrew Burkhalter.

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.

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!