Personal Checklist:

• Water
• Clothes (single day/multiple days)
• Sleeping Bag/Pillow (if overnight)
• Advil/Tylenol
• Deodorant
• Toothbrush and Toothpaste
• Business Cards

Hardware Checklist:

• Laptop and Charger
• Phone and Charger
• Projector Adapter
• Headphones
• Pens/Pencils and Paper
• Keyboard and Mouse

Software Checklist:

• Technical Stack (VM’s, local machine, favourite programming language)
• Github Repository
• Domain Name (or at least a registrar you’re familiar with)
• Server (Heroku/Webfaction)
• Any SDK’s or Frameworks installed
• Agreed upon standard tools (IRC, Editor, Trello, etc…)

Idea Checklist:

• Basic Idea
• Knowledge of any needed APIs
• Checklist of Features

I’ve shown up with just a laptop and a charger before and still placed relatively high. Planning before hand just gives you that little extra advantage over the other people there. What tools/things do you bring to a hackathon?

Keep it Informative

A lot of people try to be funny in their proposals but miss out on the key points. Your proposal should include a brief description of what you’ll be talking about, the audience that it’s intended for and anything else that you think would be useful for the audience.

Keep it Short

Conferences get a lot of talk proposals. PyCon US got 450 submissions for 114 slots. DjangoCon Europe got 74 submissions for 20 slots. With such competition the reviewers have to go over a lot of content. It’s important to keep your proposal short and sweet so you don’t bore the reviewers and risk them skipping over your talk.

I haven’t done any statistical analysis but a brief look over the proposals for DjangoCon EU makes it look like the sweet spot for proposal length is 4-7 sentences. Shorter and the reviewers can’t get enough relevant information, longer they get bored and go on to the next one.

Keep it Relevant

Development communities seem to have an almost cyclical nature when it comes to “hot topics”. One year it’ll be deploying, another year your software stack and the next year best practices for caching. Some topics, such as performance, databases and security are always fresh. Make sure your talk is relevant, both to yourself, and the community you’re presenting to.

Stop Rehashing Talks

We get it, Django sucks, this other community is better than ours, your side project is the next best thing. These talks have been done a million times and while they sometimes add a new twist or new content for the most part they’re old news. If you’re going to do a talk that’s been done before make sure it’s done in a new way with new material.

This year I submitted a proposal on “Caching Django” for DjangoCon Europe which ended up ranking 7th out of 74 proposals. I’m looking forward to hopefully going to Warsaw Poland and giving my talk.

Problem Solving

For as long as I can remember I’ve loved solving puzzles. When I would get a new puzzle I’d try to break it down to smaller logical chunks to try to see how the puzzle worked. That’s exactly what I get to do at work every day. I first start with a large overarching problem that’s given to me by a customer and then I have to break it down into smaller logical chunks. Sometimes these problems aren’t exciting or challenging. I’ve written enough CRUD websites that they no longer give challenges but sometimes these problems are unique and fun.

Building Stuff

While I love solving problems and it’s fun to have a challenging career I really enjoy building things. As a kid I was always taking stuff apart, finding out how it worked and then building it back. Writing software provides me with quick gratification because I can see the immediate results of my work. I can quickly put together a new app and once deployed see it being used instantly on the Internet.

Being a programmer also lets me build a large range of things. I can build a website one day, an iPhone app another and configure a sever on the weekend. This diversity allows programming to feel new and exciting even if you’ve done it for a few decades.

Continuous Learning

As a programmer, if you’re not learning the latest technology you get left behind very quickly. There’s always a new language coming out or a new framework to read about. While this can become overwhelming at first I often find trying a new language out to be a fun experiment on a day off. I’ve also found that this constant learning makes programming stay fresh and fun.

These are the main reasons why I became a programmer but I’d love to hear why others did. Let me know in the comments below.

Installation

Installing Clip is simple with pip:
$ pip install clip‘

You can also use a mirror by typing:
$ pip install -i http://simple.crate.io/ clip

Getting the Code

You can either clone the public repository:
git clone git@github.com:silent1mezzo/clip.git

Download the tarball:
$ curl -OL https://github.com/silent1mezzo/clip/tarball/master

Or, download the zipball:
$ curl -OL https://github.com/silent1mezzo/clip/zipball/master

Once you have a copy of the source, you can embed it in your Python package, or install it into your site-packages easily:
$ python setup.py install

Quick Start

You can get started with clip quickly by typing clip in your terminal to pull up the help text.

Here are a few commands you can try out

Creating a List:

$ clip <list_name>
$ clip websites

Viewing a List:

$ clip <list_name>
$ clip websites
...

Adding a snippet:

$ clip <list_name>  
$ clip websites django1.5 https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.5/

Getting a snippet:

$ clip <list_name> 
$ clip websites django1.5
'https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.5/' has been copied to your clipboard

You can also omit the list_name and it’ll try to find the key

$ clip django1.5
'https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.5/' has been copied to your clipboard

Deleting a List/Key

$ clip delete <list_name>
$ clip delete websites
 
$ clip delete <list_name> 
$ clip delete websites django1.5

Opening a snippet in your browser:

$ clip open <list_name> 
$ clip open websites django1.5
 
$ clip open 
$ clip open django1.5

Hope you enjoy using Clip as much as I do!

Buying a Domain

The first step to starting a blog is finding a relevant domain name that hasn’t been taken. Using services like domai.nr and instantdomainsearch.com can help with your search.

Once you’ve found a domain name that isn’t taken you’ll have to register it with a domain registrar. Websites like netfirms.com and name.com will allow you to buy a domain name for under $10.

Finding a Hosting Provider

Once you’ve bought your domain you have to find a place to host it. While there are many ways to host your website one of the easiest and least expensive options I’ve found is webfaction. Not only do they give you the ability to host your blog but they make it extremely easy to do so. Some hosts you’ll have to manually setup WordPress (or another blogging framework) and use a command line to configure things. With webfaction you simply use their website to create a WordPress site.

Finding a Theme

So you’ve bought your domain, found a place to host it at and are now ready to personalize your website. If you’re familiar with CSS/HTML and PHP you could make your own theme and spend hours tweaking the colours or, if you’re like me, you could use a pre-made theme. There are a number of market places but my favourite is themeforest.net. In my opinion they have the best variety and quality.

If you don’t feel like paying for a theme you can also use one of the two defaults that come with WordPress or look for a free one from WordPress or you can search for one through WordPress Admin.

Once you’ve found the theme you want to use you can add it in just a few steps:

1. Log into WordPress Admin (www.your-domain.com/wp-admin)
2. Click on Appearance -> Themes
3. Click on Install Themes
   4a. If you haven’t found a theme yet you can search from this screen.
   4b. If you’ve already bought/downloaded a theme click ‘Upload’
4. Click choose file
5. Find the .zip file for the theme and select it.
6. Click Install Now

Once you’ve followed those steps you should have your theme installed and ready for your first post.

Creating your first Page

Pages are static content that are often written when you first set up your blog and then left alone for a long time. An example of the page is my About page where I’ve listed relevant information about myself. Other examples are Contact pages or an Event page.

To write your first page, follow these steps:

1. Log into WordPress Admin
2. Click Pages -> Add New
3. Enter in the page Title
4. Enter the page content
5. Click Publish

Writing your first Post

Posts are where you write your daily thoughts, tips and content for your visitors. By default categories show up on the front page of your blog with the latest posts showing up at the top. If you want, you can assign categories to posts so they show up in different spots or to make it easier for your visitors to find different type of posts.

To write your first post, follow these steps:

1. Log into WordPress Admin
2. Click Posts -> Add New
3. Enter the post Title
4. Enter the post content
5. Select a category (or leave it blank for the default)
6. Fill in any other information that you need (plugins can add more options below the post content).
7. Click Publish

Here are the first months statistics:

Number of Articles: 36
Number of Comments: 8
Visitors: 2,801 visitors
Page Views: 5,442 pageviews (1.94 pages/visit)
Average Time: 2:04 min. avg time on site
Bounce Rate: 63.87%
RSS Subscribers: 19

Top Sources:

Direct – 1,067 visits (38.17%)
Feedburner – 686 visits (24.57%)
Google (Referrer) – 306 visits (11.01%)
Google (Search) – 183 visits (6.33%)
Twitter – 148 visits (5.22%)

 Top Content:

Procrastinatingdev.com
Making Interactive Maps for the Web
Advanced Django Form Usage
Building APIs in Django with TastyPie
Real Word Deployment using Chef

DjangoCon 2011

As you can see from the Top Content for this month all of the posts are my live-blogging from DjangoCon. A lot of my traffic came from live-blogging the conference because the feeds showed up on Django’s main website, on a lot of people’s twitter feeds and all over the place. While the conference is now over I’m still getting a lot of residual search engine traffic from these articles.

The big spikes in the traffic are during that conference as people searched for #djangocon2011. The blog also got mentioned by a lot of high-profile Django developers so that helped as well.

Promotion

So far, other than adding my feed to a couple of feed aggregators and tweeting out my articles I haven’t really done any promotion. When I comment on different tech blogs I include the URL when available but the traffic from this is very minimal.

In the future I’d like to start guest-blogging for larger sites to try to gather a larger following. This is something I’ll try this month.

Final Thoughts

DjangoCon certainly gave me a boost in traffic and while it has decreased now that the conference is over the overall traffic is still greater (3-4x) than before the conference.

I’m going to try to continue posting every Monday, Wednesday and Friday as this seems to be working.

Stay tuned for more goodness…

I want to propose a challenge to everyone. Write code as if everyone in the world will see it. Here are a few things you can do to complete this challenge.

1. Use comments sparingly
   Comments are excellent ways to give people a quick understanding of what a specific function does or to give insight on a given file. Be careful with having too many comments. Over saturating your code with comments can be worse than not having any comments. It can make your code difficult to read and obfuscate rather than help.
2. Use meaningful variable names
   This one is pretty self-explanatory. When you use single letter variable names you’ll quickly forget the meaning behind them and then have scour the source code to find out what they do.
3. Don’t use overly complex statements
   Simple is almost always better, especially when it comes to readability. One liners are great for compressing your code but in most cases they’re harder to read (especially for beginner programmers).

   # In Python you can do x if condition else y # Or you can also do (lambda:y, lambda:x)[condition]()   # Both of the above can be difficult for beginner programmers. # Using a simple if/else statement is easier if condition: x else: y

4. Use whitespace properly
   Whether you use Python where whitespace is mandatory or languages like C or Java where it isn’t, using whitespace properly greatly improves readability. Programs like this one lose a lot of their readability by not using whitespace.
5. Have proper unit tests
   I can’t stress this one enough. If you have valid unit tests it makes it a lot easier for people (and yourself) to use. Writing unit tests will make sure that you code runs properly even when you add new functionality. It’ll also make changing existing functionality easier.
6. Be able to explain it in 5 minutes or less
   This tip may seem a little weird but you should be able to explain your code in 5 minutes or less. If it takes longer, your code may be too complex. Splitting it up into extra functions, methods or files could help. If you can’t explain what the code does then it’s unlikely that somebody else will be able to figure it out by reading it.Being able to explain your code also helps you organize your thoughts and decide whether or not the way you’re doing something is correct.

To sum everything up. Always write your code (even your little scripts) as if somebody else will be reading it. This will help you be a better programmer and will make it easier when you need to come back to the code in the future.

A tour through the systems that power ep.io, the Python hosting platform, from the array of daemons powering the system, to how redundancy is set up, and also covering general best practices for hosting Django sites yourself.

Updates Below:

sock = ctx.socket(zmq.REQ)

for endpoint in self.config.query_addresses():

    sock.connect(endpoint)

payload = json.dumps({'type':type, 'extra':extra})
with Timeout(30):

    sock.send(self.sign_message(payload))

    return self.decode_message(sock.recv())

PostgreSQL is effectively the default RDBMS for Django. Learn the dark arts of optimizing this powerful database to be blazingly fast on your own hardware or in the cloud.

You can view the slides at http://media.revsys.com/talks/djangocon/2011/secrets-of-postgresql-performance.pdf

Updates below:

ALTER <table> ALTER <column> SET STATISTICS <integer>;

CREATE INDEX open_tickets_idx ON tickets (OPEN) WHERE OPEN='t';

“Code not tested is broken by design” – Jacob Kaplan-Moss Every programming project has unique testing needs. It’s not always easy to understand what those needs are, or how to write tests that satisfy them. One of our goals as developers is to write tests that minimize failures in production that can cost our companies time, money, resources, and in many cases, hours of sleep!

You can view Sandy’s talks at https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0AVthC0Z3iw8DZGRrdnFzeGdfN2c5bWJ6d2Y1&hl=en_US

Updates below: