DJUGL September 2009

Despite the fact a large percentage of the DJUGL meetups have occurred in the building I work in I’ve been very lax in attending one, and it’s been my loss.

The crowd was friendly, the pizza and diet coke plentiful and the speakers enjoyable, and I’ve got every intension of making the next meeting - especially if it’s in the same building.

Gareth Rushgrove started the talks with a subject very dear to my heart, deployment. The talk went quite quickly with an intro to Fabric and a live demo of a deployment. The demo went as most demos do but fabric itself looks interesting, especially when you consider that our websites are written in Python. Unfortunately the two different versions (with different goals) and the fact that a new owner’s pushing the development now means it’s not something I can drop in right now with any degree of comfort. I’d like other people to find the rough edges first so for now I’ll stick with the plan of getting Capistrano involve id in one of our more self contained projects alongside puppet.

Although I disagreed with little bits here and there it’s always nice to hear a developers point of view on this stuff.

Ben Firshman was up next with a selection of talks, the Celery distributed task queue (very nice API but passes pickled python objects so only good for Python at each end projects), a rewrite of MPTT (a topic of which I know nothing) and some highlights about py.test (a quite nice Python test framework). I’ve been lucky enough to work with Ben over the last few months and he’s someone to keep an eye on technically.

This was the last DJUGL organised by Robert Lofthouse, he’s passed the baton on to Gareth, and from the people I met at the event, and he can pass it on proud of the group he’s put together.