ZPUGDC Meets Me

I attended a ZPUGDC meeting for the first time last night. It was on my todo list for some time and the planets had aligned such that I would be free to attend without being a delinquent family member. These are some interesting people who have been playing with a lot of interesting python features. For instance, I've read a lot about easy_install/setuptools but I never saw it in action, but Matt and Alex were able to take a virgin python installation and turn it into a working social networking site in about as long as it took to download the packages and with minimal work. Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of easy_install at work. But as someone with this particular experience pointed out, easy_install will burn you some day when you're deploying and PyPi goes down. Ouch!

Another really neat tool was virtualenv. If you ever run two applications that expect different versions of the same python module, virtualenv will save your sanity.

Also I learned that Zope and Plone are both frightening.