Monday, February 18, 2008

Feb Meeting Summary

For those that missed the meeting on Wednesday, it was awesome! We are trying out a new location thanks to Sim Harbert, at the GTRI Food Processing Technology Building. One of the advantages of this new building, is that security does not take 30-45 minutes to get through. Rick Copeland , an "old school" PyAtl founder, gave an incredible presentation on BloxAlchemy, Drew Smathers and Carey Hull gave a very cool prezo on Axiom, and finally Brandon Rhodes gave an impromptu presentation on KSS. Finally, Michael Langford, recorded things on his "direct to the web" camera, and will be posting it to PyAtl, via Google Video at some point. Thanks Michael!

March Meeting

Concurrency with special guest Richard Tew: White Wolf is rapidly becoming the PyAtl sugar daddy. Richard Tew, the Stackless maintainer, will be giving a presentation on...you guessed it, Stackless. Remember, we will be meeting on March 20th, due to a conflict with PyCon, and once again at Georgia Tech. Please see the meetup page for full details: http://python.meetup.com/46/calendar/7327638/

Please note we have room for a couple of 10 minute lightening talks related to concurrency, and that we will be having our monthly roundtable discussion on PyCon 2008 aftermath. There will be a pre-PyAtl dinner as usual, at 6PM, at a yet to be determined place. We discuss dinner before PyAtl here: http://groups.google.com/group/pyatl-dinner

Random Announcements

PyCon 08: I believe there will be another large PyAtl group attending this year. It might be cool if all met for lunch or dinner one night, plus if we had some kind of T-Shirt we printed at Cafe Press. I drew up a very basic logo some time ago: http://files.meetup.com/127119/PyAtl_Logo_bbg.png, but I am sure we could come up with a better one. Make sure you stop by for Brandon's talk on Grok and my talk on Command Line Tools... although keep the eggs and tomato throwing to a minimum. Remember we also want to see if we can get PyCon 2010 to be in Atlanta, so lets see what we need to do. I believe there is sort of a bid process.

PyAtl.org: Note, PyAtl.org is alive and kicking and 100% self serve, so have at it. Basically if you give a presentation, you can post your material, and bio of yourself, just contact me for access after you sign yourself up for an account. If you think we need a new section or content added to PyAtl, by golly add it yourself. I sure as heck don't want to do it. As hard as it is to believe, I try to have some sort of life outside of PyAtl.

Jobs Board: I know some people have discussed putting a company section of PyAtl.org up, where people could highlight their Python related company. Also, some brave soul could volunteer to help organize a jobs board. I constantly get asked by employers how to access PyAtl people, and I keep telling them, eventually we are going to have a jobs board.

Special Interest Groups: Quite a few people have expressed interest in joining special interest programming groups. The idea would be that a leader, or leaders, of a technology would meet every other month on a Saturday morning for 3-4 hours and program etc. So far we have interest in a Twisted Group led by Drew Smathers and Cary Hull, I know I would attend. There is also an interest in a Grok group led by Brandon Rhodes, I know I would attend this too. Maybe someone can start a special interest page on the PyAtl site, and also create a special interest google group mailing list so people can meet and discuss things.

Summer Sprint: We are still planning on having a PeachWSGI/PyAtl sprint at the end of May or early June on a three day weekend. Our only road block is finding a location for enough people to code together with internet access. If your company would like to sponsor this event, please contact me. I would anticipate it should be a turn out of approximately 30-50 developers.


See you in March!