New year’s Python meme

by Tarek Ziadé

Here’s a short, 5 questions, 2009 Python meme. Copy-paste the questions, and blog your answers !

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2009 ?

Twisted. I have used Twisted in small occasions in the past, but since I have changed my job, a fair amount of my daily work is around the Twisted framework. I also program in plain Python for some needs, and I use Pylons to build our website, but Twisted is the biggest part of our current application.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2009 ?

Network programming. I was a web programmer before, and now I am learning how to write programs that need to scale, to work using several computers. It’s pretty exciting, and sometimes pretty exhaustive because when some bugs occur, they are often leading to snowball effects. The code needs to be more rigourous, and I need to know exactly what is going on when interacting with memory or I/O.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2009 ? What did you do ?

Python. I am a commiter since December 24th 2008 (my birthday 😉 ). And I have been working almost exclusively on Distutils. I did around 200 commits in the trunk (not counting the backports and forwardports on the branches), and I have been mainly correcting bugs and improving Distutils code coverage, which I raised from 18% to up to 75%.

I have also added some minor new features. The most important ones are or will be added in the What’s new file hopefully. I also did a lot of work in the PEPs to prepare the future of packaging in Python, and wait for that work to be finished, to start to change Distutils more. While I did more commits in Distribute, Distutils was the most time-consuming project.

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2009 ?

Python Reddit. And I think I am not alone in that case. 90% of my blog hits come from Reddit 🙂

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2010 ?

I’d like to learn how to program the C part of the CPython core, and eventually to try to contribute some patches for CPython. I would also like to write my own toy programming language, just for fun. Last, I would like to learn Japanese. And all this comes after Distutils, Distribute, etc, so I am pretty sure I won’t find the time…
Read other people meme now (If you did one, let me know, I’d like to link it here):

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