Django User Group London Meeting

I attended yesterday’s DJUGL meeting, held at the Guardian in London. The evening consisted of three presentations with gaps for discussions and consumption of free beer and pizza. Entry was free and open to all with an interest in making Django better, though registration was strongly advised as the venue was almost full. The best way to find out more about upcoming meetings is probably through the London Django User Group Google newsgroup or the London Python Twitter stream.

The talks were quite inspiring. Nicholas Tollervey’s FluidDB talk had quite an interesting concept, though the company seemed to be at an early start-up phase and I will probably wait to see how it progresses before making my apps feed data to them. Toby White’s Solr talk was an insight into the techniques used by companies that have masses of data the wrangle into searchable formats. The Celery/RabbitMQ talk by Mat Clayton was the most familiar subject to me as I’d read articles on Celery before. It included some practical tips and lessons from their infrastructure experience. I can definately see how implementing a queuing system like this would be beneficial for parts of my apps that have to send emails and communicate with public web APIs.

Ubuntu Opportunistic Developers Week

I’ve been following along with the latest community program from Ubuntu this week – Ubuntu Opportunistic Developers Week. There are a number of talks, each one hour long, which aim to stir up some action in the minds of would-be developers.

The talks are carried out through a tool called Lernid from community manager Jono Bacon. I feel this has been very successful in bringing down the perceived barriers between the well known developers and those of us who wish to get an application going.

Listeners were encouraged at the beginning of the week to think of an app and, hopefully by the end of the week, make it happen. Almost all levels of programmer could benefit from the talks and the leaders were very willing to answer in depth questioning throughout.

The format has worked really well in that you can choose which parts to listen in on and somehow feel less intimidated to ask questions than in a real-life conference.

The week has definitely inspired me so far to start putting some of the ideas I’ve had in to practise. A few of the projects I had tried before such as Quickly and Ground Control, but I was good to hear from the humans behind them. Talks that engaged me especially were CouchDB/DesktopCouch with Stuart Langridge, GStreamer with Laszlo Pandy and GooCanvas with Rick Spencer.

I look forward to the rest of the week and hope it inspires many more developers like me to create some really cool open-source apps. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to make it possible.