Meeting Schedule for the Dallas Subchapter

The DFW Pythoneers have two kinds of meetings.

Each month on the 2nd Thursday, we meet at Denny's in Addison (on Beltline at Midway Road) for a social dinner, from 7:00 pm until 10:00 pm. Denny's is open as late as we want, for our long discussions.

On the 2nd and 4th Saturday afternoon, we meet at Nerdbooks.com in Richardson, TX for hands-on Python coding and teach sessions. The regular session run from 2:00 pm until 5:00 pm, but we also feature a "beginner's hour" from 1pm - 2pm. If you are interested in learning Python, please show up for the beginner's hour and receive free instruction from one of our experienced volunteers.

When visiting Nerdbooks, please note that the front doors are now closed. Nerdbooks is no longer open to the public, but user groups are still privately hosted. Please enter through the side door, and make yourself aware of Dave's rules (keep the door closed and don't let the dogs out).

Upcoming Meeting Plans

Please feel free to edit the upcoming schedule to let us know you're attending if you're willing to give a formal or informal talk

Next Meetings:

• Thu10Apr2008 - social dinner at Cafe Brazil
• Sat12Apr2008
  • Secrets of the Framework Creators - Brad will lead discussion using material from the PyCon? tutorial of the same name, and will encourage everyone to try out practice examples. We will cover decorators, metaclasses, and frame hacks. See http://us.pycon.org/2008/tutorials/FrameworksHsu
  • Brad will discuss PyCon?-Tech project; if anyone is interested. It is a set of Django components for running conferences; Brad wants to expand the scope of this software to make it useful to user groups, small conventions, and sprint planning.
• Sat19Apr2008
  • no plans yet

Recent Meetings:

• Sat26Jan2008
  • 1pm - 2pm Beginner's Hour (Brad will be there to teach anyone who shows up)
  • 2pm - 3pm Open Discussion; we'll probably discuss the new PyCon? schedule, travel plans, etc.
  • 3pm - 4pm Open Discussion
  • 4pm - 5pm Open Discussion
  • Dinner afterward (attending: Brad, and likely some of the other regulars such as Sumeer, Paul, Jeff, J., and Ralph. Hopefully we can drag along some others as well.)
• Sat09Feb2008 (2nd Sat of Feb)
  • Genshi (Jason) - template language (alternative to Kid, the default)
  • Elixer (Jason) - database language on top of SQLAlchemy?
  • CherryPy? (Jason) - meat and potatoes of TurboGears?
• Sat23Feb2008 (4th Sat Feb)
  • Distutils (Jeff)
  • Eggs (Jeff)
  • zc.buildout (Jeff)
• Sat08Mar2008 (1st Sat Mar)
  • Distutils/Eggs/builout pt2 (Jeff)
• Sat22Mar2008 (3rd Sat Mar)
  • PyCon? followup meeting

NOTE: Even though the history of meetings is not always maintained, and there are gaps in the history, we do have regular meetings and folks do always show up (though sometimes late).

History of Coding Sprints

In future, we need to start posting these at http://python-groups.blogspot.com/

June 2007 - Present: We had regular meetings, but no documentation on what transpired.

24-Mar-2007: Paul showed using OptParse? with restructured text usage output; Louis showed his first PyGame? program; Daniel explained and demoed his BList?, which is a new container class with a B+ tree structure--an alternative to Python's list which performs inserts and lookups much faster when dealing with very large numbers of values. Afterwards, as usual, some of us got together for dinner.

10-Mar-2007: Post PyCon? discussion. Bill showed some of the videos he recorded at PyCon?. NerdBooks? owner Dave made a pitch to the group about a group project to build a website for Labrador dog owners to organize events and join an announcement mailing list.

Aug 2006 - Feb 2007: We didn't log the event details for this period. During that time we did a lot of organizing for PyCon?, since it happened in the DFW area this year. We also had our usual meetings covering a variety of topics, such as Jeff's work on Python advocacy, Dabo, Zope 3, restructured text with emacs, Python descriptors, etc. Every meeting was attended, with frequently over 10 members at the Saturday meetings, and 5-6 members at the social dinner meetings.

22-Jul-2006: The group went through the SQLAlchemy? .2 tutorial beginning to end

08-Jul-2006 : Jeff Rush on Design Patterns (Structural Patterns) and Lightning Talks (John did a talk on Faces project management, Ralph did a talk on his script to normal audio volume on Wave files)

24-Jun-2006: Jeff Rush on Design Patterns (Creational) and Lightning Talks.

25-Mar-2006: Joseph Hill demoed Boo

11-Mar-2006: Jeff demo'd Docutils with ReStructuredText, and misc other topics were covered as per usual.

Sep 2005 through Feb 2006 non-documented meetings and of course much PyCon? activity and preparation occurred in this period.

27-Aug-2005: 8th coding sprint at Nerdbooks.com; (lost count)

13-Aug-2005: 7th coding sprint at Nerdbooks.com; had 9 people show up

Ralph Miller gave us a talk on his rules-based expert system, written in Python. We walked thru the code and discussed why you would use one.

23-Jul-2005: 6th coding sprint at Nerdbooks.com; had 5 people show up

We worked on getting everyone's laptop set up with various software packages and reviewed some of the topics we've covered before.

09-Jul-2005: 5th coding sprint at Nerdbooks.com; had 6 people show up

We covered how to serve web pages using Python, using the Twisted framework and a database connection to a PostgreSQL database. A series of advancing programs was presented.

25-Jun-2005: 4th coding sprint at Nerdbooks.com; had 9 people show up

We covered how to do data storage with Python, from pickles, shelves, SQL databases to object persistence using Durus and ZODB.

Presented were the same program written for each of the above storage scenarios. Those programs are on the source repository under datastorage.

11-Jun-2005: 3rd coding sprint at Nerdbooks.com; had 6 people show up

A different set of people showed up so we reviewed the material from the 28-May-2005 meeting, re Python data types and basic syntax.

28-May-2005: 2nd coding at Nerdbooks.com; had 6 people show up

We went over the data types (ints, strings, dicts, lists, tuples, etc.) and basic control structures of the Python language, performing experiments using the interactive Python interpreter.

14-May-2005: 1st coding at Nerdbooks.com; had 7 people show up

We discussed version control software and played around with the subversion club repository, using a very simple Python program.

History of Social Meetings

• 08-Sep-2005: 10th social at Spring Creek BBQ; (lost count)
• 11-Aug-2005: 9th social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 9 people show up
• 14-Jul-2005: 8th social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 4 people show up
• 09-Jun-2005: 7th social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 5 people show up
• 12-May-2005: 6th social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 6 people show up
• 14-Apr-2005: 5th social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 8 people show up
• 10-Mar-2005: 4th social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 9 people show up
• 10-Feb-2005: 3rd social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 6 people show up
• 13-Jan-2005: 2nd social at Spring Creek BBQ; had 4 people show up
• 09-Dec-2004: 1st social at California Pizza Kitchen; had 12 people show up