PUN (Dutch Python Users) meet-up in Arnhem
Thursday February 26 I attended a Python Users meeting in Arnhem. Just like a couple of months ago in Amsterdam we had a nice turnout and some interesting topics on the agenda.
First there was Christo Butcher telling us something about his open source speech recognition framework Dragonfly. He astounded us all by stating that he actually does all of his Python programming by speech, something I still find hard to visualize. Hopefully he will be able to give a short demo at a future meet-up.
Then it was my turn to tell something about my latest endeavor for my business software company SmartPR: Python web app deployment. A month or so ago I sent out an e-mail to the python-nl mailing list asking for some advice. Eventually I ended up going the zc.buildout route, which is a very elegant system that utilizes setuptools to streamline, automate and isolate deployments. zc.buildout’s biggest problem is its somewhat arcane nature, having its roots in the not-so-newcomer-friendly Zope world. The goal I had with my speech was to take away some of the fear that many people (including myself) have when considering the package. As there is not much introductory documentation available on the subject, it can be hard to find assurance that zc.buildout is the right tool for your job. After I had shared my experiences with the group we had a nice little discussion which ended in the conclusion that zc.buildout is a terrific tool that is in desperate need of some decent documentation. Some people expressed their willingness to do something about this problem, which is an initiative I will support as soon as it comes. In the meantime I intend to report some of my work with zc.buildout here on this blog, since there is really just a handful of tutorial-style articles available online. For now I will just point to the buildout configuration that I currently use for deploying SmartPR. That will probably already be a very useful resource for the truly interested.
Before I end this post, let me thank Erwin Elling and Salmon Tetelepta at Eight Media and David Hund at Valued Standards for hosting us in their great office building. And of course Floris van Manen for giving me a ride back home 
. As always Reinout van Rees put a nice summary of the night on his blog. The next PUN meet-up will be on May 28 at Seek You Too in Veenendaal. See you guys there!
UPDATE: Erwin posted a brief review on the Eight Media blog, including a gorgeous photo of my scribbly presentation sketches.
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