Interacting with a database, can be a regular task of a developer, and for that we would like to ensure that we are developing and testing in situations close to a real implementation; therefore, using the same database as in production can help detecting issues early.
However, setting up an entire database server for development, can be
cumbersome. Hopefully nowadays, modern operating systems like Linux
have great tools and features that we could take advantage of.
A review of the events that took place this year, related to software engineering and architecture.
These are some of the events I participated in:
PROTOSEC 20161: A technical conference about
networking, protocols, security, and related topics.Python Córdoba meetup2: interesting meetup where
I presented my talk at EuroPython and attended the sprints
afterwards.ArqConf Meetup ¿Cómo es trabajar distribuido
globalmente? Caso Open Stack3: Hosted in the Red Hat's offices
in Buenos Aires, this talk was a very interesting one, on which I
learned about the collaborative way of working of the Open Stack
team, around the globe.zc.buildout, an interesting tool for
managing packages and environments in Python, which I first heard of
at PyconAr (Python Argentina group) 2012. The third and last talk,
presented a project named aiocache6: a cache system implemented
in asyncio, that supports multiple back-ends. The talk walked us
through the code, its architecture, and some use cases with demos.I started with a small contribution to the coala project7, and
during the EuroPython sprints I contributed to aiohttp with a pull
request.
Last Thursday November 17, 2016, there was a Python meetup in Barcelona1, with a set of interesting talks.
The first one was hosted by two representatives of the government of Catalunya, and Barcelona city, and they presented the technical challenges they are facing, and the new stack proposed for oncoming projects. In this regard, it was interesting to see how they have lots of legacy applications written in J2EE, with Java frameworks, that are outdated, difficult to maintain, and they mentioned the idea of migrating them to new, more modern technologies. In this sense, there are already projects in progress, and they chose Python + Django for the migration and re-implementation of the legacy systems.
The next Saturday 10 of September, I will be presenting my talk "Clean Code in Python", as presented in the previous EuroPython 2016, at a local Python event in Córdoba, Argentina12.
The following week, I will be attending a local architecture meetup (arqconf), on which a talk3 about OpenStack will be hosted, explaining how they work in a distributed fashion.
I look forward to enjoying both events!
In order to get the best performance from our database engine, most of the times, we have to take advantage of its exclusive features. This has the disadvantage of getting farther away from standard, ANSI code, and in the case of RDBM engines, this also means, most of the ORMs will not work.
Besides that, it could sometimes be worth exploring what we can gain by adapting to the engine.
I had the great experience of presenting at EuroPython 2016. My talk entitled "Clean code in Python", was about good development practices, down to low-level design (with code examples), for Python. The idea of the talk, was to present the "pythonic" approach for writing code, and how do general concepts of clean code apply to Python.
These examples might be useful for beginners, developers experienced in other languages coming to Python, and people using Python for scientific applications. The examples could also be helpful for senior developers, because they remind real situations that might appear in pull requests, while doing a code review.
Last week, EuroPython 2016 finished, and it was an amazing conference I had the pleasure to attend. Here is my review of those days.
I arrived on Saturday noon at Bilbao, Spain, the day before the conference, so I had some time to know the city, see the venues, etc. The next day, on Sunday, was for two separate workshops: Django girls and Beginner's day. I attended the beginner's day as a coach, and helped a group of intermediate developers with several exercises aimed at explaining some Python concepts, such as: context managers, decorators, magic methods, generators, etc. It was really curious that some of these topics were those I was going to cover on my talk on Wednesday, so I felt really glad about that. I took an oath (very funny BTW) for becoming a beginner's mentor, and so I did (it was really good actually). I had a great time helping other developers, exchanging ideas and experiences during lunch, solving problems, and getting a first glimpse on what the conference was going to be like.
I am glad to inform that I will be speaking at EuroPython 2016 conference.
My submission about clean code in Python was accepted, so in the next edition of EuroPython 2016, in Bilbao, Spain, I will talk about clean code principles for Python. Here is the abstract:
https://ep2016.europython.eu/conference/talks/clean-code-in-python
The full list of talks is available at:
If you are interested, subscribe to the EuroPython blog and Youtube channel. I will include more details in a separate post.
It's been a while since I started tracking versions of my custom Vim configuration, and making it available as an open source software in Github. The best of this project is, in my opinion, to have it under version control, so I can track changes and releases.
Every once in a while, when I find a new setting, or a great new feature, I modify the configuration, so they will become available on the next release. Besides the features that are mentioned in the project, and the customizations made, I feel very comfortable with the colour scheme I made.
This is a rule I always encourage in software development. Moreover, I consider it to be something that has to be included in every coding guideline of a good project.
There are several reasons for this, but probably the best explanation can be found in the book "Clean Code"1 by uncle Bob, on which explains that the code, gets outdated (rotten) with the rest of the surrounding code, and hence it makes a place for confusion, leading to an error-prone spot.