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PyCon 2006 Day Three

Notes from Day three of the PyCon2006 Python Conference. *Still no coffee*! I spent most of the day today focusing on testing tools and methodologies for Python web applications. Grig Gheorghiu and Titus Brown gave at least three talks (one lightning talk and two regular sessions) on this topic, and I learned a lot of practical knowledge. Both of these guys are really passionate about testing, and have done much through their writing and development to advance the field. At work, we are already doing unit testing (though I have switched to using nose as the test driver).

I left these talks enthusiastic about setting up buildbot, twill, and perhaps FITness and Selenium for build automation, functional, and GUI testing. Getting buildbot to periodically run the unit tests -- and setting up a maintainable strategy for loading PostgreSQL test data sets before running our data model tests -- are the first tasks I'll tackle.

Other random thoughts: Anyone not using the web seemed to be building GUI applications with wxPython. Beautiful Soup seems to be the most popular choice for doing web screen-scraping.

After the sessions, I took a bit of time on the first "Sprints" day to make some small contributions to the vobject library. I've never participated in a sprint before, and the experience was quite interesting. I have no experience with the vobject library, though I do know something about vCard and iCalendar from my Palm days. Armed with that and some Python skills, I was only able to get a tiny bit done, as much of the time was spent getting my head around the vobject design, etc. Next time I'd like to attend the sprints for at least two days.

Categories: python

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