An even dozen (or maybe an odd dozen…) folks attended the October Python Special Interest Group meeting, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator.
It was a busy and exciting meeting. Vigorous conversations filled the first half hour, as we welcomed a few new members, a few members not seen in a long time, caught up on news and what’s new in the Python world, and made a round of introductions.
Kent S. Johnson presented a new episode of Kent’s Korner, talking about the unit testing facilities available in Python. Python has a couple of options, including a xUnit-clone version and a more Python system in nose. We got into a great discussion on the philosophy of unit-tests, the test-first-fail-code-test cycle, test-driven development, and so forth. It was quite enlightening.
Arc Riley made the second presentation on the Sphinx documentation generator for Python. Arc talked about the history of Python documentation, with docstrings and EPyDoc and ReStructuredText (not to be confused with ReST, Representational State Transfer!). Sphinx seems to be a popular project name these days, as I heard about a different project by the same codename both at the RubySIG and maintainer Patrick Galbraith’s presentation at MonadLUG).
Arc provided us with the slides to his presentation, available on the gnhlug site here: [TBD real soon now, once we get the site restarted]
Links and notes from this meeting and past meetings can be found at Shawn O’Shea’s blog at http://eth0.net/ — thanks, Shawn!
Thanks to Arc and Kent for great presentations, to Bill and Alex for organizing and running the meetings, to Janet for the incredible cookies, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the great facilities, and to all who attended and participated.