WOW.

Yesterday was the last day of GUADEC 2013 in Brno.

These past four days have been... WOW. Interesting and exciting talks (including some inspiring keynotes), great conversations, amazing human beings (once more, special mention for the Women's Dinner). It was fantastic.

I felt so well that I even managed not to make too much of a mess during my talk: I went through it a bit too quickly in the first half, but I managed to slow down in the second one (that was the one that I cared the most about), and in the end it was great having more time than previously thought for the discussion, which brought some great ideas for my future plans.

And today... Documentation BoF! Where all these plans will begin to be planned in more detail. After Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sindhu Sundar talks, after a couple of conversations with Meg Ford and Federico Mena Quintero, I am really looking forward to it.

The slides for my talk are here (.pdf). Kitten included. Have fun.

More PyCon! It's a wish, not just a title.

I left the last post minutes before Jessica McKellar's keynote at PyCon 2013. Unfortunately the keynote was cancelled. Raymond Hettinger followed a series of lightning talk with a keynote the theme of which was "Python is amazing" (I don't rememeber the exact words, but that's the main idea). YAY!

Getting started with automated testing, by Carl Meyer, was a great introductory talk, a good way to remind me that not writing tests is not (just) being lazy, it's counterproductive (and therefore leads to more work later).

Then I moved on to a couple of much-needed talk on community building: Scaling community diversity outreach, by (take a breath) Asheesh Laroia, Jessica McKellar, Dana Bauer and Daniel Choi, and, after lunch, How (Not) To Build An OSS Community by Daniel Lindsley. So far my contacts in London for programming have been by mentor in the TechAbility programme (my gateway drug pusher, the way I really got into programming - thank you Ben!), a couple of friends and of course my husband (but I tend not to talk too much about computers with him). I probably never realized how much I miss a "real life" (as opposed to "just IRC/internet") community since I got here. There are the GNOME beer events, of course! But the only London Python User Group I see online is "professionals only", so it doesn't look very newcomers-friendly... and there is no chapter of the PyLadies in London. (I was told that I should set one up - but I cannot do it on my own. And yes, dear Londoners, this is another cry for help!) All of this probably just means that I need a job, I am tired of doing things on my own. End of the rant, sorry.

Later in the afternoon, yet another fantastic talk. Lynn Root presented Sink or swim: 5 life jackets to throw to New Coders. It was perfectly tailored for the stage I am in my programming education: I know the basics, now what? Well, there is her website, then there is... teaching others. I sense a pattern here...

And then I went to rest, because the day after I had to present my poster and I was already too nervous.

The day after - the last day - was basically "hey, here's my poster". I had presented a poster only once in my life, but it was a much smaller (although quite big!) conference, and it was in another field (game theory).

And you know what? I loved it! (Even if it meant missing the keynotes... and the other posters.)

I talked about what I did last summer, why it's a good idea to do something like that, how you do it (and what you shouldn't do); most important, I spread the word about the Outreach Program for Women - all the leaflets but one or two were gone by the end of the session, and many people went away with the link to the website scribbled on a piece of paper!

I wasn't able to stand on my feet, afterwards. So: nap! And then, introduction to sprints...

...so that yesterday I managed to find something for me at the OpenHatch sprint. I helped with a webpage that was incomplete (a webpage that was... teaching - how to contribute to an OpenSource project. Mmmmh, more of that pattern), and I cleaned up the wiki a bit. I had never heard of OpenHatch before this conference, but I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful frienship (to use the words of Claude Rains in Casablanca).

And now I should be packing (how will I stuff all the t-shirts I got into my suitcase?) and go on my way...

So: a big thank you to PyCon, to the PSF (who generously sponsored my travel and my hotel!), to all the wonderful people I met, too many to fit in a post here (also: I am terrible with names, I would probably forget someone). And... maybe see you in Florence later this year!

PS: I wrote the post this morning (PST). It's now almost night (also PST, I don't want to know what time it is in London), and I am at the airport - flight delayed by approximately 3 hours. I use the airport connection to give you... the poster! With a huge thank you to Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Meg Ford who sent me so many useful suggestions.

Ready for Brno? I hope so!

In the last week I revised as much Python 3 as I could, and I tried to teach myself the basics of JavaScript. And let's not forget Mallard!

The (Not So Evil) Plan:

• To give a closure to that Python tutorial! If it is possible to give a closure to something... ;-)
• To help as far I can, particularly with the other developer tutorials (thus particularly with the JavaScript tutorial).
• To tackle Izidor Matušov (again, as far as I can: I remember that he is quite tall) and start working on Getting Things GNOME, finally.
• To have fun! Well, that's always part of the plan...

Will I be able to follow my plan? In everything? At least in part? Will I freeze in the -11°C I read about on BBC Weather?

More news to follow...

So, how did it go?

The ButtonBox had some problems. Namely: it was a calculator... that did not work! At least, not if you tried to do something along the lines of "2 + 3 - 1".

I spent half a day re-writing the methods for calculating things, remembering my reverse Polish notation - and now it works, at least as long as you don't require that multiplication has precedence over sum.

Anyway, then it was time for the MenuButton (with some help to use jhbuild) and the Tooltip.

The first one was done on the model of what was already done in Vala. As I said at GUADEC, reading Vala knowing a bit of Java is like reading Spanish knowing Italian: you meet a lot of false friends, but you end up getting the general meaning. So, Vala examples has been my reference for all the internship.

The Tooltip was done just adding some tooltips to the old Toolbar code. Simple, and there is already room for an exercise (I added the tooltips to 3 buttons out of 4 - who will complete the job? No-one but you, my dear reader!)

Unfortunately, due to a couple of constraints (time and being a bit under the weather) my work has stopped here. I plan to start again as soon as possible, to write that "custom widget" and to revise all the pages of tutorial (should the "API Reference" section point to the stable or to the unstable version? What do you think?).

So: how did it go?

How did the internship go? Are you really asking that?

Answer: IT-WAS-GREAT.

I have learned a lot (I much more proficient in Python, I have learned how to do at least the basic stuff with Gtk+, I have managed to get along with git...), I am much more confident about my skills (in programming in particular and in "keeping a job" in general), and my ability to learn something new quickly.

So: when do we start doing something new again?

Soon, I think... Watch this space!

Last but not least: another HUGE thank you to Marina, for organizing the Outreach Program for Women and to Tiffany, for being such an extraordinary mentor... thank you, really, from the bottom of my heart.

Near the end, a cliffhanger.

(As in every half-decent movie!)

The time of my internship in the Outreach Program for Women is almost over! A GIGANTIC THANK YOU to Marina, Tiffany and everybody that has given me the opportunity to participate in the OPW. I cannot start expressing how grateful I am for the chance... and for the confidence boost that comes with it!

But the time is not over yet, and I still have work to do.

I have to do: example of MenuButton (ok), of Scrollbar (ok, I guess), of StatusIcon (it has appeared there tonight: is it going to be a sisyphean work? - but ok, again!), of Tooltip (I plan to do something simple, so: ok)... and a "create your own" widget.

And that is not ok.

I am completely at loss for ideas! So, please, dear readers... if you have any suggestion, let me know in the comments! I cannot guarantee I will follow all of your suggestions, of course: but I would really love some input.

In the meanwhile, I am doing all over again my example for ButtonBox, since I was inspired by the "nifty calculator" by Daniel Sielgel. Mine should be a bit simpler, though...

(Also missing - alas, completely missing! - are the exercises for the tutorial. That will be a work to be done after the end of the internship - my goal now is to have all the examples and theory pages ready for the 20th. Yes, that includes the mysterious "custom widget"! As I told you in the title, a cliffhanger...)

Comments & suggestions, as usual - and more than usual! - are welcome in the comments.

GUADEC + 1 (actually: + 2)

OK, I got it wrong.

GUADEC did not really end on Sunday.

On Monday, I went to my first hackfest - the PyGObject hackfest. It was fantastic. Thank you to Martin Pitt and Paolo Borelli and John Palmieri and everyone (sorry, I am terrible at remembering names!) that helped me to learn so many new things. Thank you, in particular, for your patience with this beginner.

On Tuesday, I finally sat down at a table with Tiffany and we redesigned what I am doing for this summer, given the many useful suggestions we had during GUADEC. The new idea: you should be able to consult the "example" pages (which are divided into: example, code for the example, useful methods, API references, exercises) both from a page that groups the widgets by "category" (windows, display widgets, buttons...) and from a page that gives you a series of "lessons" - a more "sequential" tutorial. The former is aimed at more expert hackers, whereas the latter is for almost absolute beginners. In the latter there are also the "theory" pages (properties, the MVC design...). For the order of the tutorial I owe a lot to Taryn Fox's page here (although I changed some things).

Any suggestion is, as always, very welcome!

Theory and practice are always the same thing. In theory, not in practice.

Ok, I said: "The main idea: one page, one widget; one widget, one page." in the last post about the 0 Beginners Tutorial, two weeks ago. (My, how time flies and all that sort of things!)

Of course, since things are never going to be as planned, this is not what will happen.

First thought, about ten days ago: "It would be nice to talk a bit about strings and Unicode, on the model of what Sebastian Pölsterl does here". Then it occurred to me that also this page of his tutorial is a great model too.

So: three pages (strings, signals and callback functions, properties) that are not attached to a widget - but linked from some widgets' pages.

Then I was about to rewrite the TreeView widget documentation page, and the ComboBox documentation page... and here comes the idea to write a page about the Model/View/Controller design, about TreeModel and its implementations ListStore and TreeStore, so that the similarities of TreeView and ComboBox are clearer (and therefore it is easier to learn both - my opinion is that ComboBox is slightly easier, but difficulty is always subjective!). Also: in the plan for the tutorial there are two ComboBox examples and four TreeView examples. To repeat a long explanation on the M/V/C design and the methods for TreeModel & friends would make things more confused.

So, now: off to write the M/V/C design page! And then hopefully I will be able to write some code samples again... I miss my Python! (Sorry Mallard, nothing against you...)

As usual: your thoughts? Ideas?