Announcements
- Google I/O is having baby conferences; there’s one here in Atlanta in May (via JR).
- The Jam Sessions are probably moving; contact JR with suggestions.
- Doug reminds us about the upcoming List of Consultants.
- Rick has coupons for his book; I wonder if I should get one just in case I need to do MongoDB stuff in the future.
- GTRI is hiring; Brighton Technologies (sp? where Dan Rocco is working, at any rate) is hiring, too.
The Tax Man Cometh (Daniel Rocco)
- I’m a big fan of the
csv
module, too. - But not as big of fan of it as I am of
namedtuple
. - TIL about
._make
. - I have to admit, even my feeble attempts at an NCAA bracket this year are better than tax brackets. Taxes just suck.
- I like the functional flavor, here. Data processing pipelines are so awesome.
- I feel a mod operator coming on.
- I didn’t mention it before, but the
Decimal
usage is probably super awesome for people who are new to Python. - csvkit you say? That sounds extremely cool.
- Good Question: what about
DictReader
?
The Trouble with Commas (Cliff Kachinske)
- Fun gotcha: A trailing
,
will often create you a tuple, usually when you really don’t want one. If you start seeing complaints about mismatches in the number of arguments, it’s a good idea to look for trailing commas. - What really frustrates me is when I try to get clever and do something like this only to find out that Python isn’t creating me a tuple in this particular instance (for whatever reason).
A/B Testing with Cleaver (Ryan Petrello)
- Didn’t use Visual Website Optimizer, Google Analytics, Optimizely, etc. because they wanted a Python-based solution that targeted developers, not marketers.
- Found plenty of solutions, but they were all opinionated (to the point of requiring specific frameworks). This might not be a show-stopper for me, because tight integration usually means less config to mess with.
- They wound up creating Cleaver (MIT licensed?), which only requires WSGI, basically.
- Basically, you use WSGI middleware to add tracking.
- It has a number of pluggable backends to store the experiment data.
- You can add a weight to the tuple, easy-peasy. Does not currently support functions, but he seems confident it can be extended fairly easily.
- Comes bundled with a lightweight web UI for viewing the results.
- It’s cool. I wonder how much of the statistical heavy lifting it does (statistical power, significance, correlation with other changes, etc.)
- Ryan says: They don’t do power, but it does do significance.
- I missed this discussion while I was reading the
README
(curses!), but I believe the control is just the first option.
Back to flipping out…