Real Ultimate Programming

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Notes From PyATL 2011-09-08

Welcome to Python (Brandon Rhodes)

Sweet. I just learned about fileinput.

OpenOPC for Python (John Pilman)

OPC is OLE for Process Control, and it serves as the high-level communications method for lots of control systems.

There is a newer, non-DCOM-based spec called OPC UA, but it isn’t (yet) widely supported.

OpenOPC is an Open Source library for interacting with OPC from Python.

On a side note: drag-and-drop programming is real. This control system he’s working on is absolutely drag-and-drop programming. It’s just not general purpose programming.

I’m having a bit of a hard time following this one; I think my bad angle to the screen combined with my lack of knowledge in the domain is a bad combination.

This seems like a huge win for anybody who needs to start munging about with multiple pieces in an OPC environment.

Fast, Lightweight Testing for Python (Shawn Boyette)

Why nanotest-py? Because he didn’t like xUnit, and he likes to write tools that do exactly what he wants.

It’s a port of nanotest.js, which is itself inspired by Test::More.

pis_deeply sort of intrigues me. I will have to go read the code for that and see how it is implemented.

I think I might prefer the stuff in the standard library and/or nose, but I think it made it to my list of things to use on a side project.

This is only available for Python 3.2 right now, because he used the new argparse module in the standard lib.

Streamlining Workflows with Puppet Faces (Kelsey Hightower)

I love me some Puppet. “Infrastructure as Code” is a great concept.

Does he have a Puppet script for Oracle‽ Must. Have.

Puppet Faces

Puppet Faces is essentially a giant set of APIs to manipulate Puppet.

Wow. Their stuff for introspecting what’s already on a system and giving you the equivalent Puppet module/whatever is pretty awesome.

The main point of Puppet Faces is to cut out boiler plate and improve facility with ad hoc configuration.

Hmm… this is the sort of thing that I can imagine would be useful, but it’s so far outside what I do on a daily basis that I don’t have an immediate feel for it.

Pretty cool. The jira subcommand is available as a default part of Puppet once you finish building the Face.

I guess if your JIRA users are technically savvy, this would be super useful, but do you need to protect yourself against the new guy?

You get a REST API, the Ruby API, and a CLI for your Face.

Put on Your Data Goggles (Brandon Rhodes)

I like how I take very few notes in Brandon’s talks, because he just makes it feel so intuitive you feel stupid writing something down.