Misc. Notes

• October meeting moved to the 18th
• Beginner’s Series starting!
• Atlanta Startup Weekend is the weekend of Nov. 9 (check the mailing list for details, because I may not have heard correctly) on the 3rd floor of the ATDC.
• PyCarolinas is Oct. 21-22
• Junior devs being hired by somebody (see the discussion board for details)
• Oct. 6 - the mini-maker faire being held at Tech

Experience Report: Example of Fuzz Testing with Python (Al Snow)

• What is fuzz testing? Testing an application with randomized inputs.
• You probably want to sandbox your app when you do this, in case your randomized input breaks it in interesting and dangerous ways.
• Tried a few different apps, but not all projects were interested in looking at the results.
• The fuzz-testing sweetspot is “just a little invalid” files. If it’s too obviously corrupt, then the app has no trouble spotting it.
• If you can’t drive input through the app from the command-line, it makes it WAY harder to test, and this applies to fuzz testing just as much as any other form of testing.

How to Get Thrown Out of a Casino with Python (Skylar Saveland)

• Counting cards like those MIT peeps
• Looking forward to Skylar’s iPython Notebook talk, because some of these features are cool.
• His little blackjack lib is broken-knucks

Metaclasses Demystified (Jonathan LaCour)

• DreamHost has an S3-compatible competitor with much cheaper pricing.
• I’m having flash-backs to The Brillant Paula Bean
• A class provides an instance w/ its namespace, which is what gives the instance its behavior and state.
• A metaclass is a class whose instances are classes.
• Nothing like unsugaring class, a/k/a, defining a class using the raw type.
• An instance method on a metaclass becomes a class method on the created classes (useful factoid!).
• I wonder what sort of craziness I can accomplish if I combine __metaclass__ with __new__.

Back to flipping out…