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…