We could try to summarize the conversation here, but it frankly wouldn't do it justice. This is a great conversation between some bright guys, and it was a ton of fun to bring them all together. The links above will get you started, but you are best served to listen and simply enjoy.

Some linkable things we discussed include:

• GHeat
• Habitualist
• Gondor
• If This Then That
• Aspen
• Flask
• Brainfuck
• Whitespace
• Apple II Emulator (ApplePy)
• Mytechne

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• Introductions all around. Gladhanding. Bona fides. Poledancing (Not).
• The history of PyOhio: "This one time, at PyCon..."
• Fortune favored the bold...let's make a conference!
• Columbus was chosen because iot was between everyone. Look at a map. It really is.
• The AV staff is a bunch of steely-eyed missle men...and women. They rock. All the talks are on Blip.tv and PyVideo.
• Year one had 80 people. Year 5 - over 200.
• Did we mention that PyOhio is free? It is. And it is the People's Conference. But in a good way. Not in a creepy propaganda-poster kind of way.
• The bulk of the funds to run the con is from the sponsors and donations.
• A person can help by Volunteering. Platespinners, catherders, and co-chairs welcome.
• There is an Expanded Mission. But you're going to have to listen. I'm not telling you what it is. Nyah.
• Ok. I Lied. PyOhio wants to get into teaching the youth and other folks new to Python, "Day Of Python" events.
• People come from all over the country to PyOhio. It is at destination, nay, a PILGRIMAGE.
• PyOhio has just become a Non-Profit Organization in the State of Ohio. Federal 501.3(c) coming soon.
• There is a lot of useful info about how to become a non-profit detailed in the show, but show notes cannot do it justice. You must listen. Really.
• FreeGeek and Ohio Linuxfest folks were very helpful. Word to your mothers, gentlemen.
• Growth is the primary challenge. Growing pains require more help, more volunteers, and more publicity. Must not preach to the same choir.
• The future, it is bright. Shades are required.
• It would be awesome for Ohio to be a Python talent hotbed. Stop the brain-drain to the coasts.
• PYOHIO WILL BE THE WOODSTOCK OF PYTHON. With less drugs. Cause, you know. That's just wrong. And stuff.
• The campaign to get PyCon to Ohio has begun. Plans within plans. Oh yes. Plans within plans.
• Eric spoke on processing a million images to find "interesting things" in the night sky. Wound up finding fascinating data about the path of the year, the tracks of the planets in the sky, and how the length of the day changes throughout the year.

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This is the last of our interviews from PyCon, so I guess that means we have to get off our butts and make some more episodes happen. Don't panic--we don't plan to disappear for a year again (though that wasn't really our plan to begin with). In fact, with any luck, we should be recording at least one episode in the next few days to help get us back on track.

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What can we say about Katie? We met her at PyCon 2012 and, frankly, we were starstruck. She's a woman of many talents...

• She codes!
• She does things to the Internet!
• She blogs!
• She talks sometimes!
• She likes to hear from people!

Most importantly, she's a pythonista and she agreed to talk with us. This is that talk. Enjoy!

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And, lo, we are returned from the void. From Python Import Podcast is back! In this episode, we meet with Steve Holden, Chairman of the PSF and all around swell guy. We discuss the history of PyCon and Python itself, explore the evolution of a volunteer conference, get turndown service, and even a little chocolate.

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What do you mean it’s not February any more? Seriously?! Sigh. We know, we know, we broke our promise again. Life happened–to all of us. We’ll do better next time (Chris has a plan, you see.)

Luckily, the wait is over–we’re back, and with a whopper! Clocking in at a mighty 106 minutes, this jumbo deluxe ultra fun-size epic includes our reflections on recent conferences we’ve attended–January’s now-distant CodeMash and March’s just-complete PyCon. Your hosts for this excursion down conference memory lane, in counterclockwise order, are Chris Miller, Mike Pirnat, Ben Smith, and Mike Crute.

But first–NEWS! We get up to speed on the current haps in Blogofile, the upcoming PyWeek, PEP land, and the Python version control migration (from Subversion to Mercurial).

Our CodeMash recap describes the conference, highlights memorable presentations, and gives a little flavor of the night life (jam sessions and pool parties and craziness, oh my!). The short version is that CodeMash is awesome, and you should go. Seriously–it’s a polyglot conference! At an indoor water park! In January! It is made of win.

But HOLY COW OMG PYCON!! Having just returned from our glorious adventures, we are positively effervescent about what was probably the best PyCon ever. Mike Pirnat is goaded gently into discussing his speaking experiences–giving his official talk, Exhibition of Atrocity, mortally offending Titus Brown at the Testing in Python Birds of a Feather (aka the TiP BoF), and announcing his side project, How Old Is My Kid?, at the lightning talks.

While at PyCon, we joined up with Rick Harding of Lococast, Anthony Scopatz of scientific computing podcast inSCIght, testing goatherder and PyCon programming committee guru Terry Peppers, and an atypically quiet David Stanek to form a veritable Voltron of voices, recording a live round table during the Sunday morning open spaces. We rofl our way through the previous night’s TiP BoF exploits, and Terry gets Mike Pirnat to talk about talking. Apologies for any duplication of content in here–it’s all due to accidents with the time machine we’re working on to try to absorb all of the excellent PyCon talks. (Please also forgive Mike Pirnat for hammering on his laptop while recording–he’s very sorry and promises not to do it again.) We rave about how well the Convore-driven backchannel worked out, get some insights into the “Extreme” track and programming PyCon talks, and recall our favorites presentations. We send mad, mad shout-outs of joy to the A/V team, who had much of the conference video online before the conference even ended; their work is a fabulous benefit to the Python community. Matt Gibberman and Eric Floehr join us for a few minutes to discuss Eric’s talk on genetic programming.

In a special bonus segment, Rick and Mike Pirnat sit down with the intrepid John DeRosa, whose epic cross-country bus ride from Seattle to Atlanta with play-by-play Twitter commentary so captivated us. We talk about the why and how of his journey and chat about memorable moments and human drama he encountered along the way. Then we bring things into a full-circle, swirling time loop vortex of doom and throw some love to CodeMash and encourage all willing Pythonistas to help represent by submitting talks for next January’s CodeMash.

We then pop back up the stack to wrap up the episode and bring it on home with Chris Miller’s promises of a new episode in early April, by hook or by crook (or perhaps by five-point plan).

We want to add that it was thoroughly awesome to meet up with fans and listeners while we were at PyCon. Your passion and excitement for this podcast really inspired us to hurry up and get this thing out there so that we can get back on track. THANK YOU. YOU ROCK.

But wait–there’s more! Behold the miscellaneous links of wonderment and joy:

• Awesome PyWeek game: A Murder of Crows
• The home of CodeMash: Kalahari Resort
• Git Immersion (which Mike maybe remembered to mention and maybe didn’t)
• Python for microcontrollers: PyMite
• The MoSync SDK
• Thoroughly awesome band at CodeMash: The Womack Family Band
• Matt “Snowdog” Gibberman rocks the hell out of “Back in the USSR” at the CodeMash jam session
• The PyCon videos are giant piles of gold-plated win
• Video of Mike Pirnat’s PyCon talk: Exhibition of Atrocity
• Video of David Beazley’s talk: Using Python 3 to Build a Cloud Computing Service for my Superboard II
• Video of “Dude, Where’s My RAM?”
• Video of Hilary Mason’s inspirational keynote
• Video of Running Ultra-Large Telescopes in Python
• Video of Chris McAvoy’s Threadless keynote
• Courtesy of Alfredo Deza, a lovely reminder to press on in spite of the haters, who are, in fact, gonna hate

Thanks for listening, and thanks so much for being patient with our intermittent release schedule. Once Chris shows us his elaborate Powerpoint, we’ll get it figured out.

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...or “Make Your Own Episode Title, Since You’re So Clever; I’m Tired and Going to Sleep Because Codemash Starts in Seven Hours”

Broadcasting from high atop the basement of the Buckeye Beer Engine, regular voices Chris Miller, Mike Pirnat, David Stanek, Mike Crute, and Ben Smith are joined by Gary Bernhardt, renowned destroyer of software, for a conversational journey through what’s on our minds this week. (Audiophiles beware–thar be strange acoustics ahead!)

First, we begin with an apology for not releasing an episode in six months; we make some excellent and terribly creative excuses, but still, we’re covered in a thick layer of fail. Forgive us?

Getting down to business, we discuss WSGI2 and various issues around (what we perceive to be) the current community furor over its development. Do you know your PEP-3333 from your PEP-444? We try to sort it all out, and why we either like or don’t like bits of it, all the while haunted by the echoes of the room and the faint hints of bar music above. (Is that David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” I hear?)

Next it’s time to beat on one of our favorite pet issues, Testing. We battle our way out of the weeds of semantics and eventually come around to some more practical talk around tools like Cucumber and Lettuce and what it means for suits and geeks to collaborate to build functional specifications. (Please note that if you’re driving a Ford Taurus, you might have left your lights on.)

From there, it’s a very quick descent into a passionate discussion of Python’s tendency to spawn an explosion of “us too!” implementations of any shiny things that we see in other languages and the resulting community fragmentation that ensues, design by committee, and related perils. Dim memories of the dawn of WSGI are recalled, Armin Ronacher’s Logbook is called out for being new-instead-of-fixing, and snake-guice gets name checked. Mike Crute implores erstwhile Python developers to look around for existing solutions (and how to improve them) instead of building their own.

It’s then a hop-skip-and-a-jump over to templating engines like Mako, Jinja, Genshi, and Django templates, and then the philosophical differences between various web frameworks. Are we better pursuing unity of effort or diversity of ideas? Why does Ruby outdo Python at “one and only one obvious way to do it” when it comes to major products? This then spirals into ancient history of Rails and Python web frameworks and our aesthetic feelings and pet peeves about Ruby.

We bring things back around into more practical territory as Chris asks Mike Pirnat to expound fo a bit about Blogofile, a static site/blog generator that Mike has recently become enamored with. (A few corrections here–since recording, version 0.7 has escaped, and Chris, who claims to be “chained to Wordpress” switched painlessly over to Blogofile in an evening’s time.) We give a nice shout out to fellow Blogofile contributor Morgan Goose and his awesome Fabric kung-fu.

And that’s pretty much it.

Big thanks again to the Buckeye Beer Engine for being so hospitable with their space; they offer free wi-fi, a great selection of beers, and they have RSS feeds for their tap list and menu specials and other news. How awesome is that?

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back next month with another installment–we promise!

[shownotes by Mike Pirnat, for he is made of WIN]

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In this episode, as cast of thousands…okay, six…discuss the most recent PyOhio conference.

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In this episode Mike Crute, Cory Sitko, and Mike Pirnat enjoy a day at the beach: not swimming, not making sand castles, but talking about Python. And yet, we love them.

Detailed show notes to follow, once Chris gets off his ass and writes them.

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In this episode of From Python Import Podcast:

• We learn that Dave Stanek thinks that most of us (and by us, we mean you. Yes, you.) are using decorators wrong. “Balderdash!” quoth the Stanek. “This is all frumious nonsense!” Or something like that.
• The debate over whether or not we should be adding new code to the Standard library has been raised on certain mailing lists. Some feel that we need to add new functionality because, as we like to say, the batteries are included. However, others feel that adding things to the Standard Library is where code goes to die, and that no major updates ever take place once this happens. What do you think?
• The ever-charming and sexy Mike Pirnat joins us to discuss a personal revelation he’s had about the Zen of Python. We’re happy to take credit for this.
• We apologize for the sound quality on this one…you’ll see why when you listen. Someone had to pack up his studio equipment this week.

Thanks for joining us. We welcome, nay, crave your thoughts. And your immortal souls.

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In this episode, we continue our discussion of the Zen of Python.

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This is the first of two episodes where we’re going to explore PEP 20, that is, The Zen of Python.

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Real show notes to follow. With links and everything.

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Welcome to the first episode of the podcast! These, my friends, are the Show Notes.

Introduction to Your Hosts

• David Stanek @dstanek on Twitter
• Mike Crute @mcrute on Twitter
• Chris Miller @codeshaman on Twitter / codeshaman on Identi.ca

PyCon 2010 Reflections

• Mike and Chris were impressed by the community and the group focus
• Ruby sucks. Mike said it. Bring it, kids.
• Titus likes Distribute and Pip. Who knows why?
• What can we learn from PyCon for regional conferences like PyOhio?
• Dave’s done a lot of thinking about testing
• He finds that nothing lets him test the way he wants.
• He uses nose, mock, and dingus
• Mote might be good for BDD, but Dave finds it lacking.
• Dave hates documentation. Tests could be like documentation, and would be more accurate over time.
• Mote parses the output more like a narrative, almost like a spec, instead of …..F….
• We work with a large system, and rest assured, code is not documentation. Tests could be.
• Oh..we ramble about this for a while. PyCon? What’s PyCon? Oh…right…the Testing BOF.
• There was a Testing Goat. Terry Peppers is somehow responsible for it. Mike Pirnat needed one. Gary Bernhardt was the goat. We want pictures. ‘Nuff said?
• Look into Mike’s .vimrc. Behold the wonder.
• Right. PyCon. Remember Pycon? David Beazley’s talk on the GIL was dead sexy.
• The Brandon Rhodes’ discussion of the Dictionary Object. Awesome.
• Chris thought Titus’s talk on Continuous Integration frameworks was great.
• Oh look. Back to testing. We like talking about testing. Look for a show or two on testing. Wait! Don’t leave!
• Chris was impressed with the diversity of the community and how friendly people were.
• And about the vendors. What did we think about the vendors? We like Swag. And sometimes we buy books. And hats.
• “I use vim, so I don’t really need an IDE.” Flame. Discuss.
• We generally have a good opinion of companies using open source and who participate in the community.
• We enjoyed hacking together, especially on Mike’s snakeplan.
• We need DCVS achievements. Like games. But better.
• Catherine Devlin’s cmd2 was sweet.
• You might be eaten by a grue.
• Python is used by the military to create simulations. Thanks, Eric Silverman!
• Atlanta, however, was…meh. We’d prefer Cleveland. We’re not biased. Nope. And it’s not Detroit, right?

Closing

• Contact us by leaving a comment or by emailing feedback [at] frompythonimportpodcast.com
• What topics do you want? Who do you want to hear from? Let us know!
• Our Identi’ca group is fpip
• Let Steve Holden know we’d love a bottle of Scotch.

Housekeeping

• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
• The music is Codemonkey, provided by Jonathan Coulton.

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