Blog :: User Groups

I abandoned Baypiggies for an evening last week and instead went to the first meeting of the new DjangoSF group. Eric Florenzano started a mailing list on November 30th and a meetup group a few days later and on December 10th some forty-odd people crowded into a conference room at Six Apart.

I was a few minutes late (I missed the Bart train I wanted and had to jog from the Powell St station back six or seven blocks to Six Apart). The sign on the door said to text Eric to come down and open the door...

Once I got up to the conference room it was standing room only - I'd guess about 6-10 people ended up standing in the two entrances. I had decent view of the slides as Andrew Badr of disqus (who provide the comments for my blog) talked about scaling Django.

All in all this was a great time. It's presenting me with some problems, however, as I'd like to go back to DjangoSF but definitely can't make both Baypiggies and DjangoSF on back-to-back nights. Additionally I found out after the Baypiggies meeting that we're losing the Google Mountain View location as host. This could be good for me - I'd love some place accessible from BART so I don't have to drive quite so far... I haven't heard anything about a new spot yet though; if any readers have access to a largish conference room in the Bay Area I'd love to hear about it.

I'm also conflicted because I volunteered to head up a Python dev tools night in March. So far I have two Speakers and am considering doing a talk myself on using Fabric/Pip/Virtualenv to package and deploy python server apps and environments. I'm just switching from easy_install to Pip (after seeing James Bennet's recent posts on the virtues of Pip) and have been using fabric to deploy for a while. I've only been using virtualenv on my dev box but am intrigued by the idea of easily packaging a whole virtualenv environment with Pip. I'm still soliciting talks (no text editors please - tools should be things you use to develop, deploy, test, document, etc your Python applications...) so comment if you'd like to give a talk and are going to be in the vicinity of the Bay Area on March 10th...

Anyways, with that on the schedule I can hardly abandon Baypiggies... I may just have a full schedule of user group attendance in the next year...

Posted on December 19th 2008, 01:41 AM

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