New Year’s Python Meme 2012

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you discovered in 2012?

  • VirtualEnv (virtualenvwrapper) - This tool is really awesome. You can create a new environment for your testing and development. It’s really useful if you want to contribute to a Python project. Just run python setup develop and you’re ready to go.
  • Requests (by Kenneth Reitz) is a real advantage when you develop an HTTP client because urllib is quite cumbersome.
  • Python-RQ (by Vincent Driessen) - You can create a PubSub with Redis, and it’s easy.
  • Gunicorn (by Benoit Chesneau) - A very good WSGI server. I use it for my own projects. This WSGI server can be included in your own project via the Python API.

If you want to monitor your processes you can use these tools.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2012?

  • I learned asynchronous programming with gevent and python-rq. These libraries are really awesome.
  • Before December 2012, I didn’t use GitHub except to fetch the source code of several projects.

3. Which open source project did you contribute to the most in 2012? What did you do?

OpenERP - I have been a core developer for 5 years. I also contributed to Python via PythonFOSDEM.

I organized a Python devroom at FOSDEM 2013 with some friends. It’s really great for the Python community, and we want to improve the visibility of Python.

If you want to contribute, the repository is on GitHub

4. Which Python blog or website did you read the most in 2012?

The Python section of Reddit, Hacker News, and sometimes HumanCoders, where you can find a lot of great articles.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2013?

  • Gateway - Based on python-rq, this library is a tool to exchange data from one source to one destination via the concept of Workers.
  • PrintUs - This is a prototype of a printing server based on pyzmq.
  • LLVM - I implemented a small interpreter for a minimalist Lisp language, and I would like to compile it with LLVM.
  • The foundation of the python network programming.
  • Erlang
  • Go
  • Scala

6. What is the top software, application or library you wish someone would write in 2013 ?

  • A CMS based on Python and Flask
  • a wiki based on git and python (flask) and with the reStructuredText support

Want to do your own list? Here’s how:

  • copy-paste the questions and answer to them in your blog
  • tweet it with the #2012pythonmeme hashtag.