December of Things

I’m just done with a month long winter break after the semester finished at school. The month of December was about some travel, lot of sleep, occasional movie sprints, and lastly but most importantly it was about taking my experiences with Python some steps forward.The list of experiments included a handful with Twisted including an incomplete(+ abandoned) networking project, gitpython, a small screen grabber(+ uploader) script and a couple of patches contributed to one of the Mozilla.org websites that is addons.mozilla.org a.k.a. AMO. These experiments though not involving coding a huge project all the way, did well in teaching me some really important things both at fundamental levels and sometimes arbitrary magic tricks.

Recap. Me Earlier with Python.

I started learning Python about 4 months back in September, last year. And it was this time, that I realized that Python while being easy and quick to learn can be very useful. I did my first Python work towards a special task which was creating a script that runs as a daemon on my shared web host, crawls for artists on Last.fm, pull their biographical information and look for the location terms using Yahoo Placemaker API and eventually determine the geographical location to which the artist belonged. I needed such a bot script to populate a database of artists with their geographical locations for my website project which was about music discovery over geographical data. My shared host supported Python, I heard Python would be good for making such scripts, and I wanted to learn Python so it was an obvious to choose Python for the script. Being a PHP programmer, I used analogies to PHP methods of parsing the web documents, and random smaller stuff to make a quick leap to learning Python while directly coding my script. It was a smooth run, much much smoother than I had expected and apart from some nasty bugs which broke the script sometimes, it worked really good. Good enough to give me enough artists to get the website live within 3 days after starting the script on my shared web host.

Enclosed Lessons

1. Python has everything that PHP has. urllib, xml_minidom made me feel home.
2. Life’s easier without braces.

Some Links

• Checkout the website. Geonres.com
• Checkout the source of the script on GitHub.
• Checkout the website source on GitHub.

Exposure to the Community. PyCon India 2011

I registered for PyCon India before actually starting to work with Python which was because of my desire to learn the awesome language. I was really excited as it was the first time that I was going to attend such a large community meetup. Being interested in web development, I attended every talk/session that gave me a hint of something that I could use to build web applications using Python notably including some like the low level web- scrapping tutorial, a talk on Redis, and another one on pyjamas. They came with great learning and I got to know people who’ve been doing great things with the awesome language that I was so wanted to learn. All that was a great motivation package to keep up and working.

Enclosed Lessons

1. One can do pretty much anything, perhaps more things than any other language using Python, in ways that are easier and quicker.
2. Python has an awesome community full of cool people who do cool stuff every day, every night and in every part of the globe.

Trying out things with Web Development with Python. Learning Django.

When I started learning Python, I knew I wanted to use it as one my tools for developing web applications along with PHP. I heard the names of some web frameworks built in Python like Django, Google’s webapp, pylons, and web2py. When I visited PyCon India, I heard more about them and much more about Django and how much better it is than any of the Python web frameworks out there, or perhaps better than many web frameworks built in different languages too. I wanted to give it a wild try to learning it. I usually have a tendency to learn while doing, but I didn’t have an idea of an application to start with so I though I would remake a web application that I earlier developed using PHP(I called it shitstream), but this time in Django. Since, it was my first attempt to any MVC framework, shitstream appeared to be a good choice to get some basic concepts built up, as the app was simple and compact.

Enclosed Lessons

1. Django is the best thing one can use to build web applications.
2. Unless I’m out of choices or luck, I would never go back to PHP again.

Checkout the source of Shitstream app on GitHub.

Helping make Web Better. Fixing @ addons.mozilla.org

I wanted to contribute to Mozilla in any way possible since the day I got to know about Open Source Software, about Mozilla, and how Mozilla keeps doing awesome things which make the web much more awesome than it was, or perhaps much more awesome than how it is now. But, with a huge rack of Mozilla projects to choose from, my unawareness about them, and my lack of focus in a single field kept me confused whenever I wanted to give a try to contributing to one of the projects at Mozilla. But when I learnt Django, and accidentally browsing through the Web Dev projects at Mozilla’s Contribution page, I found my thing. Having developed two Firefox addons earlier, I was aware of AMO, or I should say that I hung-out quite alot on that website. And, AMO being the first in the web dev projects list, I could not wait to browse through the bugs list and kick out a few of those annoying bugs. It did not take me long to fork the Mozilla’s github repository of Zamboni, clone it to my local box, and start trying to set it up. But setting up the whole thing, that is my local AMO instance took me 3 days. Yes, 3 days! It was actually a pain setting up the huge stack on my Ubuntu system. Thanks to folks on IRC, who are patient great helpers and played angels in helping me setting it up especially Jeff Balogh. Not only setup, but he also guided me to how to start fixing my first bug and led me all the way to my first pull request, which was much required for me as it was not only my first attempt to fix a bug on this project, but also my first attempt to fix anything on any open source project. My first pull request although took a while to be closed with a merge of my proposed patch because it was awaiting review from the reporter and in the meantime I was also busy with college. But as the winter break started, I got it merged, and also worked to fix a couple more bugs and got my patches merged. All the while I was working on these bugs, Mozilla developers hanging out on IRC were really helpful while being prompt at suggestive code reviews especially Chris Van, who is also the commiter of all my patches to the original AMO git repository.

Enclosed Lessons

1. Most importantly, I learnt how to write code that is readable and stylish. Thanks to Mozilla’s adoption of PEP8.
2. Ample of git stuff, I knew a very limited subset of git before starting to work on this project. I’m still terrible, but much better than what I was earlier.
3. git rebase can be dangerous while working with a lot of people.
4. find . -name “*.pyc” -delete is simple but can be magical sometimes.

Have a look at my commits merged with AMO here. So that was pretty much my Python story so far, and another of my favorite December. What I’ve figured out so far is that Python and Mozilla communities are two of the best Open Source Communities working to promote openness everywhere and Mozilla doing their every bit to build an open web platform which is not just about Mozilla Firefox but freedom and choice to the users of web around the globe.