The title says it all. Start your PyTexas weekend off right by registering and enjoying a breakfast provided by the TAMU College of Architecture.

Connect with mentors to learn about Python, whether you're just starting out or are trying to extend your existing knowledge.

Stop by to check out PyTexas 2011's amazing sponsors.

Connect with mentors to learn about Python, whether you're just starting out or are trying to extend your existing knowledge.

Connect with mentors to learn about Python, whether you're just starting out or are trying to extend your existing knowledge.

Join us for a keynote presentation by Jeff Rush.

Go eat!

Come see if you've won any of the prizes provided by our sponsors.

Stop by to check out PyTexas 2011's amazing sponsors.

We'll go over some intermediate to advanced topics and consider pros and cons of choosing the simpler approach vs. the possibly more complicated or redundant one. The aim is to reduce the number of language APIs and constructs most programmers have to carry in their head to a smaller and more coherent set. Along the way some best practices will also be discussed that are at a higher level than things that can be flagged by automated syntax checking tools such as pylint, pyflakes, etc.

To provide access to enterprise directory data and services to developers at Texas A&M University, we have implemented a set of RESTful web services, using Django as our framework. Because these services include access to protected data, all web service clients must authenticate and be authorized to access a particular service. In order to implement the logic for making authentication and authorization decisions in one place, and cleanly apply it to any view, we wrote a custom decorator. This talk will cover the basic concepts behind decorators, how to write a decorator, and walk through our implementation of a decorator for authN/authZ.

In this talk we will create a simple hi/lo guessing game using Python. We will start with a blank screen and add features one by one until we run out of time. Along the way we will discuss various data structures (list, tuple, dictionary, set) and loops (for, while, etc.). This is a hands-on session, so bring a laptop and lots of questions. We will be programming in Python 2.x, though modifying the code to run under 3.x will not be difficult.

Daemons are those pieces of software in Unix (including Linux and Mac OS X) that run in the background and typically start automatically during system boot. Times when you might want a daemon include ... * Monitoring an "inbox" directory in situations where a cron job is not appropriate * Managing (possibly multiple) instances of software according to business rules Although most daemons are written in C, Python is a great alternative. Background reading: [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Types_of_daemons|Wikipedia article on Daemons]]

Apache Cassandra is an open source, distributed (NoSQL) database. This will give a high level introduction to Cassandra and its data model; it will detail the features of pycassa, the Python client library for Cassandra, and how to interact with Cassandra through it.

Join us for a panel discussion with TAMU faculty and Python community members.

In the last month, we've started an effort to aggregate our logs so we can do some real-time, holistic log analysis. Among other things, we are tracking failed logins across all points of entry, identifying possibly compromised accounts (simultaneous logins from multiple IPs, geographically disparate logins), and identifying high-volume mailers across multiple mail relays. The talk will include an introduction to MongoDB (NoSQL, data structures, querying, indexing, differences from relational databases, etc); some important performance and reliability features like its support for replica sets, sharding, and map/reduce; and some very cool features like GridFS and geospatial indexing. All of this, with the exception of database configuration, will be demoed with MongoDB's python client.

Enjoy another breakfast provided by the TAMU College of Architecture.

Open Space slots in the schedule allow you to create ad hoc discussions or informal presentations of your own choosing, unconference style (similar to BarCamp). So make PyTexas yours by using an Open Space to create an event on whatever topic you wish.

== Student Preparation If you're planning to attend the half-day tutorial on Robot Framework, it would be useful if you also attended the introductory presentation. If you can't make the Saturday afternoon introduction, then you can get the same information by working through the [[http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/wiki/QuickStartGuide|on-line Quick Start Guide]]. == System Requirements * Python 2.x ** I recommend [[http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads|ActiveState Python Community Edition]] * [[http://www.wxpython.org/download.php|wxPython]], Unicode version appropriate for your platform and Python version ** Here are some [[http://wiki.wxpython.org/InstallingOnUbuntuOrDebian|instructions for installing on Ubuntu or Debian]] * A PDF Reader for PDF files, such as the [[http://get.adobe.com/reader/|Adobe Reader]] ** Required for viewing slides * [[http://wiki.pytexas.org/FireFox|Firefox]] web browser ** Internet Explorer is not very friendly with reports generated by Robot Framework ** I recommend [[http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all-older.html|Firefox 3.6.21]], because that is what the instructor tested with and can support. * [[http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/|Robot Framework 2.6.1]] * [[http://code.google.com/p/robotframework-ride/downloads/list|Robot Framework IDE (RIDE) 0.38.1]]

Web frameworks like Django, Flask, etc. are great for most traditional web sites. However, there is a growing need to produce web applications that are responsive to external "events", whether a response from Twitter's API or a new message in an online chat room. Newer, non-blocking frameworks like Tornado seek to address this in a scalable manner. This talk will briefly introduce non-blocking principles and patterns, and move quickly into an overview of the library, as well as use cases and anti-use cases. A portion of the time will also be spent pointing out community libraries that are building on Tornado's foundation. Outline: # Introduction ## Why another framework? ## Intro to Asynchronous Design # Overview of a Tornado project ## a. Application ## b. Basic (blocking) Request Handlers ## c. Templates ## d. Asynchronous Handlers ## e. To block or not to block # Batteries included ## Auth module ## Options module ## Database ## UIModules ## Security # Community ## a. Tornad.io ## b. No-SQL libraries ## c. Twisted integration ## d. Torn Admin # Q&A

Walker Hale will explore the standard Python Logging Module and provide a tour from the basics through intermediate examples, and touch on advanced logging strategies. Do you write programs that run longer than 5 minutes? Would you like to leverage Python's excellent logging system more fully? Even if you don't use Python for your long-running processes, you will learn valuable and widely-applicable logging techniques.

About six months ago we moved our account provisioning process from a monolithic Perl script to a set of distributed, interconnected python scripts. By using message queues (specifically beanstalkd) to pass messages between the processes, we were able to build a system that was much faster, more reliable and more flexible. I will walk through the process that led us to choose beanstalkd, look at some alternatives that are available, and describe some use cases for message queues.

virtualenv, pip, and virtualenvwrapper are vital tools for any Python developer. This beginner-level presentation will introduce each of these.

Go eat!

Voted on by the PyTexas community, this talk is guaranteed to be insightful and informative. We just don't know what it is yet.

If you missed Greg Lindstrom's first talk on programming a simple game in Python, check out this one. This time, you'll be building a "Wheel of Fortune"-style game.

Learn the magic of writing programs that monitor, alter and react to the execution of program code by responding to imports, changes to variables, calls to functions and invocations of the builtins. This talk goes beyond the static world of metaclasses and class decorators into the dynamics of tracepoints.