V GruPy-SP meeting in São Paulo - March, 24th

The GruPy-SP (São Paulo Python User Group) March meeting happened at Google's office in São Paulo. The meeting was attended by about 60 people and we had 5 talks. This was a very special meeting because we had talks from Guido, Alex Martelli, Collin Winter and Cary Hull (all by video conference).

Talks:

• Rodolpho Eckhardt - "PyCon 2008 Trip Report" - Rodolpho made a very nice report of his experience going to Chicago to attend PyCon 2008. It certainly made some of us think about going to PyCon 2009.



• Cary Hull - "Divmod's Axiom" - Cary Hull talked about the Axiom ORM, it was a fast talk introducing it features and benefits.



• Alex Martelli - "Callback design patterns" - Very good technical talk. Details about the use and implementation of Callbacks.



• Guido van Rossum - "Python 3000" - Probably the talk that everyone was waiting, It was the same talk that Guido made at PyCon 2008, he showed the main changes that will happen in Python 3000 and what to do to be prepared to change your code from Python 2.x to 3000.



• Collin Winter - "2to3" - Very good talk from Collin Winter about how the 2to3 conversion tool works, where it does and where it doesn't work.

The next meeting will be held on May. We will not have a meeting in April because of FISL (Free Software International Forum) that will happen on April 17th, 18th and 19th at Porto Alegre.

Thanks to everyone who attended, specially to Rodolpho who organized the meeting.

IV GruPy-SP meeting in Santos - Feb, 22 and 23

The GruPy-SP (São Paulo Python User Group) February meeting was held at SENAI Santos. It was a two-day event, one day for talks and the other for the Python Bug Day.

First day - Feb, 22 - Talks

Luciano Ramalho and Pedro Werneck talked to approximately 140 students, professors and professionals at SENAI Santos.

Luciano talked about Python being used by big companies as a “secret weapon”, he showed some Python code including PyGame and Django examples and interactive sessions using the Python console.

Pedro showed some of the versatility of Python presenting a script that manipulates a device plugged in the computer parallel port, some web apps and a GUI application using Tkinter.

Most of the audience was not familiar to Python and this was their first contact with the language.

Second day - Feb, 23 - Python Bug Day

14 members of the GruPy-SP went to Santos to work on the Python Bug Day.

The sprint started at 10h00 led by Luciano Ramalho and Rodrigo Bernardo Pimentel (RBP). We listed the bugs that we thought we could fix and then started working in pairs. The sprint went until 16h00 and we fixed five bugs.

Thanks to everyone who attended, specially to Sandro Fernandes and Ricardo Guinody who organized this meeting.