Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

In my new executive position I’m responsible for maintaining adequate staffing levels in the technology department of my company. We are pretty much staffed up at the moment but there are some potential projects on the horizon that will tax the capacity of my team. In a novel fit of forward planning I’m trying to find a consulting partner who will be able to help us in these times of high workload. It is proving quite tricky.

So, dear lazyweb, do you know of any reputable consulting companies who will fit our bill. They must be;

1. On the ground in Australia. A Sydney office is a bonus.
2. Have competencies in one or more of; Python, PostgreSQL and scaling internet applications
3. Have a track record and reputable references. I will be checking.
4. Not cost the earth. Although I’m very aware of how much consultants cost, having been one myself for most of the last fifteen years.

Any and all suggestions are welcomed in the comments or to my email address. As long as they fit our criteria. Outsourcing and offshore development are not an option at this time so please don’t suggest these.

On Thursday, June 7 2007 from 6:30PM, there will be a social gathering of Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc. Laptops, code review, show and tell etc. allowed and encouraged.

We meet in the ground floor area next to P.J. O’Briens Pub internal entrance in the Grace Hotel at the corner of York and King Street, Sydney, New South Wales 2000.

If you are planning on coming please register your attendance at upcoming.

Its the first week of a new month which means that this Thursday evening is the Sydney Python meeting. For a change this month we are in Google’s Sydney offices for a couple of talks. A retrospective of PyCon 2007 from Alec Thomas and Andrew Bennett on Bazaar.

I’ll be there and as the team are currently looking at alternatives to CVS for version control I’m trying to persuade some of them to come along as well.

The fun starts at 6:15pm and we will be retiring to a local hostelry for a refreshing drink or two at around 8:30pm.

So, its official (see the announcement for the 13th of March, 2007). I’ve given up the cosy world of consulting for the hustle and bustle of a real job.

I’m now the software services manager at CommSecure. I should take this opportunity to echo the bloggers motto - the words published here are entirely my own and do not represent the views of my employer.

Its a bit of change for me because I’ll no longer be working with ERP systems but rather looking after the team that write and support the systems that sit at the very core of the company’s operations. Not only that but its a technology shift as well. Away from enterprise technologies like Oracle, Java, .Net, and the like and towards the brave new world of Linux, PostreSQL and Python. The team at CommSecure is one of the biggest concentrations of Python developers in this part of the world and that was, if I’m honest, a significant attraction of this new role.

Sadly I won’t be very hands on, not unless things get really hairy. So whilst I may mention the technologies in use at work here in passing most of my focus is going to be on the transition from managing people for the duration of a project to managing a team of people (and the associated projects) on a more permanent basis.

Its a big challenge for me, and the first few days have illustrated how big, but I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve packaged and released version 0.2 of gerald. You can find all of the details on the project page but in a nutshell the changes from the last release are;

1. A test suite - using py.test
2. Support for more database objects - views, sequences, stored code objects, indexes, etc.
3. A large number of bug fixes. Too many to mention here.
4. Use of my dburi module for database connectivity

There’s probably more but I didn’t keep a comprehensive change register whilst I was tinkering with the code, an oversight I’ve already addressed for the inevitable 0.2.1 release.

This code has been fairly extensively tested and exercised in the real world but I’d appreciate any feedback, bug reports or patches.

I gave my talk at OSDC yesterday so here are the fruits of my labours - the paper and slides. Enjoy.

As usual corrections and suggestions are very welcome.

Python 2.5 has been released today. Yay. I look forward to utilising some of its fine language features in my future code.

But, and you knew there was a gripe coming didn’t you? With the inclusion of the pysqlite module as part of the standard distribution there is a problem. It has been renamed from pysqlite2 to sqlite3. A move I agree with by the way, as it is clear from the name exactly what the module supports.

The problem is I’ve got quite a bit of code that uses the old name. Where my existing scripts say;

>>> from pysqlite2 import dbapi2 as sqlite

They now need to say;

>>> try:
...     from pysqlite2 import dbapi2 as sqlite
... except ImportError: # for Python 2.5 and above
...     from sqlite3 import dbapi2 as sqlite
>>> myDb = sqlite.connect('sqlitedatabasefile.db')

Or they would, if I hadn’t cunningly stolen an idea from SQLObject, which they borrowed from any number of other places, and written my own little connection function. So my scripts can carry on using;

>>> from utilities.dburi import get_connection
>>> myDb = get_connection('sqlite:/sqlitedatabasefile.db')

Fancy a look at the code? Oh, ok then, it’s called dburi.py and there is a text version of the file called dburi.py.txt. Patches are gratefully accepted.

For the next meeting of the Sydney Python group we are trying something a little different. Next Thursday, the 7th of September, we are having a pub night. The gathering will take place from 6:30pm at the Grace Hotel on the corner of King and Clarence Streets in the city.

There is no fixed agenda or prepared presentations. I suspect that laptops will be opened and ideas exchanged though. All are welcome, we’d be especially chuffed if people who aren’t Python aficionados come along and share some knowledge. It would be great if we could turn this into something like the London 2.0 meetings.

As usual the details are on Upcoming.org.

My proposal to talk at the 2006 Open Source Developers Conference has been accepted. All I’ve got to do now is write the paper.

Prompted by Mark and in an effort to keep up with Alan I’ve submitted a proposal for a presentation at OSDC 2006.

If they like my proposal I’ll be appearing in a lecture theatre in Melbourne in December talking about databases and Python. I’m being quite ambitious in scope for a thirty minute slot with discussion of the Python Database API, a side trip into JDBC and Perl’s DBI and then a discussion of database wrapper utilities, ORM implementations and patterns. I suspect that there will be some judicious editing before I’m finished, although I will try and keep all the topics in my conference paper.