PyAtl Presentations

Last night’s Atlanta Python Meetup included several interesting presentations. Living so far outside of Atlanta, it isn’t easy to make it down for as many of the meetings as I would like, but it was definitely worth the effort last night. We had a larger than usual crowd, due to the fact that Google was sponsoring pizza and providing speakers, all apparently part of their current recruiting drive.

Cary Hull of Google talked about twisted. I hadn’t ever really looked at twisted closely, so the overview and examples he provided were new material for me. It seems to be very informative and something worth looking into, particularly since we are looking at redoing the architecture of part of our system at work, and we will want to handle a lot of sub-processes which might block on I/O from a number of sources. We already know we want to use processes to take advantage of multi-processor systems, but twisted seems to offer some nice tools for managing those processes.

Sandwiched between Cary and the final presenter, Luis Caamano gave a presentation on DynaCenter, our use of Pyro, and the event manager we have built with it. Luis’ talk was our first “public” technical presentation from Racemi, and it seemed to be well received.

After Luis, Dan Morrill of Google spoke on cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Lots of food for thought there, especially regarding the trustworthiness of data coming from your own database. Dan is on the web toolkit team at Google. He has obviously given similar presentations before, and it was clear that he knew what he was talking about. Due to a miscommunication about network access, the live demo he had planned wasn’t possible. He wasn’t phased a bit, and proceeded to work up sample code on the fly in front of the audience.

Noah also announced the formation of the PyAtl Book Club, membership in which comes with a discount code for O’Reilly books. I’m looking forward to participating, since it will be something I can do without making that 90 minute drive. :-) If you are interested, even if you aren’t in the Atlanta area, join our Google group.