New year’s python meme

Doing this after reading about it on Ben’s blog.

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2009 ?

I love the restructured text tools. I use rst2pdf at least once a week.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2009?

This was a year of giving up on techniques, paradigms, development methods, frameworks, and fanciness in general and going back to basics. I’m like Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV — jogging in the snow and chopping wood with an axe.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2009? What did you do?

I’ve been working on pitz for about 15 months now. I’ve learned about a lot of stuff that I didn’t expect to learn when I decided to build a to-do manager. Because of that project, I’ve learned about how templating systems like jinja2 work internally, how to use cProfile, how to write tests for all sorts of weird situations, how to write a simple querying system, etc.

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2009?

I just went through my bookmarks tagged with python and didn’t see an obvious pattern. These days, the hundred or so people I follow on twitter keep me supplied with too much to read.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2010 ?