9 December 2014 · git wrangling, intermediate, JSON, London, python, The Church House, training, UK

After a day at The Church House I am happy to say that the Intermediate Python repository is in much better shape to move forwards.

Work on the Repository
About eight people turned up throughout the day, with the stalwarts being Kevin Dwyer and João Miguel Neves. With their help I investigated some thorny problems I had created for myself in the area of git filtering. It turns out that there is a subtle bug in Python's JSON generation which has existed for quite a long time.

We eventually worked around it by adding import simplejson as json for now, though I suspect a better fix might be to explicitly add a separator specification. Anyway, with that change the filtering then started to work predictably, and we could move forward with a review of the notebook contents to ensure that changes I made during the teaching were incorporated into the main code base.

With three of us hacking away that work didn't take very long, but before it could commence there was a certain amount of git-wrangling that I confess I probably wouldn't have managed anywhere near as quickly without Kevin's and João's help.

Training Market Discussions
All in all quite a success, and we also spent time discussing the UK training market for Python. I've a few more ideas now about how to approach that market, but if you, dear reader, have any ideas I would be happy to here them either in the comments below or through my web site's contact page.

Thank You
Thanks to everyone who turned up or merely wished the enterprise well. I am really looking forward to spending more time in the UK and helping to encourage even more Python use. Thanks also to the staff at The Church House for their excellent attention. We couldn't have been better taken care of.