Tom Hoffman
2008-07-17 16:05:54 UTC
Ignas, Alan and Tom held a three day sprint in Vilnius, Lithuania in
conjunction with the EuroPython conference last week. We used the
face to face time to plan out the remaining significant changes to be
implemented before our beta release in October.
Ignas presented his plans for re-organizing the data structures around
school years and semesters/trimesters. The basic design sounded very
solid, so we spent most of the next two days sketching out the UI
implementation and various details.
Most of the remaining time was spent designing and beginning to
implement an event log that can be used for basic integration with
external server applications. Basically, a log of changes to persons
and sections will be created which an external process can
periodically scan and propgate changes to a Moodle, Drupal, etc.
database. It is not the ultimate in data integration, but a simple,
practical step in that direction.
This will be the last sprint we'll hold at a Python convention for the
foreseeable future. It has been a useful strategy the past couple
years, given the rapid pace of change in Python web development and
Zope. We've had to assimilate eggs, WSGI, paste, buildout, and other
new (and advantageous!) technologies over the past couple years, and
attending talks on the subject and discussing them face to face was
helpful.
With a beta and 1.0 release on the horizon, it will make sense to
switch to holding sprints at schools and educational technology
conferences, as we switch our focus from technical issues to user
feedback, fit and finish.
In other news, Jeff Elkner is in El Salvador, and he managed to
stumble upon Douglas Cerna, who may be the only Zope 3 developer in
the country, if not all of central America. Jeff is also working with
a school down there, and with an interested local developer, we might
be able to get a pilot going.
Also, CanDo has seen some major work on its data model to clean up
some nasty deep bugs. Last year's crop of interns are doing very
productive work this summer.
--Tom
conjunction with the EuroPython conference last week. We used the
face to face time to plan out the remaining significant changes to be
implemented before our beta release in October.
Ignas presented his plans for re-organizing the data structures around
school years and semesters/trimesters. The basic design sounded very
solid, so we spent most of the next two days sketching out the UI
implementation and various details.
Most of the remaining time was spent designing and beginning to
implement an event log that can be used for basic integration with
external server applications. Basically, a log of changes to persons
and sections will be created which an external process can
periodically scan and propgate changes to a Moodle, Drupal, etc.
database. It is not the ultimate in data integration, but a simple,
practical step in that direction.
This will be the last sprint we'll hold at a Python convention for the
foreseeable future. It has been a useful strategy the past couple
years, given the rapid pace of change in Python web development and
Zope. We've had to assimilate eggs, WSGI, paste, buildout, and other
new (and advantageous!) technologies over the past couple years, and
attending talks on the subject and discussing them face to face was
helpful.
With a beta and 1.0 release on the horizon, it will make sense to
switch to holding sprints at schools and educational technology
conferences, as we switch our focus from technical issues to user
feedback, fit and finish.
In other news, Jeff Elkner is in El Salvador, and he managed to
stumble upon Douglas Cerna, who may be the only Zope 3 developer in
the country, if not all of central America. Jeff is also working with
a school down there, and with an interested local developer, we might
be able to get a pilot going.
Also, CanDo has seen some major work on its data model to clean up
some nasty deep bugs. Last year's crop of interns are doing very
productive work this summer.
--Tom