During the weekend I participated as a mentor in a programming competition called HackFest 2012. A couple of thoughts on the event.
Specifying choices for form fields and models currently does not do much justice to the DRY philosophy Django is famous for. Everybody seems to either have their own way of working around it or live with the suboptimal tuple-based pairs. This Django enhancement proposal presents a comprehensive solution based on an existing implementation, explaining reasons behind API decisions and their implications on the framework in general.
import this is a brilliant easter egg in the Python interpreter. In just a few words it catches the philosophy behind what is considered "pythonic". One might argue that it describes the essence of what is so great about the language, its libraries and its community.
But for it to be more than just a bunch of aphorisms, a programmer has to ask herself: how do I conform to those guidelines in my daily work? I asked myself this question the other day and here are a few thoughts and opinions. Beware that this is at times very meta.
