PyCon Canada 2017: “Python as a Philosophy”

I was in Montreal, Canada for the PyCon Canada 2017 conference and presented on the ideas and philosophy that are present within the Python programming language. I covered how the Python language influences your coding style and how that coding style is now in the mainstream and has made its way into other programming languages.

Cause & Effect Diagrams

Cause and effect diagrams, also known as Ishikawa diagrams, are one of 7 basic tools of quality. Cause and effect diagrams are useful because they let you list out all the causes that you and/or your team can think of. Having a team think of possible causes is similar to the concept of peer review in software development projects. Where one person thinks of a few causes, another person will think of different causes. This gives a broader range of causes to investigate.

Web Development with Smalltalk and Seaside Framework

The project was a software prototype for a restaurant ordering system. The goal was to design a user interface that allowed a customer in the restaurant to use their iPhone or some other smart phone to quickly order food. For this prototype, I used Squeak Smalltalk, the Seaside web framework, and the Magritte meta-description framework. As the database for this prototype, I used a class with only class methods. It used Dictionaries to store the data, just a plain key-store database.