bodner058

One of the greatest joys of being part of the PSF is to hear the success stories our members. Back in July, the PSF sponsored a small Django Girls workshop in Seoul, South Korea with a modest grant of $2000 USD. We’ve recently received a letter from one the organizers, Rachell Calhoun, and I’d like to share it here: Hello, I’ll just start by saying I knew nothing of programming or anything tech two years ago. I got inspired by a failed interview to start learning programming and I found some awesome like-minded people that were studying Python. We did so many Python MOOCs, tutorials, Raspberry Pi and even Pygame! This year we started working on web development and along came Django. The core members from this study group (codeforeveryone.co) were inspired by Django Girls to make an event in Seoul. We worked hard to make the event accessible to everyone, translating everything into both English and Korean. At first we thought it would be a small, simple event of 30 participants, but aft...

Twisted , as many of you know, is an asynchronous, or   event driven   networking framework written in Python ( https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki ). Twisted has been around for about a decade, offers many features, including low-level primitives and high-level interfaces, and works with many protocols (including HTTP, XMPP, NNTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC, FTP).   Twisted Logo Due to its maturity and complexity, Twisted  requires a lot of time and effort to be completely ported to Python 3. Fortunately, the PSF was able to help fund some of this work; one recent result is the release of Twisted 15.4,  which includes  Twisted’ s standard test-runner, Trial (codenamed "Trial by Fire"). The PSF Grant allowed core developer and Twisted release manager, Amber (HawkOwl) Brown, to port Trial to Python 3. She recently sent the PSF this announcement: “Just wanting to let you all know that a Twisted with the PSF-funded Trial Py3 port is now released. And a little example ...

As you may recall, there have been a couple of previous posts to this blog about the   BBC’s micro:bit project     (also see   PSF newsblog ). The micro:bit is a small, stripped-down, wearable computer (similar to a Raspberry Pi ) and based on an nRF51 chip. The educational project, part of a larger UK program called  Make it Digital,  is designed to inspire children to become digital creators by giving away 1 million micro:bits to all 11 year-old UK schoolchildren this spring. Today I heard some exciting news about the project from our good friend, Nicholas Tollervey, which I’m happy to pass along here.  According to Nicholas:  From the beginning the BBC have said that Python would be one of the possible languages that the device can be programmed in. The PSF is one of around twenty organisations in the project partnership. Since it’s a microcontroller, and the aim is to run Python… well, there’s a pretty obvious answer when trying to combine tho...

It is always a pleasure to report on the success of PSF funded projects. Recently we’ve heard from Ngangsi Richard about the Python Cameroon initiative. As you may recall, last March the PSF sponsored a one-day workshop in Bamenda, PyCon Cameroon ,  for the purpose of exposing women and girls to the power of Python programming. This latest project further extends programming accessibility to those previously denied the opportunity. Python Cameroon  was a month-long intensive course offered in August, free of charge, to beginners, and largely funded by the PSF. According to Ngangsi, Program Coordinator and Instructor, there were 18 students in this first session: three men and fifteen women. An additional ten people could not be accommodated. All were total beginners. As Ngangsi describes them,  Most of them had no idea about programming. Most of them have never been taught anywhere how to write programs. Some of them were not even familiar with a computer. Because of this...