I haven't been to any of the Skills Matter meetings for a while, not since last year at least, so I thought I'd go along to a
user group meeting that I'd not attended before. I've used Python a bit for automating tasks, but nothing too heavy duty.
The first talk was just a warm up. Paul Brian tried to talk about... well, nothing in particular, really. "Relying on frameworks too much is a bad thing", "Learn to be better coders"... Platitudes, essentially. He threw in some comparisons with the advent of the printing press, which was poorly thought out and seemed meaningless. It put me in mind of an old expression: better to stay silent and let people think you are a fool that open your mouth and remove all doubt.
The next was a bit more entertaining. Kris Saxton talked about using the
Salt framework to manage automation across multiple servers. He demonstrated simple tasks and, in particular, rollout of code automatically across multiple servers. Nice.
I departed towards the end of his talk as I had a long way back home and it was a pretty full day, anyway, so I missed the talk by Emil Vaughn on Cython, an enhanced version of standard Python.
