Archive of: Events
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DevDays Austin: Eric Jones on Python posted January 7, 2010
This is content taken from the 2009 StackOverflow DevDays conference in Austin, Tx.This presentation could actually be split into two different talks. Unfortunately, Eric only had fifty minutes to cover both Python and NumPy.
The Python part of Eric’s talk dealt with a very elegantly written spell check example written by Peter Norvig (copied below).
This Python code not only finds spelling errors in a given input file, it also guesses what you intended to type and suggests correctly spelled words to replace the erroneous word.
Here is the code that was discussed in Eric’s talk so you can follow along with the audio.
import re, collections def words(text): return re.findall('[a-z]+', text.lower()) def train(features): model = collections.defaultdict(lambda: 1) for f in features: model[f] += 1 return model NWORDS = train(words(file('big.txt').read())) alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' def edits1(word): s = [(word[:i], word[i:]) for i in range(len(word) + 1)] deletes = [a + b[1:] for a, b in s if b] transposes = [a + b[1] + b[0] + b[2:] for a, b in s if len(b)>1] replaces = [a + c + b[1:] for a, b in s for c in alphabet if b] inserts = [a -
DevDays Austin: Jonathan Johnson on iPhone Development posted January 6, 2010
This is content taken from the 2009 StackOverflow DevDays conference in Austin, Tx.Jonathan gave a very nice introductory presentation on developing applications for the iPhone. The live code example was a great deomonstration on how to get a new app up and running quickly. It seems that Apple really did their homework when creating the iPhone development tools.
One disheartening part of Jonathan’s talk dealt with the current state of the iPhone App Store. As most of you probably know, the App Store has been built on this $0.99 eco-system where it’s really hard to sell iPhone apps that cost more than a dollar. Unfortunately, this means that a company may never fully re-coup the costs of developing an application if it takes them too long to create, much less turn a profit. Does this mean there aren’t going to be any new and awesoeme apps coming out for your iPhone in the future? No. But, the current state of the app market may cause developers looking to get into the iPhone development market have second thoughts.
Overall, a great talk by Jonathan and it was very informative for those of us who have never developed anything for the… Read the rest
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DevDays Austin: Peter Mourfield on ASP .NET MVC posted January 5, 2010
This is content taken from the 2009 StackOverflow DevDays conference in Austin, Tx.In this presentation, Pete gives an interesting talk on the ASP .NET MVC architecture. This talk offers a fresh alternative to anyone currently working on ASP web forms. Also, the point of entry for developing ASP .NET MVC applications is much smaller for developers currently working in MVC frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Palm Mojo, or even Django.
The Model View Controller (MVC) framework allows for the separation of the presentation and business logic and allows developers to change one without affecting the other.
The idea of MVC is nothing new, but it’s nice to see the mainstream web frameworks (and even mobile development frameworks) adopt this methodology.
If you are interested in learning more about MVC architectures or are curious about getting started with ASP .NET MVC then check out Pete’s talk. You won’t regret it.
Image From: Flickr
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DevDays Austin: Jonathan Sharp on jQuery posted January 4, 2010
This is content taken from the 2009 StackOverflow DevDays conference in Austin, Tx.Jonathan Sharp of Outwest Media gave a very informative and interesting talk on jQuery at DevDays Austin. Jonathan’s presentation includes an introduction to jQuery, an overview of jQuery’s 5 core concepts, a quick look at the jQuery API, and jQuery initiaves. Jonathan also includes a live code demo which showed us how to build a jQuery plugin in 6 simple steps.
This is a great talk to listen to if you want to know more about jQuery, or if you’ve started looking at it but don’t really know how to move on.
Jonathan is also a freelance developer so keep him in mind if you need some quality development work done.
Jonathan included his presentation slides and the live code demo on his website.
My apologies on the audio, there are a few sections I had to edit out at the begenning because people kept shuffling around in my row. This caused some really nasty disruptions in the audio and I just removed them completely.
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DevDays Austin: Damien Katz on CouchDB posted January 3, 2010
This is content taken from the 2009 StackOverflow DevDays conference in Austin, Tx.CouchDB is a robust document-oriented and schema-free database server. CouchDB was written in Erlang which was designed for the Telecom industry. This means that CouchDB has excellent concurrency, message handling, and reliability.
The most exciting thing about CouchDB actually stems from their motto, “Relax”. As a programmer, you can relax knowing that in the event of a database server crash, not only is your data preserved – because data is never overwitten in CouchDB, new files are created – but the CouchDB server (being a product of Erlang) will simply start itself back up and continue with business as usual. In fact, the shutdown command of some versions of CouchDB is a simple kill -9.
CouchDB is especially unique because it doesn’t just scale-up for larger applications, but it also scales down extremely well to create a very lightweight implementation that can be used on mobile devices and netbooks.
Sound interesting? Give Damien’s talk a listen and see if CouchDB is the right choice for your next project.
You can also check out the official CouchDB introduction, read the overview, check out some… Read the rest
