PyLadies Dublin went well

Tuesday 18th March (18:00-21:00) @ DIT, Kevin Street.
http://www.meetup.com/PyLadiesDublin/events/166955082/

Different venue this time, and it’s a big shout out to Bryan and folks at the DIT’s School of Computing for accommodating us in a cool lab to host our March PyLadies Dublin meetup.

I have to admit, DIT is huge, even with asking how to get there and that I got the right building, I still got lost. I eventually found where to go and Serena saved me wandering further around. :-)

The room was big with enough seats, power sources and wi-fi! That was a big life-saver that night. So again, a big thanks to [DIT](http:dit.ie) for helping us out.

The evening was full of tense emotions, full of apprehension to whooping joys of glee with plenty of high fives. All because we manage to get Linux laptops of various old versions of Ubuntu up-to-date with Python 3.3.0+, virtualenv, and git.

Although myself and Serena were happy as all we did was use Homebrew, which rocks if you are using Macs are your development platform. We assisted others by googling issues that came up and tried various solutions, aside from finding many wrong answers, and along with Mick’s help (pretty much the Linux head that evening), we held our breath in anticipation as everyone to get their dev environments setup and working. It was a great learning process for all along some mild grumbling about Linux. It was pretty exciting, am I geeking out a little here?! ;-)

Those who were present were happy to work on a Flask project, so the first major test was import flask to make sure everything was setup up correctly. Once that passes the test, we were pretty much set. Everyone went through the basic Flask tutorial.

We wanted a PyLadies Dublin website. I am aware that PyLadies itself are centralising its website and will be asking for other chapters to contribute to it. This is still work in progress, so it’s no harm in us creating the site with the following as part of our learning process and working together.

• Front page
• About us
• Code of Conduct
• Resources

We will be accessing meetup.com’s API, and I can’t really share my API key, so everyone will have to generate their own. This is to get around having to hide our own API keys without sharing with everyone when we commit the code back to our Github repository, the solution: try hosting off Heroku, thanks Mick for that suggestion.

The next step was to have everyone sign up to Heroku, and go through the Quickstart followed by Getting Started in Python. So basics in command line, setting your own local git repository to pushing local git repo to Heroku (where we noted requirements.txt is very important) to running a Python WSGI HTTP Server called gunicorn so people can run their Flask app. We were pretty tickled by the names assigned to where our apps were being hosted on Heroku server, e.g. mine is serene-caverns-6596 at http://serene-caverns-6596.herokuapp.com/

Well, before we knew it, time was nearly up!

We have a few TODOs listed in Hackpad before our next meetup in April. Also in the same Hackpad, there are notes from that evening.

And I have to say, after a few months of 101 about source control, git, virtualenv and pip as well as figuring out what we wanted to do as a group if people have no projects of their own, it was really good fun. Although I was pretty tired when the meetup ended, but it was good tired. Learning with everyone was quite exhilarating.

Our next meetup will be kindly hosted by Demonware on Tuesday 15th April (18:00-21:00): http://www.meetup.com/PyLadiesDublin/events/169806012/