Well, it’s been quite some time since I last blogged. There have been a lot of things happening at my end and amidst this I totally dropped the ball on updating my posts. As it is said, it’s better late than never. Let me summarize what happened over the past couple of months.
Good bye Transifex, hello Goibibo
I quit #Transifex last January (2013) and joined Goibibo. Goibibo is one of the products of Ibibo Web Pvt. Ltd., an e-commerce giant in India. No doubt Goibibo is doing an awesome job in the market, one of the main reasons for me joining Goibibo was that it is a #Python shop and #Django is what that drives it. Needless to mention that we Python lovers always favour Python and love to stick to it :D. So far, it’s been an #awesome #roller-coaster ride at Goibibo, especially, in terms of the scaling it handles. Things are totally different when your product serves so many users and especially when you are dealing with monetary transactions. The things I learned at #Transifex helped me to push some best practices like TDD, coding standards (Flake8), etc. in Goibibo’s work culture. I also replaced #gitweb + #reviewboard with #Gitlab as our VCS. Gitlab has helped a lot to streamline the process of pushing code. People now work on #branches for each feature/fix. The #branch gets tested by #QC and the #developers first. If everything is OK, the branch gets merged to master and pushed for a release. Currently, I am planning to implement #DXR codesearch and #IRC for communication.
Python Month 2013
This year, a new initiative was taken by Pycon India group. It was to conduct Python workshops all across India to spread Python awareness in the month of August 2013. I and Sayan have been regularly attending pre Pycon meetups (mostly in Goibibo’s office) and decided to volunteer for the same. I and Sayan conducted two workshops on basic Python: one at BNMIT and the other at Reva Engineering College in Bangalore. We met a lot of inquisitive youngsters in our workshops. We did our best to motivate them and contribute to Open Source.
Pycon India 2013
This year’s Pycon was super awesome for many reasons. We had a large gathering of #dgplug folks for the first time in any conference. We had loads of discussions, brainstorming on project ideas and some hacking. I conducted a workshop on “Test your code” on the first day of Pycon. I got the chance to meet the Kenneth Reitz, the creator of request. I was greatly inspired by the keynote speech by Kiran. Among other talks, I also found Anisha’s talk on Functional testing with Python quite interesting. This year, Goibibo sponsored Python and we had a Goibibo stall at the venue. We had quite a lot of activities going on at our stall. It was great fun. I spent most of the time during the conference hacking on waartaa. I got some tips from Kaustav Das Modak on optimizing mongodb for waartaa. Most of the days ended with a #dgplug team dinner. The following day after Pycon, I, Sayan, Kushal and Kenneth went for a trip to Mysore. It was great fun.
Well, that’ll be all for now. It’s getting an overkill for a single post ;)