Let’s Write a Game: Hangout with PyLadies Pune
In early January I was invited by PyLadies Pune to do a hangout. We spent an hour writing a 2d game in Python, covering a number of Python development skills along the way. I’d love to repeat this, so if you have a meetup or user group and are interested, let me know. The recording is below…let’s talk a bit about the backstory.
Smart, Nice, Energetic: Sounds Like Python
PyCharm visited PyCon India in September 2016 and, at our booth, tutorials, and talks, we were fortunate to meet many Python developers and hear about the community in India. So very much going on, and it was nice to see the PyCharm has interest as well. We did a PyCharm tutorial and a talk on using PyCharm for JS MVC web frontends.
We also had a chance to meet the people behind the reboot of the Pune chapter for PyLadies and sit in on a panel discussion they hosted about growing communities. The lesson I learned: pay attention to what they’re doing, as they are a smart group of people, warm and inviting hospitality, and sincere in their effort to bring people in.
Far Away, So Close
Based on that, I asked if I could remotely participate in one of their meetups. I realized this was an imposition based on timezones, and was pleased to get an invite for a Saturday morning hangout.
I thought a bit about what to show. I wanted to focus more on development skills, with the IDE helping along the way. I’ve been partially involved with Arcade, a Python library for 2d games. Games are always a fun topic, and Arcade is so lightweight that a 1 hour session doesn’t turn into 59 minutes of “learn Arcade”. This point is critical and quite easy to get wrong.
The outline was then straightforward, showing: running a Python program, version control, debugging, testing, coverage, and profiling. All from a “visual” (read: IDE) perspective. All in a bit over an hour.
Snow Falling on Cedars
The morning of, I woke up early to a blanket of snow, which made for a peaceful atmosphere for the hangout. I used YouTube On Air for Google Hangouts, which did a nice recording, but introduced approximately a 30 sec lag. This made it awkward to pause and ask for questions.
The recording is available on YouTube. Kushal Das did a nice writeup of the session, as did Pooja Yadav.
I’m hopeful to do more of these. If you have a user group and you’re willing to have a remote speaker, give me a nudge on Twitter. I can show this same outline, or a deeper dive on visual debugging, visual testing, JS MVC frontends, or some other crazy idea that you might have.
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