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Silver Catalyst v1.4 Released!

Quick note: Silver Catalyst version 1.4 has been released. Download it here.

Using python to teach kids programming

Horst Jens uses Python to teach kids how to program at Profikids in Vienna. In the following screencast, we see one of the kids, Leo, program a simple GUI button box. The screencast is in German, but it has English subtitles. Check it out below -

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

This video originally comes from here at ShowMeDo from the Python category.

Design of Programmer Spaces - My DCamp Presentation

We spend a lot of time on improving productivity through better languages, tools and processes. How often do we look at the environment in which the team works? Cubicles are probably the worst environment for programmers because they are poor when you want peace and quiet to work alone and poor when you want to work collaboratively as a pair or group. In this talk we'll look at some environmental factors that impact teams and how we can design better programmer spaces.

Resources

• The Ultimate Software Development Office Layout: Tons of good links
• The Psychology of Computer Programming: The first book to look at programming as a social activity. Published in 1971.
• IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory: A study on designing spaces for programmers while IBM was planning out the Santa Teresa Lab. This was done in the late 70s.
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams: Another classic book on programming as a human activity. First edition in 1987.
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game: Has a good discussion on programmer spaces, especially with regard to agile processes. Published 2006.

There is a narration for the slides available in the comments section here

DCamp Photos

Sagaro, Arpit and I just got back from attending DCamp in Bangalore.

I'll post about the sessions later. For now, here are some photos from Allagappan's flickr stream, more photos from Muthu's flickr stream and a description of the sessions by Saurabh Minni.

Keeping track of unconference/community/tech events in India

It's getting harder and harder to keep track of unconference, community and tech events that are happening these days. In the next 30 days alone you have DCamp, Agile Workshop at Indore, Freed.in, Agile Chennai 2007, Yahoo Open Hack Day, SearchCamp and Barcamp Mumbai.

And these are only events that I'm aware of. Add in any other events that might be happening plus regular events like the OpenCoffee Club in various cities and its just too much to remember.

So what I've done is to create a group on upcoming.

Check out the group here.

If there are any events that you are following that are not on upcoming, add it to upcoming and then add it to the group. Anyone who is subscribing to the group RSS feed will get an event notification.

Similarly, if you want to track events that are happening, join the group and subscribe to the group RSS feed and you will be notified of any new events that get added to the group.

Django screencast: Template inheritance, filters and newforms

Following up on my first Django screencast, I've put up the second screencast in the Learn Django series. Like the first one, its hosted on showmedo.com and you can view the screencast here.

The second screencast extends the wiki application we built in the first part by adding a menu, support for auto-linking of wikiwords and a feature to search through the database. In the process, you'll learn about some cool Django features such as template inheritance, custom filter libraries and Django newforms. Django newforms in particular is a very cool form handling library that can really cut down on boilerplate form generation and validation code.

Interested? Check out the screencast.