Differences between revisions 7 and 41 (spanning 34 versions)
⇤ ← Revision 7 as of 2006-08-17 02:17:59 →
Size: 4467
Editor: adsl-68-95-150-255
Comment:
← Revision 41 as of 2007-01-11 14:54:00 → ⇥
Size: 6326
Editor: ottgw
Comment:
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 1: Line 1:
Existing material appears (also) at EvangelismSupportMaterials and PromotingPythonBof. ----
For active discussion on advocating the use of Python, please join the [http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy Advocacy mailing list] and visit the [http://advocacy.python.org/getinvolved Advocacy - Get Involved!] site.
----

Greetings! I'm the PythonAdvocacyCoordinator. You can reach me via email at [[MailTo(advocate AT python DOT org)]]. I'm always glad to hear ideas or corrections.

Want to help with some writing? Check out our list of whitepaper/flyer AdvocacyWritingTasks or magazine ArticleIdeas.

----
== Suggestions ==

 * Identify a shirt store in Europe, to provide a more local source of Python wearables than Cafe Press.
 * Help complete the remaining 15% of Python-equivalent recipes (and review the existing 85% for being current with Python 2.5) of the [http://pleac.sourceforge.net Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook], a side-by-side comparison of algorithms in different programming languages based on the Perl Cookbook.
 * Do something about python.com! Python is a great teaching language, but one of the first things a curious student is likely to do in search of more info is go to their browser and surf to www.python.com. Yikes! It is unlikely that we can get them to give up their domain name, but maybe they could be convinced to at least put up a front page with "You are about to enter an adult site, are you 18, etc..." And if we were really lucky, their front page could contain "If you are looking for info on the Python programming language, go to www.python.org" How can we "encourage" them to do the right thing?

----
== Advocacy Resources ==

=== Python Advocacy Kits ===
[[Anchor(AdvocacyKits)]] [#AdvocacyKits (permalink)]

 * [wiki:/CollegeStudentKit College Student's Python Advocacy Kit] (being developed)
 * [wiki:/ItDepartmentKit IT Department Python Advocacy Kit] (being developed)
 * [wiki:/UniversityEducatorKit University Educator's Python Advocacy Kit] (being developed)
 * [wiki:/K12EducatorKit K-12 Educator's Python Advocacy Kit] (being developed)
 * [wiki:/HomeSchoolEducatorKit Home Schooling Educator's Python Advocacy Kit] (being developed)
 * [wiki:/PythonForScientists Python for Scientists Advocacy Kit] (should be developed)
 * [wiki:/PythonUserGroups Python User Groups Advocacy Kit] (should be developed)


=== Reusable/Retargetable Teaching Materials ===
[[Anchor(TeachingMaterials)]] [#TeachingMaterials (permalink)]

 * [wiki:/SlidePresentations Excellent Slide Presentations] - we're looking for the best out of many
 * [wiki:/ClassHandouts Class Handouts]

=== Other Resources ===

 * [wiki:/WearablesGadgets Promotional Items like shirts, posters, etc.]
 * [http://advocacy.python.org/@@/collaterals/ Document Library]
 * WellKnownPythonPrograms - you may already be using Python!
 * LanguageComparisons - Python Compared to Other Languages
 * [http://pythonology.org/ Pythonology: A Site for Python Advocacy] (success stories, how-tos, press list, and more)
 * [http://www.python.org/doc/Summary.html Executive Summary] ("What is Python?")
 * [http://py-howto.sourceforge.net/advocacy/advocacy.html Python Advocacy HOWTO]
 * MarketingPython
 * [http://www.cafepy.com/article/53/ Python Marketing] Yet another article collecting quotes and facts pointing to explosive growth of Python in the enterprise.
 * PythonAdvocacyInScientificComputation
 * And if you think that Python programs run slowly, please read PythonSpeed where some of the issues related to speed are discussed.
 * Python23Release (preparation of PR and marketing message for Python 2.x Release)

Please send me [[MailTo(advocate AT python DOT org)]] any files that might be useful for giving out at user groups or business meetings.

Existing material appears (also) at ["evangelism_support_materials"] and PromotingPythonBof.
Line 4: Line 57:
== Magazines that Accept Technical Articles == == General Notes ==

Advocacy is the process of letting people know what Python is
good at, and drawing them into using the language. The most effective
forms of advocacy lure users to the language by impressing them
with results, rather than brow beating or lecturing them on language design.

Published articles that answer the question "how do I solve X with Python?" are a good way to get people interested.

One goal for writing articles might be to develop a library of
How-Tos for Python. Much information exists, but it has not been
collected for convenient access from python.org (or another central location), and there are
certainly gaps in covering key strengths of Python.

A collection of [http://python.org/about/success Python Success Stories] already exists. These are also useful, usually by helping engineers convince their bosses that Python is worthy of attention. But success stories tend to be lean on "how-to" style information, so they do not offer a convenient path to get new users working with Python.

Since the goal for advocacy is to highlight Python's strengths, [http://wingware.com/python this Key Strengths list] may be useful.

== Print and Online Magazines that Accept Technical Articles ==

We would like to focus on those magazines outside the Python community, in order to reach those who don't know about us. Also there are many magazines that accept press releases that do not accept articles. We need those that welcome articles.
Line 9: Line 82:
 * [http://www.mactech.com MacTech Magazine] [http://www.mactech.com/editorial/writersguide.html Author Guidelines]
 * [http://www.onlamp.com/python/ O'Reilly Python Dev Center] -- Inside Python community in a sense but O'Reilly gets a lot of exposure.
 * [http://www.infoworld.com/ Infoworld]
 * [http://www.artima.com/ Artima Developer]
 * [http://www.intelligententerprise.com/ Intelligent Enterprise]
Line 10: Line 88:
== Magazine Articles About Python I Would Like to See == == Electronic Magazines that Accept Technical Articles ==
Line 12: Line 90:
 * Python and Relational Databases  * [http://arstechnica.com Ars Technica] [http://arstechnica.com/site/styleguide.ars Author Guidelines]
Line 14: Line 92:
   Talk about the DB-API that Python has standardized on, and how easy it is to write conventional SQL. Then move into one of the ORMs for Python, perhaps SQLObject or SQLAlchemy. Discuss how data types are automatically converted, and how cross-platform the solution is. Highlight the different database engines supported, both open source and commercial.

 * Python and Object Databases

   Talk about how dynamic languages make a good match for object databases, with seamless serialization. Provide an overview of how an object database works, but focus on the end-developer and not the underlying mechanisms. Cover how the databases retain transaction support, and to what degree they provide support for the principles of ACID. Discuss the popular ZODB, Durus and APE frameworks, their tradeoffs (e.g. read-mostly usage, transaction rates) and the fact that they can be used standalone without the baggage of Zope or Quixote. Cover their lack of granular security and user identities at the database API level.

 * Handling Email with Python

   Perhaps as a two part article, cover the essentials of first parsing an incoming email and then generating an outgoing. Demonstrate how the email module makes it easy to handle multi-part email bodies and convert various character sets into unicode, which Python supports natively. Also cover how the email module supports the use of international message headers and handles their conversion between the 7-bit ASCII used on the wire. Show how the email module addresses the issue of date and addressee parsing. End with how the support of iterators makes it easy to walk over complex emails and touch upon the support added in Python 2.5 for writing email archives.

 * Image Processing, Array Numerics and Python

   array module, numpy/numeric/scipy framework

 * Functional Programming in Python

   Provide an overview with examples of the functional programming features of Python. Cover the lambda, map and reduce functions but move on to the newer all(), any() and generator/coroutine support in Python 2.5. Discuss the broad support Python iterators

  itertools functools

 * Mixing Network Protocols in Python

 *

  interpreter prompt, inspect module, the power of tracebacks, pprint module

 *

  packaging; imports, zipimports, distutils, eggs and cheeseshop

 *

  unittest module, doctest module, test module

 *
  unicode, codecs, unicodedata and stringprep modules, a bit about the locale and gettext modules.

 *

  writing shell utilities with Python

  getopt/optparse modules, curses module, shutil module, commands module

 * Processing Compressed Archives with Python

  gzip, zlib, bz2, zipfile, tarfile, zipimport

 * Debugging and Profiling Your Python Code

   Talk about the power of the Python debugger, along with the profiler module and the (new for Python 2.5) cProfiler module. Contrast both the short-term ability to break on flexible conditions with the ability to profile code over the long-term. Discuss code coverage functionality and end with mentions of some of the IDE environments for Python that make some of this even easier.

 * Writing a Web Client with Python

   Walk the reader thru the creation of a program to fetch content from a website, starting with simple HTML text, adding basic/digest authentication, cookie support and SSL certificate checking. Also discuss having this program talk thru a web proxy ala SOCKS and briefly cover parsing the retrieved page using one of the DOM modules. This article would cover a lot of the API in the urllib2 module.



For active discussion on advocating for Python, please join the mailing list at [http://wingware.com/mailman/listinfo/marketing-python]

WellKnownPythonPrograms - you may already be using Python!

For active discussion on advocating the use of Python, please join the [http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy Advocacy mailing list] and visit the [http://advocacy.python.org/getinvolved Advocacy - Get Involved!] site.

Greetings! I'm the PythonAdvocacyCoordinator. You can reach me via email at MailTo(advocate AT python DOT org). I'm always glad to hear ideas or corrections.

Want to help with some writing? Check out our list of whitepaper/flyer AdvocacyWritingTasks or magazine ArticleIdeas.

Suggestions

  • Identify a shirt store in Europe, to provide a more local source of Python wearables than Cafe Press.

  • Help complete the remaining 15% of Python-equivalent recipes (and review the existing 85% for being current with Python 2.5) of the [http://pleac.sourceforge.net Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook], a side-by-side comparison of algorithms in different programming languages based on the Perl Cookbook.

  • Do something about python.com! Python is a great teaching language, but one of the first things a curious student is likely to do in search of more info is go to their browser and surf to www.python.com. Yikes! It is unlikely that we can get them to give up their domain name, but maybe they could be convinced to at least put up a front page with "You are about to enter an adult site, are you 18, etc..." And if we were really lucky, their front page could contain "If you are looking for info on the Python programming language, go to www.python.org" How can we "encourage" them to do the right thing?

Advocacy Resources

Python Advocacy Kits

Anchor(AdvocacyKits) [#AdvocacyKits (permalink)]

Reusable/Retargetable Teaching Materials

Anchor(TeachingMaterials) [#TeachingMaterials (permalink)]

Other Resources

Please send me MailTo(advocate AT python DOT org) any files that might be useful for giving out at user groups or business meetings.

Existing material appears (also) at ["evangelism_support_materials"] and PromotingPythonBof. Note [http://psf.pollenation.net/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/160].

General Notes

Advocacy is the process of letting people know what Python is good at, and drawing them into using the language. The most effective forms of advocacy lure users to the language by impressing them with results, rather than brow beating or lecturing them on language design.

Published articles that answer the question "how do I solve X with Python?" are a good way to get people interested.

One goal for writing articles might be to develop a library of How-Tos for Python. Much information exists, but it has not been collected for convenient access from python.org (or another central location), and there are certainly gaps in covering key strengths of Python.

A collection of [http://python.org/about/success Python Success Stories] already exists. These are also useful, usually by helping engineers convince their bosses that Python is worthy of attention. But success stories tend to be lean on "how-to" style information, so they do not offer a convenient path to get new users working with Python.

Since the goal for advocacy is to highlight Python's strengths, [http://wingware.com/python this Key Strengths list] may be useful.

We would like to focus on those magazines outside the Python community, in order to reach those who don't know about us. Also there are many magazines that accept press releases that do not accept articles. We need those that welcome articles.

Electronic Magazines that Accept Technical Articles

CategoryAdvocacy

Advocacy (last edited 2009-10-30 02:22:47 by panix3)

Unable to edit the page? See the FrontPage for instructions.