How can I get involved

[Paul Boddie]

Prateek wrote:
>
> I'm messaging this group for the first time. Basically I've been a
> (pretty intensive) Python programmer for the past 2 years. I started a
> software company which has just released an SDK (v1.0b - developer
> preview) for developing web applications in Python.

I find it interesting that you've been using Python for so long and yet
haven't posted to this group before. Have you been participating in
other forums or groups? I suppose this shows how big the community is,
and that comp.lang.python is just the tip of the iceberg.

Anyway, welcome! :-)

> Key points:
> 1) It comes with a non-relational schema-free database we designed
> 2) The application server is based on CherryPy
> 3) The UI engine is XSLT based (but it also supports Cheetah and
> Clearsilver via plugins - out of the box)

I get along fairly well with XSLT, so this sounds rather interesting.

> Basically, I really love the language and I'm looking for ways to get
> involved in the community and contribute.

There are so many things you can do that it's hard to describe them
all. If you're free to contribute to open source projects, you might
choose some that interest you, or which might benefit the work you do
in your day job, and contribute some effort to those projects.
Alternatively, you could start your own interesting projects and share
them with us. Perhaps you want to help other people to understand
Python or its libraries, and you could decide to write some
documentation or some "how to" documents or guides. If you're really
enthusiastic, you could help the core developers with developing
CPython, but if you're more of a Java person then perhaps the
developers of Jython might appreciate the help a bit more.

> My past (pre-Python) experience has been mainly in web-technologies -
> Java, PHP, ASP and a little bit of C.
>
> Any ideas?

The python.org Wiki gives a few starting points, based on what I've
written above:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/FrontPage

It's a bit of a mess, unfortunately, despite some of us trying to keep
some areas reasonably tidy, but if you dive in and look around you'll
probably find something to inspire you. If not, just tell us and we'll
try and suggest something. ;-)

Paul