and on - topic and and off topic

[Sivan Greenberg]

Hi All,

 First apologies for the rather off topic but I grep'd over the existing
mailing lists and couldn't find one that's suitable, at least judging by
the titles.

 My inquiry is both technical and social, first for the technical stuff:

1. When is the use of functools.partial beneficial? When can it be a
hindrance? Perhaps it can save on func argument evaluation time when
creating many invocations for asycn exec?

2. Is what now is Python 'stdlib' requests the preferred way to work with
session / connections pooling and when in need of a very fast performance?
Specifically in view of stream buffer issues and posts like
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15461995/python-requests-vs-pycurl-performance
and ones like:
http://jmoiron.net/blog/async-hell-gevent-requests/


Now to the possibly off topic section of this post:

1. Is there an python.org mailing list that Python contractors can post to
offering their development services to prospective customers? I'm talking
specifically about opening the possibility of working remotely and/or on
site internationally, maybe a'la jobattical style.

2. While having quite vast experience with Python, system programming API
design and data fetching tasks, it seems that that functional approaches to
problem solving in concurrency can always surprise you and there's always a
new style to learn (almost as the number of developers engaged in the
field). - If I want to prepare myself for any home coding technical drill,
question, or otherwise Python convention, where would I go and read? Where
do I find practice question to solve while in pursuing of one's Pythonistic
career advance to become better than excellent?

3. Home coding tests. What do you think about them? Are they productive /
counter productive to a hiring process? Moreover - personally, I do not
stand well to whiteboard coding tests as I'm rarely able to come up with
the working technical code solutio. I thinks this is due  the lack of
interactive interpreter  and other unnatural conditions that this setting
entails. My question comes after going through 3 such in the past,
realizing each one can be at max 1 week to solve when you're also catering
to the current day job. What other tools then, do some of you use to hire a
good developer or maybe there is no other way? Will you also have a
candidate attempt solve an extremely technical solution on the whiteboard
after he has done a length home drill successfully with the explanation you
cannot know for sure it's his own work? Where does one draw the line?

Your feedback and comments shall be immensely appreciated,

-Sivan