[python-uk] Tell us what you did with Python this year....

[Matt Hamilton]

On 20 Dec 2010, at 15:41, Jonathan Hartley wrote:

> clients with extremely large spreadsheets (which take hours to recalculate on Excel)

*shudder*

But that is what makes what you have done even more amazing :) I'm pretty sure spreadsheets of that level of complexity have a lot of subtle excel'isms that you must support and at least be able to do on your system.

> to manually partition calculations to run in parallel across several EC2 instances. Soon we hope to make this process automatic, by examining the dependency graph (which cells depend on which other cells) and passing large stand-alone chunks of the graph to be recalculated on other machines.
> 
> A lot of our core code, such as formula parsing and dependency calculation, didn't use any .Net at all, and so getting Dirigible running under CPython using code from Resolver One was straightforward. Nevertheless, personally I'd never done any Django nor Javascript, nor EC2 before, and the other guys on the team weren't massively experienced in these things either, so there was a concern about how quickly we could make progress. Happily, we managed to go from first conception ('mkdir Dirigible') to first beta release of Dirigible in two and a half months, and have been releasing updates every couple of days since, which is something I'm very proud of.
> 
> Going forward, we hope that the two products will compliment each other (web apps aren't the right solution for everyone), and that code-sharing between the projects will mean that improvements in one (e.g. in providing robust statistical functions, or more Excel-compatible functions) will also improve the other.


That is all really really cool :)

-Matt

-- 
Matt Hamilton                                         matth at netsight.co.uk
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