Mike Pirnat

To everyone who now has Kelly Clarkson stuck in your head, you're welcome. (I know what it is you see, for it is in my mind also.)

Thanks largely to last year's 365 project, I posted a record 382 entries here on the old blog in 2012. So it feels strange that this is only my third post for 2013--and I missed February entirely!

What the heck happened to me? Life!

• The first half of January was dominated by CodeMash and the eight-hour Django tutorial that I helped put on.
• Mid-January through mid-March were consumed by preparations for the half-day web app security tutorial that I presented at PyCon.
• I've also been crazy-busy preparing for and running our company's annual Hack Day event. We did a whole secret agent theme, going so far as to produce some extremely low-budget but nonetheless epic video segments in the style of the Bond films. Our audio team even made us a theme song, which I'm not ashamed to admit I enjoyed playing on a loop on my phone while I walked around the office in a tuxedo during the event.
• I've been building lots of Legos with my daughter! She rocks the Lego Friends sets on her own, and helps me with my Star Wars and Lord of the Rings sets.
• Speaking of Lego Lord of the Rings, I kind of got hooked playing the Xbox version. So good...
• I got a RaspberryPi at PyCon! So the kiddo and I have built a case for it out of her spare Legos, and I've shown her a little bit of Python and Scratch. Now we need to find a project, because she's really excited about building something with it. (Thanks, PyCon!)
• I made a little URL shortener for my pirn.at domain before I realized that bit.ly does it all for free and then some. That's okay. It gave me a chance to learn about Flask. I'll probably write a little bit more about it at some point later.
• I made a little RSS-to-Twitter gizmo to automatically tweet links to my blog, using my pirn.at shortener for links. I'll probably write a little bit about it too.
• I got all excited at PyCon and made PythonIpsum, a lorem ipsum generator with a Python-flavored vocabulary. Patches welcome!
• I've been bitten by the site refresh bug and have started tinkering on a responsive-ish layout so that this place won't look so daft on a phone.
• I've got a photography backlog from CodeMash and PyCon that I hope to address shortly. And then I want to get back to shooting regularly (though I've got a case of gear fever, so right now I'm mostly obsessing about which lens I'd like to pick up).
• The kiddo and I have been watching Clone Wars and Dr. Who together. She's been really enjoying watching them with me, and I've really enjoyed helping to counter the influence of the Princess Industrial Complex.

In short--death by bullet points! Hopefully with the big conference season behind me, I'll get back into the swing of things shortly and won't be quite so much of a stranger here.

A couple of weeks ago at the amazing-beyond-belief PyCon 2013, David Stanek and I presented a half-day tutorial. We used a deliberately-vulnerable web application to walk our students through the OWASP Top 10, giving them hands-on experience exploiting these problems and offering advice on how to mitigate them.

While we had concerns about the amount of material and the time available, not to mention the size of the class--we had about 80 people show up!--it seemed to go well, and we got a lot of positive feedback both during the tutorial itself and throughout the rest of the conference. One attendee even told us that thanks to our class, he'd fixed a security problem over lunch immediately after the tutorial! It was immensely satisfying to hear that we'd been able to catalyze some actual improvement in the world.

If the official feedback is good enough, we may look to run this again in the future, whether at smaller venues like PyOhio or next spring at PyCon 2014.

You can clone down the tutorial app if you'd like to follow along with the slides.

I had the honor of working with Mike Crute and David Stanek to produce and deliver an all-day tutorial session at CodeMash 2013, where we got folks up to speed on Python and then ran them through a series of iterative exercises as we built a small Django site together.

We promised slides, and though we took a bit of a break to celebrate and then enjoy the conference, I wanted to make sure we didn't wait too long before making them available. Hopefully they will be a useful reference in spite of their lack of the interactivity inherent in a live tutorial session.

You can clone down the sample code repository if you'd like to play along at home.

I think it's safe to say we had a great time presenting at and attending CodeMash and are looking forward to continuing to make sure Python is represented there.

Five years after creating a logo for it, I finally managed to attend PyOhio, an awesome and free community conference in Columbus, Ohio. It was a treat to catch up with friends from PyCon as well as meet lots of new people, and I'm really excited to see how PyOhio has grown over the years--it's now almost as big as PyCon was when I first started attending it. From great talks to a fun hallway track, sprinting, and socializing, it's clear that there's something great going on here, and I'm really excited to return.

My PyCon name badge, bearing various tokens of honor: my twitter handle, our podcast's twitter--suddenly relevant again!--and various badge bling indicating my involvement as a volunteer, a session chair, and a conference sponsor.

Every year, PyCon astounds and amazes me, enlightens and enriches, and moves my heart as well as my mind, and I'm honored to be part of it.

PyCon conference chair Jesse Noller prepares to raffle off a much-coveted Nao robot.

Yes, he even threw in the Baby Bjorn.

No, I didn't win it.

Doug Napoloeone helps clear the room after Jason Huggins' robot-which-plays-Angry-Birds talk, directing the crowd to an open space for further show and tell.

One of the five Nao robots from Aldebaran Robotics that opened PyCon with a coreographed dance takes a rest to ponder what's next on its agenda. These are pretty amazing little things, and Aldebaran's vision for its next few years is tremendously exciting.

Did I mention that I suggested the music that was used? Made. My. Day.

I had a hard time deciding which image to use for this, my first full day of tutorials at PyCon 2012. I had a few decent shots of the exterior of the conference center, of a big banner with the conference logo, of palm trees lit up at night... But this is, to me, what PyCon is all about--discovering that someone has done something unexpected, creative, and beautiful.

Chris just can't stop texting today. Honestly, I can't say as I blame him, although the pace of his messaging does rival that of teenage girls.

Here we pass the time while waiting to board our first flight to PyCon. (Which, by the way, is going to be completely awesome. You heard it here first!)