postgres, postgresql , , , 7 Comments

Offering an Intro to PostgreSQL class

UPDATE: See below for pricing.

I’m working with Code Lesson to offer an Introduction to PostgreSQL class.

Code Lesson is pretty cool – it’s an online course system, and the idea is you get a couple assignments and lessons taught by me each week, and there’s a midterm and final evaluation. I love conferences, but the nice thing about an online course is you don’t have to spend an entire workday taking a tutorial at a conference, or travelling to a particular location, and you can finish assignments when it’s convenient for you.

My current working outline is:

Intro to Postgres

Hello, world!
* History of PostgreSQL project
* Features
* Basic SQL

Usage
* psql
* Drivers: Perl and Python examples
* GUIs
* Documentation

Survey of features
* Full text search
* Built-in functions
* Datatypes
* Indexes
* Transactional DDL

Community
* Mailing lists & IRC
* Asking questions
* Modules, add-ons, tools

Operations
* System and hardware
* Installation and configuration
* Maintenance and operation
* Replication

Our plan is to provide students with login access to a shared database. During the course, I’ll be available to answer questions and I’m considering making short videos to go along with the course material.

We haven’t set the price for it just yet, but should be figuring that out in the next week or so.

Anyway, if you’re interested, sign up and you’ll get an email when we set the price. I’m happy to answer any questions you have about content.

Another thing that was requested in the Hacker News thread was more advanced material. I think the advanced material falls into two categories – PostgreSQL core functionality, and administration/tuning.

Update! Pricing is set at $325/student, with a 10% discount if you register 2 or more students at the same time.

python , ,

Learning Python the hard way: __init__.py needed for packages (as opposed to modules)

Just ran into this today, and wanted to get it down so I never forget:

Modules are not packages! 🙂

From the docs, a Module is:

A module is a file containing Python definitions and statements. The file name is the module name with the suffix .py appended. Within a module, the module’s name (as a string) is available as the value of the global variable __name__.

And a Package is:

Packages are a way of structuring Python’s module namespace by using “dotted module names”.

When you create a module and you want other scripts to be able to reference it, you need an __init__.py in the directory containing the modules in order for Python to treat a directory as containing a package.

The error manifests as “ImportError: No module named XXXX”.

All I had to do was touch __init__.py and things worked. I’m sure there are other things I’m going to learn today, but that was a silly one that I didn’t expect, and wasn’t mentioned in the Modules documentation, but is mentioned in Packages.

twitter

twittering on 2011-02-09

postgres, postgresql , 3 Comments

Invited lecture at Oregon State University: PostgreSQL

Oregon State University invited me to give a technical talk yesterday about PostgreSQL and open source community. It was aimed at graduate level students, and an attempt to recruit them.

It’s not in the slides, but I told a short story in the ‘but there’s a disconnect’ slide. I wanted to convey to them that both the free and open source community and the educational system are failing them when it comes to open source. I attended a conference last fall that had nearly 1000 undergraduate and graduate students. I staffed a booth about open source software, and nearly every student that dropped by couldn’t think of a single open source project they’d ever heard of. With prompting, they’d agree that Linux was probably open source.

We had a discussion about how our community manages conflict, who the big production users of PostgreSQL are, and how folks can get involved. I gave out a few tshirts and buttons, and ran into some old friends from Open Source Bridge.

community, portland , , , , 1 Comment

Event organizers: spaces to have tech events or conferences in Portland

I’ve been asked more than a couple times about places to have events in Portland.

When you google for ‘event spaces portland, or’ you don’t get anything that I’d call useful.

So here’s the list that I’ve compiled:

East Side:

West Side:

twitter

Weekly tweet digest for 2011-02-06