Python North-West: The Python Challenge

Last week I went to my first-ever Python North-West meeting, at the Manchester Digital Laboratory (aka MadLab). The webpage describes it as a "user group for Pythoneers and Pythonistas of all levels and ages, open to everyone coding 'the way Guido indented it'", and meetings alternate between talks and coding dojos (group coding sessions where people get to share code and ideas with the aim of improving their knowledge and skills - see http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?CodingDojo for more information).

This particular meeting was a coding dojo and so as a group we worked through The Python Challenge (http://www.pythonchallenge.com/), which is a series of puzzles that can be solved using Python programming combined with some imagination and lateral thinking. While most people had come with their own laptops, the format that developed was for one person to "drive" the laptop connected to the overhead projector, typing in code and taking suggestions from the others.

Although I'd already looked at the first two challenges earlier in the day to get an idea of what was involved, the group setting provided a great opportunity to see how other people worked, and to learn about bits of Python that I was unfamiliar with - one example for me was being introduced to list comprehensions, which are concise ways to generate lists, e.g.:

>>> [[x,x**2] for x in vec]
[[2, 4], [4, 16], [6, 36]]

(although there were several other examples which I won't write about here so as not to spoil the challenges for others). Also, as many of the challenges began with having to figure out what the programming problem actually was, it meant that collectively we didn't get stuck for too long on any particular puzzle - I know that at least a couple would have had me completely stumped if I'd been on my own. For me personally it was also an opportunity to play with IDLE - Python's IDE - under Windows (not an environment that I've used much in the past but quite handy for this kind of exploratory programming process.)

Overall it was great to get out and interact with other Python developers in an enthusiastic and friendly atmosphere, while at the same time broadening my knowledge of the language - and now I've had a taste I'll definitely be back for future meetings.