On Saturday (May 10th) the Cape Town Python User Group held a Python Sprint meeting as part of the Global Python Sprint weekend.  8 or so of us got together on and off from 10:30am until about 9:30pm at the SynthaSite offices around a table and worked through 10 or so issues in the Python issue database.

Thanks to The Other Neil and Simon for most of the organisation effort, and to them and Adrianna, Russell, Jonathan, Jeremy, Brad, and David for coming through and taking part.

And thanks to SynthaSite for coffee, coke, crisps, chocolates, and other goodies.

According to The Other Neil, we worked on:

• http://bugs.python.org/issue2736
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2809
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2742
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1491
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1343
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2776
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2768
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2722
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1153769
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2746

Next week, on Tuesday 8th, the Western Cape Linux User Group meets to hear about dbus "and other freedesktop stuff".  Usual venue - Chemical Engineering lecture theatre at University of Cape Town.  18:30.  As is usual for CLUG meetings, everyone who attends is welcome to come have supper afterwards (there's a list of previous CLUG dinner venues on the wiki).

The next day, Wednesday 9th, the Cape Town Ruby Brigade has a meeting at the Bandwidth Barn from 19:00.  Currently known topics include the Yahoo! UI and working with it with Rails.  Don't forget to sign up

Saturday, 26th April, finds the Cape Town Python User Group Tenth Meeting (probably) at the Bandwidth Barn, probably from 14:00 as usual.  No set topics yet, but I imagine we might have a round of collaborative programming after the unplanned session last meeting which seemed to go down well.  (Unfortunately, I was working, so I missed out...)

Tuesday, 29th April, is the second of the twice-a-month meetings of the Western Cape Linux User Group.  No idea on the topic yet, though.

Another successful Cape Town Geekdinner, Garrulous Grape, has come and gone, marking the start of our second year.  Not much to say beyond great people, great vibe, and, at times, great entertainment (Brad Whittington doing Tania's Slideshow Karaoke was hilarious).

Others have more to say, though:

• Jonathan Hitchcock explains our "projector screen hack" and gives thanks
• Ian Gilfillan explains his wearing tie-dye for his "Geek/Hippy talk"
• Paul and Kerry-Anne posted a photo from the evening on Cape Town Daily Photo
  
• Jeremy Thurgood also reports back
• Marius Bock returns to the fold after a few months
• Beverley Merriman met a bunch of new people at her second GeekDinner

Special thanks to Perdeberg for the wine - I'm sure there'll be a bunch of new entries into their clink-to-win competition.

Plans for May Cape Town GeekDinner are already underway, and I might organise a GeekBrunch some Sunday or GeekPoker some weeknight in April for those who need an intermediate fix.

The GeekDinner Cape Town first birthday dinner is upon us - Garrulous Grape is our seventh GeekDinner (one year and three days after the first one), happening on Monday, 31st March from 7pm at Greens in Plattekloof.  Yes, we've finally headed north!

Before that, the Cape Town Python User Group meeting (aka CTPUG 9) at the Bandwidth Barn on Saturday, 29th March, from 2pm.

That I'm having more fun working recently than I can recall having before hasn't changed, and part of that is working with some of the best people in the country (and occasionally in the industry as a whole) here at SynthaSite.  And now we're hiring (in both San Francisco and Cape Town, but I'm talking about the team here in Cape Town).  If that interests you and you think you're pretty hot (even if you might need some experience to fully shine), I don't think you can find a better place to work in Cape Town.

There are four positions open in Cape Town - two technology and two admin/support positions.  (And we're always open to getting to know people who are as passionate about making a great product as we are.)

The sysadmin position will join Lisa and I in the "systems" team mostly on the infrastructure side.  I've been doing most of the system administration in the company since I got there, automating as I go, but it's not something I can do as well as I'd like and still work on the things I most want to work on.

This job is probably fairly flexible.  You might be starting out, in which case we'll help you grow into the position.  You might be hard-core, in which case we'll generally keep out of your way.  Or you might want to do a bit of sysadmin and a bit of platform or product development.  Experience with Python and advanced Bourne shell scripting would be useful.

We also need someone to spend most of their time researching and building platform prototypes and then production systems as we move through iterative and large-scale improvements to our platform.  This is the "platform engineer".  Experience building platforms or using the sorts of tools that go along with building them (memcached, for example) is preferable, as is experience with multiple languages (I'd say Java and Python especially would be useful, but then my voice is just one of many).

The other two positions are for a copywriter and a support person - although, there's always scope to get involved in any number of other activities - QA, research, user testing, and so forth.

The Cape Town SPIN (who don't believe in permalinks for meeting information, so you can only ever get information on the next Cape Town SPIN meeting) is meeting on Wednesday, March 19, to discuss Project Automation and Software Configuration Management.

Software Configuration Management

Software configuration management, and its central theme of version control, is and old topic, and yet many people ship software products without really getting all the potential benefits. In this talk I'll survey the current state of the art in tools and thinking. A few recommendations will be made, especially for small teams who are not too keen on heavy-weight process.

Project Automation

Performing repetitive tasks is tedious, error prone and never fun. Software projects is full of potentially boring but important task, such as building, testing and deployment.

Automating such tasks does not only relieve pain but also provide the development team with a useful early warning system. However, one needs to be pragmatic about the time spent creating and maintaining automated tasks.

These are topics close to my heart (and memory, since this is what I've spent a large chunk of my time focusing on the last few months), so I'll probably be at the Bandwidth Barn from 18:15 next Wednesday to hear what the speakers have to say.

How cool is this - a South African (Capetonian, at that) student, Federico Lorenzi, placed in the top 10 of the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest.  Federico has good taste - he likes FreeBSD and Python - and worked on the MoinMoin wiki project for the contest.

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest is a way to introduce pre-university students to the world of open source, and to reward the contributions made by these students.  The winners get flown over to Google's Mountain View headquarters for a prize-giving.

In conjunction with Charl van Niekerk's Google Summer of Code participation, the fact that South Africa has a wealth of technical talent is probably reaching many more ears.  (I'm sure Google isn't surprised - I know a few South Africans doing good work there.)

When I started at SynthaSite and returned to doing some sysadmin-related work I discovered BackupPC and rdiff-backup, and I offered to give a talk at CLUG.  For my sins, I'm talking tomorrow from 18:30 onwards at the UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre.  There will be the usual post-CLUG dinner for anyone who wants to continue chatting after the talk.

I'm a bit late this month with my monthly calendar of Geek events.  Can't really get much more later and still be in the month...

Anyway, Frugal Fennel is the next GeekDinner, tomorrow (31 January), at Sloppy Sams along Somerset Road in Green Point, Cape Town.

We're already sort-of full, but if you put yourself on the reserve list, then when the occasional bunch of people remember that it's their spouse's birthday and pull out, you have dibs on replacing them.

It feels like ages since the last GeekDinner - probably the combination of having lots of holiday time and lots of hard work at both work and on StarCamp.  Can't wait to relax, see my friends, and hopefully make some new ones. 

No, this isn't my post about what it's like to work at SynthaSite.  Although I can say that I've had the most fun I've had in years working here so far.

SynthaSite has two positions open that I'd like to see filled with local geeks, both working on the community and marketplace aspects (ie, forums, blog, web site, and so forth) around the core SynthaSite application.   Both the positions involve coding and the usual amount of collaborative decision-making in a start-up environment, but one is slightly more "senior" and will involve additional liaising and planning and organisation.  You'd be based in our Gardens, Cape Town, offices.

Basically, that's it - two bright and cheery and passionate geeks with a diverse skillset (including, but certainly not limited to, PHP) wanted to work at a well-funded "Web 2.0" start-up in Cape Town.  We have the usual start-up environment with pay-you-what-you're-worth remuneration and other financial incentives, great equipment, good company lunch, nice location (near the 24-hours-Woolies-at-the-Engen in Gardens), good connectivity (well, for .za), and so forth.

Send direct to careers@synthasite.com or send me an email if you know me (or can figure out my email address).