Meet up for Django (and Python) web developers

[Carruth, Rusty]

What a first meet up should cover?

Hmm.  Well, I started as a total newbie to Python and Django about a month ago.  (Been programming/software_engineering/etc for MANY years.  Not a lot of HTML though)

Now I've got 2 apps working, one a database query system, one a lunch voting system ("where we gonna go for lunch on Friday???")
 
There were some critical things that were not in the tutorial, but now that I know them I've forgotten what they were!

Oh, yeah - one of them was the extreme limitation of the python in a template.  Ouch!  No array indexing?  Wow.

So all that to say - it depends upon what level of person you are targeting - a software newbie, or just a Python or Django newbie.

I might have been able to save a day or 2 if the examples were more thorough.  How to deal with a 'real' database layout? (many tables, with the data in only one place and pointers to that data from the other tables)  When to use links and when to use buttons?  How to get an html POST to actually work (including the 'right way' to tell if it was a POST or a GET or whatever), and how urls.py and views.py (or whatever you decide to call them) play together.  Suggestions as to when to make a new file vs sticking it all into views.py - or at least a reminder that its not required to have everything in one 'views.py' file! (duh)

And now I'm dealing with the user authentication stuff.  I wanted to be able to send the user their current password (sending email from Django was trivial, really), but that looks impossible without adding the plain-text password to the database....  So now I'm considering how to do a password reset page....  Or maybe since its just lunch voting I'll stick the password in the database and assume nobody can hack into my database ;-) (or that the damage from someone doing so is trivial - which it probably is)

Just a few thoughts.

Or perhaps just have each person say their current involvement in P/D, their experience level in general, a short description of what they've done in P and/or P/D, their worst P/D problem, or whatever.  Then a short 'real' example (yes, I know - 'short real example' is an oxymoron)

Rusty