Code. Design. Explore.

Bill Gates delivered a very moving speech to Harvard’s graduation class last June, but I only got wind of it this weekend (thanks Paul Graham!).

For readability I split the speech into fives parts (based on the fact that the videos were also split that way). Take your pick on whether you want to read or watch…

Part 1

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It’s unbelievable how far we’ve come since JavaScript was first utilized on a web page to create a popup window or an annoying alert box.

Now we have full blown e-mail clients, street view mapping APIs, and… Mario Bros!

check it out:
http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/04/super-mario-in-14kb-javascript.html

What’s Pylons?

I’ll assume you’ve heard the buzz about Ruby on Rails. Pylons, like Rails, is an MVC framework, but written in the Python language.

This isn’t meant to be an intro to MVC frameworks, but for those just getting started… MVC frameworks let you keep the presentation, business logic, and data separate. They also take care of the majority of setup work involved with building a new web app. I could write another post just on this topic alone, but many people already have. BetterExplained as a great tutorial entitled, Understanding Models, Views and Controllers.

The Real Intro

I’ve been using Pylons for about 9 months now. I have picked up some nice conventions, and created some of my own along the way. I had initially developed a web app with Pylons 0.9.5, and it was quite impressive. When learning all new frameworks there is a bit of a learning curve, especially when slapping together several pieces of middleware and other various tools.

Last week I upgraded to Pylons 0.9.6 — and things broke. Although it didn’t take nearly as much time to get moving again, there were definitely some hiccups.

In the hopes of alleviating your pain, I will show you how to get Pylons working with an authentication system (AuthKit), the database model (SQLAlchemy 0.4), and some conventions I established with the Mako templating engine.

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