While I’m not aggregated into the Python Planet I wanted to join in the meme that’s already going on.

What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2009?

While I didn’t discover it until the latter half of 2009, I’d have to say eventlet is the coolest Python library I discovered in 2009. After leaving Slide, where I learned the joys of coroutines (a concept previously foreign to me) I briefly contemplated using greenlet to write a coroutines library similar to what is used at Slide. Fortunately I stumbled across eventlet in time, which shares common ancestry with Slide’s proprietary library.

What new programming technique did you learn in 2009?

I’m not sure I really learned any new techniques over the past year, I started writing a lot more tests this past year but my habits don’t quite qualify as Test Driven Development just yet. As far as Python goes, I’ve been introduced to the Python C API over the past year (written two entire modules in C PyECC and py-yajl) and while I wouldn’t exactly call implementing Python modules in C a “technique” it’s certainly a departure from regular Python (Py_XDECREF I’m looking at you)

What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2009? What did you do?

Regular readers of my blog can likely guess which open source project I contributed to most in 2009, Cheetah, of which I’ve become the maintainer. I also authored a number of new Python projects in 2009: PyECC a module implementing Elliptical Curve Cryptography (built on top of seccure), py-yajl a module utilizing yajl for fast JSON encoding/decoding, IronWatin an IronPython-based module for writing WatiN tests in Python (supporting screengrabs as well), PILServ an eventlet-based server to do server-side image transformations with PIL, TweepyDeck a PyGTK+ based Twitter client and MicroMVC a teeny-tiny MVC styled framework for Python and WSGI built on eventlet and Cheetah.

What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2009?

The Python reddit was probably the most read Python-related “blog” I read in 2009, it generally supercedes the Python Planet with regards to content but also includes discussions as well as package release posts.

What are the top three things you want to learn in 2010?

  • Python 3. After spending a couple weekends trying to get Cheetah into good working order on Python 3, I must say, maintaining a Python-based module on both Python 2.xx and 3.xx really feels like a nightmare. py-yajl on the otherhand, being entirely C, was trivial to get compiling and executing perfectly for 2.xx and 3.xx
  • NoSQL. Earlier this very evening I dumped a boatload of data out of PostgreSQL into Redis and the resulting Python code for data access using redis-py is shockingly simple. I’m looking forward to finding more places where a relational database is overkill for certain types of stored data, and using Redis instead.
  • Optimizing Python. With py-yajl Lloyd and I had some fun optimizing the C code behind the module, but I’d love to learn some handy tricks to making pure-Python execute as fast as possible.