Jazkarta Goes To LA

This year Jazkarta’s annual sprint was held in the city of Los Angeles, graciously hosted by Alec Mitchell who lives a block away from LA’s City Hall.

We had fun exploring the city – Union Station, Chinatown, LAX-C (pictured above, a gigantic Asian food distributor and restaurant supply), Grand Central Market, Griffith Observatory, and the Hollywood Farmers’ Market where we bought lots of delicious fruit.

We attended an improv comedy performance at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, ate lots of tacos, had original Phillipe’s French Dip sandwiches, visited brew pubs and drank lots of local beer.

We even had a private tasting of cheese, beer, and wine pairings.

Oh, and we also sprinted on a variety of topics!

Alec and Jesse Snyder ported several of our Plone add-ons to Python 3 and Plone 5.2:

• jazkarta.tesserae
• collective.siteimprove
• collective.relatedslider
• collective.isotope
• jazkarta.abtestile

Carlos de la Guardia created a set of Pyramid Quick Tutorials on Glitch – more about that coming in another post.

Matthew Wilkes and Jesse researched the best way to set up Pyramid functional tests using pytest and webtest in an efficient manner. They were unhappy with their previous model, which relied on in-memory databases. They settled on a pattern that switched out private variables of the sessionmaker to join a longer-running transaction for each test. This is more self-contained than adapting the session setup machinery in the app itself, and works transparently on different database backends. Matthew made a gist of the relevant code.

Alec made a prototype of an app to provide faceted search of bibliography references kept in Zotero. The app has a Elasticsearch backend and a React front end. It uses the Zotero API to pull the references into Elasticsearch for querying.

Carlos investigated what it would take to move the CastleCMS quality checking features into a Plone add-on. It’s a work in progress.

It’s wonderful to be able to work together in person, instead of remotely from our home offices spread across 3 countries and 2 continents. We try to do it once a year and always have a fantastic time. This year was no exception.