This document started out as a proposal for mid-commit hooks on the ZODB mailing list, but I realized while writing it that mid-commit hooks were flawed. ZODB is a transactional object-oriented database. It uses a transaction package that provides a two-phase commit abstraction for Python.

Often, when working with transactions …

Two weekends ago I attended and gave a talk at PyOhio 2014.

I'm really quite impressed with the how well organized this free conference was. The talks were high caliber. The conference drew attendees from a pretty wide area. Most folks I ran into were from outside of Ohio [1 …

Last night I gave a talk about Bobo at the NoVA Python Meetup.

Bobo is a minimalist Web framework for Python. Bobo was designed to be very easy to learn and remember (or re-learn). It's philosophy is that it's best for the components of a web application to be decoupled …

Last night I gave a talk at the Scala DC - MD - NOVA Meetup about my experience developing a caching Blob server for ZODB with Scala.

I thought this project was interesting because, although the code base is quite small, it touches on a number of areas of interest, including:

• Testing …

I gave a talk at a joint meeting of DC Droids and Riak DC.

The slides can be found here:

http://www.jimfulton.info/talks/scala-android.html

I gave a talk at the FredDev meetup on our experience with agile methods and especially Kanban. This included a demonstration of our Asana-based 2-tiered Kanban application.

http://jimfulton.info/talks/zope-kanban.html

I gave a talk on a content-aware load balancer at PyCon 2012.

There's a video of the talk.

The zc.resumelb (source) is a content-aware load balancer for Python. When an application has a working set that's too big to fit in application cache, and when the applications data can …

I "gave a keynote presentation <http://jimfulton.info/talks/What-I-Learned-as-the-Zope-Pope.html>`_ at Python Brasil 2011 sharing some perspectives on the History of the Zope project.

Recently, I needed to animate rotation of an HTML button. I use the Dojo javascript library, which has some frameworks for animation. Unfortunately, the core framework, dojo.Animation isn't well documented. For example, if you look at: http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/quickstart/Animation.html The documentation and examples are written …

The purpose of this post is to make a point about the dangers of excessive automation

Let me emphasize: the purpose of this post if not to criticize ConfigParser in particular, but to make a point about the API over design. ConfigParser is an old project and if it was …

I gave a talk on deploying applications with zc.buildout at PyCon 2011.

Here's a video of the talk.

This talk discussed how we used buildout for deploying applications, including:

• Development
• building self-contained source releases (tarballs)
• Building production configurations of applications as well as support configurations (run scripts, logging, etc …

http://health2challenge.org/code-a-thon/washington-dc/

Someone sent a link about this to the DC Python Meetup Group (http://meetup.zpugdc.org/) a few weeks ago. It looked like fun and a way to learn about a new domain, so I signed up. I'm not aware if any other Python folks …

There are a lot of things I'd keep an eye on, if it was easier, including:

• Nagios problem summaries
• Various plots showing metrics for our hosted applications
• finance.google.com
• social network feeds
• ...

I could keep web pages open, but that takes too much space. What I want is the …