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— june meeting:

intros:
  - there was at least one new comer and several old timers who decided to show up today, welcome!
  - we had one open bsd user (that's new...)
  - one suse user... bob i'm pretty sure...
  - a ubuntu user, mint, deepin, etc, etc.
meeting topic: "Getting Started with Python Programing"
  - the presentation appears to center around flask which is a popular lightweight python based web framework that does many things
  - python has packages, which is a collection of python modules
  - pip is used to install said packages
    - is a package manager similar to a Linux package manager such as apt-get or yum
  - virtualenv is a tool to create isolated python environments
    - this is basically a way to keep from breaking your system python environment and to give you application its own namespace
    - it is also a package that can be loaded with either pip or the os package manager
  - python terms
    - argument - value passed to a function
    - immutable - an object with a fixed value. immutable objects include numbers, strings and tuples. Example: key in a dictionary
    - mutable - an object that can change their value but keep their id()
    - statement - part of a suite or block of code. a collection of if, while or for expressions
    - class - a template for creating user-defined objects
    - decorator - a function returning another function, usually applied as a function transformation using the @wrapper
  - flask
    - based on werkzeug toolkit and jinja2 template engine
    - homepage - http://flask.pocoo.org
    - werkzeug is a WSGI utility for python
    - jinja2 is used in many python projects, similar to django templates
    - routes - specific commands are executed by flask when you access a flask router (eg. /dosomething)
    - templates can be created with logic (such as iteration) in them.
    - variables can be added to the routes for sending data between client and server
    - several examples were showed and well all tried very how to explain how decorators work... i'm not sure we did a good job or not because they are mysterious to be honest...
    - mike showed a simple https example with flask
    - he then showed some example code that was used to create a simple dropbox-like example
    - for a simple way to "test" your code try pythonanywhere.com
      - there is a free tier that allows you to try their service or you can pay for more usage...
  - after that there was conversation about various other python topics such as the benefits of packaging, requirements.txt, console scripts, pep standards etc.
  - then we all talked about GitHub and what our favorite GitHub alternative is.
  - we all voted that gogs was the best in favor of gitlab and Launchpad (not sure if Launchpad even a fair comparison but hey).