New Year's Python Meme

1. What is the coolest Python application, framework, or library you
   have discovered in 2011?

   We use PyFilesystem to access WebDAV and S3 storage as though it
   was part of the local file system.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2011?

   It's not a technique, per se, but I learned a lot about the
   internals of Sphinx while preparing the manuscript for my book. I
   will be summarizing what I learned in a presentation at PyCon
   2012.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the
   most in 2011? What did you do?

   For non-coding contributions, that would be the Python Software
   Foundation. The PSF Communications team set up Python Insider,
   a blog for the Python core development team. Posts written in
   English are translated into 10 different languages by members of
   the Communications team.

   For code-related contributions, it would probably be a tie between
   virtualenvwrapper and sphinxcontrib.spelling

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2011?

   Definitely the Planet Python feed.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2012?

   • non-relational databases like MongoDB
   • message passing systems like RabbitMQ
   • non-Django web frameworks like Pyramid and Flask

6. What are the top software, app, or lib you wish someone would
   write in 2012?

   I like Tarek's idea for a mobile wine label recognition app, but I
   would settle for a decent wine log/journal app for iOS.

   Other than that, I can't think of anything I want to see that I'm
   not planning to build myself, but none of those projects are far
   enough along to talk about yet.

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Tarek started this series with these instructions:

• copy-paste the questions and answer to them in your blog
• tweet it with the #2012pythonmeme hashtag

virtualenvwrapper 2.11

What is virtualenvwrapper

virtualenvwrapper is a set of extensions to Ian Bicking's virtualenv
tool. The extensions include wrappers for creating and deleting
virtual environments and otherwise managing your development workflow,
making it easier to work on more than one project at a time without
introducing conflicts in their dependencies.

What's New in 2.11

• Add -a option to mkvirtualenv to associate a
  new virtualenv with an existing project directory. Contributed by
  Mike Fogel.
• Drops support for Python 2.4 and 2.5. The tools may still work,
  but I no longer have a development environment set up for testing
  them, so I do not officially support them.
• Shortcut initialization if it has run before.
• Set hook log file permissions to be group-writable. (issue 62)
• Add VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PROJECT_FILENAME variable so the
  .project file used to link a virtualenv to a project can be
  renamed to avoid conflicts with other tools. (issue 120)

Installing

Visit the virtualenvwrapper project page for download links and
installation instructions.