Package managers for source code (like pypi, npm, nuget, maven, gems, etc) are great! We should all use them. But what happens if the central repository goes down? Suddenly all your continious builds / deploys fail for no reason. Here is a way to prevent that:

Configure Apache as a caching ...

These days we should write every code as if it will be used by international people with a wide variety of personal information (just look at Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names for some headscratchers). I would like to do add my small contribution to this by showing how UTF-8 ...

So you need to convert a python datetime object which has a timezone set (“aware” in the Python nomenclature) to an UTC one with no timezone set (“naive”), for example because NDB on GAE can’t store anything else. The solution will look something like this:

date = date.astimezone(tz ...

The GAE presentation I’ve given for the 12th edition of Cluj Geek Meet can be found here (created using reveal.js).

You can find the source code here.

Having tools like pep8 and pylint are great, especially given the huge amount of dynamism involved in Python - which results in many opportunities to shooting yourself in the foot. Sometimes however you want to invoke these tools in more specialized ways, for example only on the files which changed since ...

Warning! This is a method to erase the data from your Google App Engine datastore. There is no way to recover your data after you go trough with this! Only use this if you’re absolutely certain!

If you have a GAE account used for experimentation, you might like to ...

This blogpost was originally posted to the Transylvania JUG blog.

On the surface it looks simple: just add the dependency and you can run the example code.

However what the jython artifact doesn’t get you are the standard python libraries like re. This means that as soon as you ...