Unified Designs Blog

As suggested by Tarek, and done by so many others.

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

**[Requests](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests).** I've dealt with Python's HTTP handling on numerous occasions, and most times found myself constructing an abstraction layer to deal with it. Requests provides this abstraction layer for pretty much all of my use cases. I'll give an honourable mention to **[Pyramid](http://www.pylonsproject.org/)**, because it allowed me to bring together my current use of Pylons and my past experience with Zope.

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

**[Sorting algorithms](http://alecmunro.blogspot.com/2011/09/sorting-out.html) ;).** On a more serious note, I started actually getting benefit out of Scrum, which is not quite a programming technique but definitely help my programming. On a related note, I learned the benefits of continuous deployment, and some of the techniques one can use to support that.

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

**[Python Web Client](https://github.com/alecmunro/Experiments-in-Public/tree/master/python_web_client/pwc).** But I built that myself. I did file an accepted (and quickly fixed) bug in [PyDev](http://pydev.org/).

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

[Planet Python](http://planet.python.org/). Pretty much my go to for Python, though I'm tempted to start reading Python Reddit (I've never used Reddit before).

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

[Chef](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home) (and related tools), [gevent](http://www.gevent.org/), [Go](http://golang.org/). I'm also interested in (and more likely to learn) [CoffeeScript](http://coffeescript.org/) and [Node JS](http://nodejs.org/).

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

A web service mocking library. I've seen some promising signs in this direction, and I have cause to contribute myself to the effort.
A self-replicating Python platform, that can deploy itself from device-to-device relatively transparently. I want to be able to say "run code X on instance Y", and not worry about any of the details of preparing Y or moving X to it.

If you want to participate:

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

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