Here is my recap of things that impressed me and that I saw as directly applicable to what I am working on.

redis / pyres / celery

• redis, pyres, celery
• I need to use Redis with pyres or celery.
• Could replace a lot of my crontabs
• Could replace local queuing (versus distributed queuing running in the cloud).
• Could replace adhoc email queue infrastructure
• Simplifies stuff done asynchronously with crontabs - queue up the fact that something needs to be done at the moment instead of running queries repeatedly looking for conditions to trigger action.
• Becomes super simple to mark things as something to execute asynchronously so more functionality can be added without slowing down website (e.g. logging, near real-time data warehousing, etc.)

picloud

• picloud
• Looks promising, however, cannot execute non-python code (e.g. ffmpeg)
• Client is LGPL but it is pure Python so should be able to at least glean ideas from it especially how bytecode is compiled and shipped for remote execution.

Haystack / solr

• Haystack, solr
• solr seems to be what everyone prefers. not much talked about this, but rather Haystack
• Haystack is genius.
• It's designed for Django. It's modular.
• Interface/API is simple and clean.
• Makes adding new search indexes easy and useable.

Beautiful Architecture

• Greg Wilson
• Beautiful Code author
• 20 pages describing architecture of great software or, comparing architectures of two similar pieces of software from community for chapters.
• Looking forward to reading this when complete.

Unit Testing

• Ned Batchelder
• coverage.py, lots of improvements over the past year
• HTML reporting
• Branch coverage
• Cobertura-compatible for XML output for CI reporting
• Can set settings in .coveragerc to ignore certain lines
• Coming: will work with nose and test.py
• unittest in Python 2.7 gets major update
• new unittest stuff is backported and available as module as unittest2
• provides nose-like test discovery

Creating/Reading Word Documents in Pure Python

• Mike Maccana / @mikemaccana
• python-docx
• creates word documents
• extracts plain text of documents (parse documents)
• search + replace

virtualenv

• Need to be doing things in virtualenv with virtualenvwrapper
• creates virtual python environments
• easy segregation of third party library dependancies
• good for managing upgrade efforts to things like Django or SimpleJson, etc.

pip

• pip blows easy_install out of the water
• can install directly from svn, hg, or git
• can cleanly uninstall
• recovers from failed installs (doesn't leave site-packages in strange state like easy_install can)
• easy requirements management for a package
• this could be part of our internal deployment strategy
• easy upgrading of existing packages
• could be very useful in bootstrapping different versions of software in cloud environment
• especially powerful when used with virtualenv