Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

PyCon-Tech (the python behind pycon) is an open source project for the management of community run conferences. It is actually a framework for developing conference websites, and doing collaborative management, written on top of the django web framework. The project is broken into multiple application, most of which can be used independently. The issue is, not many people even know this resource exists.

One of the stated goals of PyCon-Tech is to give back to the python community which makes the conference possible. This series is my attempt to shine a light on some of the general use applications under the hood and how you can use them for other projects. The first app in this series is the feedutil, a lightweight generic RSS/Atom feed pull. (it is also the only app in PyCon-Tech being used for other projects that I know of).

Overview

Feedutil is a lightweight app for pulling RSS/Atom feeds onto your site with django template tags, or custom views. This is not a full feed aggregator like feedjack, but you could write one with it. This is more along the lines of the blogger plugin which allows you to have the latest 5 entries from an RSS feed appear on your sidebar. We use it on the PyCon website for the main about page which has summaries of the latest PyCon Blog entries via Atom, and on an organizer page which replicates a Trac RSS issue feed for open website bugs. This does not use any django models, and there is no database interaction. You could create your own models for managing your feeds, but that is not the purpose of feedutil.

The feedutil provides two primary template tags {% feed feed_url [posts_to_show] [cache_expires] %} and {% get_feed feed_url [posts_to_show] [cache_expires] as var %}. There is also a higher level interface to feedparser which includes caching pull_feed(feed_url, posts_to_show=None, cache_expires=None) => posts_dict.

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I have not had much time lately to make posts, but one issue has risen to the top. At work we are hiring.

This is nothing new really, the jobs listing is 5 pages long for our Burlington Ma. office alone. What is different, is that the group I work in is hiring. That would be the MREC (Modular Recognizer) Group, which does the development on the core speech recognition engine for a multitude of product lines, including Dragon Naturally Speaking, Mobile Solutions, and Medical Transcription Services to name just three. Yes I know the ‘demos’ suck, you can search youtube and find better examples of the products.

The Core MREC team is has always been a small core group of less than 10 engineers working with research and the product groups. Speech experience is not a requirement (and is actually the exception) for our group. We work with research to develop new features and productize new algorithms. The work is primarily C++ on windows and linux. The code base is the cleanest one I have ever worked on (and I have worked on over three dozen in a number of fields). The code is not old either, as we are continually rewriting parts of the engine, removing obsolete features, and adding in new ones; that is where the ‘M’ in MREC comes into play. Python experience is a big plus. The primary research framework is all python and the core engine is instrumented in python.

If this sounds interesting to you, send in your resume, either via the official nuance form, or by e-mailing me (doug at this site). You can also ask questions in comments to this post.

This post was dictated directly into wordpress using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.