Via Richard who got it from Tarek...

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

I haven't been using it much lately, but looking back the library I think I was most excited about was bottle a Python micro-framework for building web applications. The thing I like is that it's extremely small, just a single file. For simple things that I might have used a CGI for in the past, bottle is great.

As far as the thing that I use the most on a day-to-day basis, that would probably be cony. Cony is a personal URL-bar command-line, so you can write custom shortcuts to different locations. For example, I have shortcuts like "backup [HOSTNAME]" which searches for the host and takes me to the page on the backup server, or "nagios [CUSTOMER]" which takes me to their nagios page.

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

Via a recent code retreat (written about previously), I really got into test driven development. Which is great, because our system administration work I like to call "test driven system administration", via Nagios, so it's very comfortable to me. But I hadn't had time to really get comfortable with testing my code until I got this opportunity at code retreat.

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

That's a tough one, because I've mostly done a lot of small contributions rather than any large ones other than ones I maintain. So probably the python memcache module or vPostMaster would be at the top. Until, that is, we release the source to our backup system, which I spent a lot of time contributing to this year. Aside: We've finally settled on a name for it: Network Attached Backup.

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

I don't really follow any Python blogs... Most of my news comes from my friends feeds in facebook or plus. But the number one website I read in 2011 is almost certainly the library documentation. :-)

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

I don't really set out goals for what to learn, certainly not a year in advance, because things change too fast. In general I want to continue to improve my business chops.

I'm expecting that in 2012 I'll be able to start programming seriously in Python 3.

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

I'd love to have something that did a really good job of bringing together and making searchable all the data that comes at me. Thunderbird can often be pretty good for e-mail, but sometimes it seems like it just misses huge parts of my correspondence for reasons I don't fully understand. But I'd also like web pages I visit in there, photographs, and more...

Thanks Tarek and Richard! So what are your answers?
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