I feel like a sub-editor just struggling really hard to avoid punny headlines like “A Unique Experience” and “5 Unique Solutions” and so on… because last night’s challenge was to recreate the Unix “uniq” command in Python. In fact, this was chosen only after a tie in the first round of voting giving us a top 4 rather than a top 3 and a triple-tie for second place in the second round, although with one clear winner. (Otherwise I was going to have to move onto a Single Transferrable Vote round).

It was nice to see quite a few new faces, 6 or so first-timers and several who haven’t been for a while or who have been only once or twice. Plus, of course, the old familiar faces. Fry IT continue to host us generously, including ordering artisan pizzas with enormous slices. And O’Reilly came across as always with a book for the giveaway at the end.

Most teams went for a fairly straight solution, one of them managing to carry a TDD approach pretty much throughout. One team had grander ambitions for field selection and datatype conversion, but their solution ended up on two different machines with not enough time to merge properly. I was a little surprised that no-one used itertools groupby, which is pretty much advertised as a drop-in for uniq.

You can see a few photos retweeted at the @ldnpydojo account. Back again in January, probably on the second Thursday. But watch the python-uk mailing list and @ldnpydojo for announcements.