The London Python Dojo was hosted yesterday by Hired, an unashamedly promotional move by the job search marketplace firm. Their offices are in Southwark, not far from Borough or London Bridge, a welcome change from the Old Street area where we’re often hosted.

After the usual beer & pizza, kindly provided by our hosts, we had a fairly quick round of voting which ended up with most people wanting to try out my Network Zero package, advertised and just pipped to the post at the previous Dojo. I gave a quick demo and explanation, pointed to the github repo and the readthedocs page and let people loose.

Amusingly, our hosts — not being a tech startup which most of our hosts are — didn’t really have an easy way for guests to access WiFi. They did offer us an ethernet cable. So, in a network-centred Dojo, we had a combination of link-local connections, tethered phones, and a wired internet connection shared via a OS/X hotspot. Apart from anything else, it really showed up some of the shortcomings of the NetworkZero approach, especially in the area of the UDP broadcasts supporting the advertise/discover mechanism.

Fortunately, everyone got something working after a bit of experimentation and several people provided PRs, raised issues, or just told me of difficulties they were having. Thanks especially to Sandy for bringing his undoubted networking expertise to bear on the innards of the project.

I had held off uploading anything to PyPI until after this event in case any obvious instability or major flaw were to show up. But this caused some surprise when people couldn’t simply pip install networkzero. (Fortunately it’s very easy to clone the repo and pip install -e .). I’ll be reviewing the issues & PRs and then, hopefully, publishing to PyPI.

I now want to put the code in front of teachers to get their feedback on its usefulness and usability.

Thanks, of course, to our hosts — Hired — and to O’Reilly who continue to support us with a book to give away at the end of the Dojo.