SA Python hacking grows with gaming activities

“One of the reasons I like playing with Python is that every structure is where it needs to be,” Python developer Simon Cross said at the monthly hacking event held at the 88mph offices this week.

Cross was pleased to see a bigger turnout compared to the previous session, with an almost evenly divided group of developers and newcomers to the programming world as well as African Institute for Mathematical Students (AIMS) scholars.

“Three tutorial attendees wrote their own anagram game,” Cross said.

Different from the previous session, which mainly revolved around assisting Python hackers according to individual agendas, this hackathon included a number of code guessing games.

After a basic briefing tutorial in the Python console comprising of number addition character strings, the writing of games began which moved into writing a simple guessing game.

Cross told HumanIPO: “Initially the implementation of the game was very simple.

“It chose a random number and printed a message asking the user to guess it. But we slowly improved it by introducing new programming concepts and adding new features. The game we ended up with is on the Cape Town Python Users Group (CTPUG) wiki.”

Another group, led by developer Maciej Fijałkowski and cffi expert Jeremy Thurgood, made “significant progress” by working on a Python module for wrapping the SQLite database.

SQLite is a database library written in C, another programming language, while cffi allows access to such libraries from Python. 

Cross uploaded three of the attendees’ written anagram solving games, of which two were complete newcomers, on the Python wiki.

More advanced users Neil Muller and David Sharpe worked on improving a Sudoku solver written by Sharpe, while Mike Jones linked Google Talk to Twitter using Vumi.

HumanIPO reported on the first Python hacking session ran by Cross last month, marking the start of the software developer’s growth vision of the Python hacking community in South Africa.