Our Python "Esperanto Project"

Much of the time, my work environment is not pretty. It's not the elegant situations that are spelled out in books or in "best practices" guides. Often, there are things that would look convoluted to outsiders, that seem like strange and quirky paths to get to places and to accomplish tasks that seem, well, not at all ideal. Why do we use them? Because it works. More to the point it has worked for years, and the thought of ripping out everything and starting anew would be a tremendous loss.

I have been discussing with my daughter ways that we could get more involved in and create an environment that we can both use, both agree on, and both work in and understand what each other is doing. In other words, we both decided we would put together our own "Esperanto Project" to help each other learn interesting tools, try out various frameworks and have an excuse to apply the ideas we are soaking up here and there and put them into an environment we can both work with.

Currently, our project resides on a Trusty Tahr build of Ubuntu Linux. The agreed to language for what we are going to do is Python, mainly because my daughter and I are both roughly skilled at an equal level (somewhere between novices and advanced beginners). As a web framework, we are using Django, because, well, Python. Selenium WebDriver is installed, with the idea that test scripts will be written in, you guessed it, Python. For my own fun, I am adding JMeter, Kali Linux and a few other tools to practice testing scenarios and particularly to exercise APIs, utilizing Python as the scripting engine. Finally, we are using PyDev as a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE because, hey, why not ;)?

One of the reasons I want to do this is that I want to be able to not just play with tools, but also have a way to keep the things I learn and find in an environment that can follow me from place to place. Each company uses their own set of tools and languages, and it's likely that I will not be using Python at different jobs. That's OK, since the goal is to not necessarily do a direct port of what I do from one company to the next, but instead, get to a point where I am able to develop and test an environment with a broad range of tools and become more familiar with all the possibilities, while also teaching my daughter how these tools are used. In turn, I'm hoping she will be able to teach me a thing or two later on down the road.

I joked with Kristoffer Nord yesterday via Twitter that his "Python for Testers" course would perhaps be an ideal jump start to this goal of ours. I'm looking at how I can make this into something interesting going forward, and I'd like to make regular updates to it and say where we are in the process. More to the point, I'd like to use it as a chance to ask for help here and there from the broader community, specifically the Pythonistas out there, because our goal is to use Python as the unifier of all the tools we pick, wherever we can.

It may work well, it may work terribly, but we won't know until we try :).