PET - Python Entre Todos

In early June 2010 a mail appeared in the PyAr mailing list about how it would be nice to do a magazine about Python, from the community aimed at the community. A free project, a space where knowledge could be shared, a path of honour and sacrifice, communing with the spirit of our language, Python.

How was this magazine organized?

Many ideas popped, and one of the first was the name... faced with the adversity of choosing only one of many options:

• PyAr Exposed
• PET / Python Entre Todos
• The Greatest Pythonst Magazinest of the Worlds
• Lampalagua / Our national python ;)

After tussles, trials, tribulations, alliances and conference calls, finally PET was chosen as the healthiest neutral and effective choice.

Then teams were formed... we needed articles to be produced, we needed to turn them into digital formats for consumers, so we formed two entities:

• AAASF - Association for Anonymous Articulator Secessionists (Federated). Set or class whose members/methods can write articles about Python.
• UNIEIE - UNIted Entity of Immutable Editors (read-only mode for a friend). Group dedicated to organizing the articles and crafting a magazine using them.

First the UNIEIE made a call for contributors who wanted to be in the first issue. With those who answered, a list of possible writers was made. Then we advanced on extraordinarily complex strategies aimed at generating the magazine, involving authorities in publishing, design, programming, thaumaturgy, alchemy and Sanskrit.

The result was adherence to KISS. We set a deadline, hoped it was not literal and we would survive it, set a date in gregorian and started building. Several centuries later we were still toiling at it and sent email to the writers, and after extensive filtering (we only accepted articles from those who answered our emails!) a group was formed who dedicated themselves to the mission of filling the magazine with something.

The list of members was delivered to our monitoring/tracking division, which pestered them about dates, and we even started calling them names, like "Super Star". As we were receiving articles we stored them in a secret Swiss bunker (a cheap VPS) protected by the latest innovations in security (a .htaccess file).

On July 25th, the secret committee started operation final countdown (see http://is.gd/e9pnq) aiming to give birth to this community magazine on early August to this communal magazine. But we were not happy with making a magazine just for the spanish speaking pythonista.

We are nothing if not ambitious. So we decided to do it all over again, but backwards and in high heels like Ginger Rogers, and publish it in english, too, in a month. The name became PET: English Translation because of our unhealthy appreciation of recursive acronyms.

So here we are, with this first number, the beginning and the end, genesis and antithesis of KeyError and IndexError.

Ladies and gentlemen, here we are, sit down, raise the curtains, enjoy our first shot at making a Python magazine.

reSt version