Hi! This is all new to me, so I'm apprehensive and excited about the 
sprinting experience. I'll spare the first-date analogies.

I've known the basics of python for years, and only in the past few 
months really focused my understanding of it. I like it... even more 
than I did before.

I'm completely new to Zope, and the first few chapters of Philipp's book 
have been extremely interesting. I'm loving this already and I'm only 
just getting into the meat of the book.

I'm seeing this sprint thing as a chance to connect a bit with the Zope 
community, especially the folks at TriZPUG, get my hands very very dirty 
(Zope-wise) and of course, eat some awesome BBQ... I'll check with my 
manager, who will be joining us at Camp 5, and see if there's anything 
that he might want me to bring up or focus on during the sprint, but I'm 
basically opening myself up to the whims of the group... My interests 
are vast, and anything that involves getting to know Zope better is 
right up my alley.

I should introduce myself a bit more personally: I work at the Carolina 
Population Center here at UNC. I'm a web developer, been such for close 
to 10 years. I primarily work in PHP (don't laugh) and Perl (it's 
strictly a working relationship, I swear). CPC is moving off of a 
perl-based CMS called WebGUI to Plone. We do a lot of one-off 
applications in PHP that integrate with WebGUI for authentication and 
authorization, look and feel, etc. I'm planning to steer the development 
of those apps away from PHP in the future and to python, most likely 
using Zope as an application framework.

I'll be on the #trizpug IRC channel throughout the next week (I'm in 
there right now!).

I live up the street from the Barbecue Joint, and can attest to it's 
awesomeness. Rachael Ray did not do it justice.

JJ

whit wrote:
> hey guys,
> count down to the start here!
>
> just checked the subscriptions to the bbq-sprint list and it looks likes 
> only about half of the folks coming to the sprint have joined the list 
> and I've gotten little or no feedback about what sort of things people 
> are interested in working on or learning. so....
>
> please join the list:
>
> http://www.openplans.org/projects/bbq-sprint/lists/bbq-sprint
>
> and if have joined send an email introducing yourself and what you are 
> interested in taking home from this sprint. 
>
> In other new related to topics, Michel Pelletier has expressed an 
> interest in expanding some work he's done with python and Xapian(a 
> industrial strength indexing system similar to lucene) out into either a 
> zope integration or a full REST searching service.   This would be a 
> great way to learn about xapian(http://www.xapian.org/)  and how to 
> extend searching for zope and plone.
>
> -w
>
>   


-- 
Josh Johnson
Application Engineer, Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming, feedback is the treatment." - Kent Beck