Son and/or Daughter, we need to hack…
Some weeks ago, Chris Holdgraf and I said we wanted to do some hacking on pandas – really easy stuff that will make everyone’s life better. But, we didn’t get around to it!
Then, Will Stein came by and told us about this awesome IPython extension to do Sage’s convenience pre-parsing. Sure, it’s the kind of thing that will make some people cringe, but it goes some way towards complaints that python makes you type a lot of stuff.
All we need to do is open a repo with a name (which might be hard!), put that code in there, et voilà, we’ve got this crazy new extension for everyone. And we’ll need to factor out the other dependencies from Sage, but how hard can that be?
UPDATES: Total hijack by Thomas
So, instead of all that, Thomas got us to join in the fun with the first round of the Google Code Jam. It was great fun (for us anyway), and you can still go back and practice on previous contests (though it’s too late to join this year). There was much whiteboarding and coding about cookies and minesweeper.