Following Tarek Ziade's lead:

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2011?

   It's a toss-up between Pyramid and requests.

   For the admittedly small, specialized application that I've used Pyramid for, I like how the framework interface is largely confined to the __init__.py module. Outside of that I find myself just writing Python code to get stuff done and throwing in a few decorators here and there to link into the framework. I find the Pyramid docs to be really well organized, informative, and complete. They worked for me at the introductory level (though I did arrive with quite a bit of experience of other Python web frameworks) and continue to work as I dig deeper and do more advanced things.

   Requests has made my life so much better in several projects, whether its collecting data from well structured web services or scraping hydrometric data from a particularly annoying Government of Canada site.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2011?

   I got a lot better at writing simple, clean, uncoupled unit tests, inspired in large part by the Pyramid unit testing guidelines. I shifted from being a skeptic to a proponent of mocking thanks to the mock library. I was spurred in that by the need to refactor a test suite that had become way too slow to be useful.

   I also got a lot more proficient in JavaScript, using it for client-side stuff in web apps, database views for CouchDB, and a Firefox add-on.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2011? What did you do?

   CouchDBkit. I spent most of my time at the PyCon 2011 sprints adding the SetProperty and LazySet class to store Python sets as lists of unique elements in CouchDB. I also added some missing Python list methods to the LazyList class. It was a good learning experience in the realm of subclassing Python builtins. It was also cool to work sitting beside @benoitc (the CouchDBkit lead developer) in contrast to communicating electronically across 9 time zones.

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2011?

   The Planet Python feed, by far.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2012?

   • Message passing systems. I've got a Django project that needs to get some asynchronicity and I'm planning to explore Celery for that.
   • More message passing systems. I've got some devops issues around server synchronization and failover that I think I might be able to address with ZeroMQ.
   • Python 3. Because it's time! Most of the libraries that I use have already been ported, so the transition shouldn't be overwhelmingly difficult, and perhaps I can lend a hand porting some of the libraries that I need that haven't made the jump yet.

6. What are the top software, app or lib you wish someone would write in 2012?

   I wish there were more open source libraries and applications in the home automation realm. One of my first personal Python projects was a wrapper around heyu to make our house look lived in when we are away. It's still working okay after nearly 6 years, but the X10 hardware it interfaces with is getting rather long in the tooth. Sadly, newer home automation hardware and protocols seem to be mired in the muck of "vendor associations" that only pay lip service to openness.

Want to do your own list ? here’s how:

• copy-paste the questions and answer to them in your blog
• tweet it with the #2012pythonmeme hashtag