The deployment of OpenStack is a complex task. The most important task at the beginning is to figure out what YOU (or the company you are working for) want to implement using OpenStack as a tool to provide infrastructure resources in a data center. Will the Openstack based cloud be used by your internal customers (the tenants) using a Web or CLI based API or is the Openstack cloud not seen by the tenants. In the last case, the cloud is only used by the IT department to make their working life more easy. But the “easy” has a high price – the added complexity.

[Eric T] wrote up his insanely-comprehensive home automation setup. What started out as a method to notify him when his dog barked grew into a whole-house, Arduino-powered sensor extravaganza. We’ve previously looked at two different steps from this mammoth article. One automated his dog, the other focused on the Wink hub to bridge with commercial hardware like smart lightbulbs. Now let’s look at the project as a whole.

TL;DR: Python is a (powerful) general purpose language in broad use, let's dive in and learn some control flow tips, standard library tricks, and common pitfalls.

1 Introduction

Python (and its libraries) are enormous. It is used for system automation, web applications, big data, analytics, and security software. This article aims to show off some lesser-known tricks to put you on the path to faster development, easier debugging, and general fun.

As with every language, the real resource you get once you learn it isn't a language-related superpower. It's the ability to use the idioms, libraries, and shared knowledge of the Python community.