DEV Community: Ngazetungue Muheue

My experience at PyCon UK 2018

Ngazetungue Muheue — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 07:41:52 +0000

After meeting Daniele Procida, Vincent Knight, Nikoleta .E. Glynatsi Loek Van Gent, and others at our first Python Conference in 2015, I had a great time chatting with them about their experience of different PyCon around the world. I decided to expand the borders of my experience by participating in an international conference. I submitted my talk to PyCon UK 2018, and it was accepted. Everything went smoothly after the acceptance, I just needed to take my laptop and go to the airport since Namibians don’t need VISA when visiting the UK.

On the 12th of September, I traveled to Wales to attend PyCon UK from the 15th to the 19th of September.

I reached Hosea Kutako International Airport 30 minutes before the scheduled flight time. I had to complete some customs and other formalities quickly before going to the plane. My plane was ready for flight. It was a very big KLM, a Dutch airline with luxurious seats. It looked so royal, impressive, and wonderful. Likewise, it was the first time that I had to touch and sit on an aeroplane. I was really excited and full of many expectations. I had got a window seat, which gave me a fine view of the outside world. It was so cool as we were taking off. I had an amazing time in the sky, enjoying the first flight of my life.

Between the clouds

Pythonista landed in Cardiff

Upon arrival at Cardiff Airport, I met with Daniele Procida (PyCon UK director) and an active member of the international PyCon community) who drove me to the city. I was staying at the Mrs. Potts Hostel at St Mary Street, Cardiff not far from Cardiff Market which gave me the opportunity to explore the city center. Evening time, we went to a local restaurant where we had a delicious meal at an Italian restaurant closer to my hostel. Thanks, Daniele and others for the wonderful gesture.

At City Hall (Conference Venue)

The annual PyCon UK took place in Cardiff’s City Hall from Saturday the 15th to Wednesday the 19th of September 2018. The conference included five days of talks, workshops, and collaboration. My friend Nikoleta Glynatsi was one of the four keynote speakers and I had the opportunity to attend her talk. Also, I met Tania Allard who received the John Pinner Award (a UK Python Association community award) this year. Both Tania and Nikoleta coached at the Django Girls UK workshop, where a total of 53 women were introduced to programming.

There were different amazing talks that I enjoyed listening to, and I attended some robotics workshop that was so amazing too. The conference is a great place to meet new people and become a friend.
I had the pleasure of meeting some amazing participants and speakers like Adam Johnson, James King, Ben Nuttall, Vincent Knight,Mark Smith and Ania Kapuścińska.

Day of my talk

The day of my talk finally came. I was a bit nervous because I wanted to be perfect. My talk was about “What Python means in Namibia”. Twenty minutes before my talk, I had a big fight with my laptop that was freezing and restarting all the time. The PC disappointed me in front of everyone. I had gone from one corner to corner waiting for the laptop to cool down. The feelings of anxiety, stress, and worry at this moment were actually beyond my levels and that’s a day I almost forgot my English that I came with. Imagine talking to Native English speakers with stress, not easy at all. Fortunately, Daniele came to my rescue and everything got sorted a few minutes before the presentation and the talk went better than initially planned. After the talk, everyone congratulated me, and we exchanged emails. I moved to Linux, I don’t want further disappointment with Windows OS.

The Beautiful Cardiff city

Outside the conference, I had great opportunities to see the city. I walked around the city to see its architecture. There are a lot of parks, shops, bars, cafés, and beautiful castles all around. Cardiff is small, so it’s easy to get around quickly. I had observed there aren’t that many big roads going through the center of town, so it was easy for me to walk around from one shopping mall to another. The food was nice, I never experience any problem with food in Cardiff, the only thing that was strange to me was a strong COFFEE without Sugar. I didn’t understand why they were drinking coffee without sugar. In Namibia, we use sugar in coffee.

Cardiff has pretty good air quality and not much pollution and the center of town was cleaned and that was my first judgment of Cardiff city since I came from one of the cleanest cities in Africa (Windhoek). I have had a lot of memorable times in my life, but this was probably one of the most memorable times in my life.

To conclude, the experience was amazing, and I can’t wait to visit Cardiff again. Hopefully, I would get the opportunity to visit other cities in Wales and many other tourist attractions that missed out on during this trip.

Bye Cardiff

Leading Namibia's Community of Python Developers

Ngazetungue Muheue — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 13:50:12 +0000

In Africa, the Python community consists of hundreds of passionate developers scattered across the continent. In Namibia’s capital city Windhoek, there is a small but vibrant Python community spearheaded by The Python Software Community of Namibia or PyNam for short. This week Built in Africa spotlight was on me. Find full article here https://www.builtinafrica.io/blog-post/ngazetungue-muheue-python-namibia

After 2020 Python Software Foundation Board of Directors Election .

Ngazetungue Muheue — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:39:47 +0000

Here we Go!!!.

Before i start let me use this opportunity to give thanks to Ewa Jodlowska and the entire PSF team for the election and leadership skills during the dark cloud of COVID-19.

Grown up in the hot desert and mountainous area of Kunene Region in Namibia. Hanging with elephants and other wild animals everyday is my day to day activity when i am at the village.

This year, the Python Software Foundation had four seats going vacant with directors fulfilling their term. After many years of working with Python community in Namibia and around the globe, I decided to run for a seat.

I didn't know one day I would be running for the high position in the world of tech. 
I had a privilege to contest with well-known people in Python community this year.

The results didn’t go well on my side, and I accepted as it is. I received the bunch of email from people around the world encouraging me not to give up since I was closer. Some went to extend of calling me on my mobile phone. A wounded lion never gives up, but always trying its best to protect the pride. I have a long journey with our community. I see a defeat as a ladder to the brighter future. I will keep fighting for the Python community day and night. Cheer to you all.

The community i serve.

I have been an active volunteer in the Python community for several years, advocating for usage of Python in Namibia and around the globe.

Read the full nomination statement here

Check out the responsibilities of a director of the PSF here.

Duties & Responsibilities of PSF Directors
Life as a Python Software Foundation Director

The results

It was that time where we separate sheeps from goats, the dark hour came and the election results was announced, I was in 8th place out of 26 nominees with 201 votes and the highest got 263 votes. Four board seats were available for grab. 1,151 people were eligible to vote, while those that actually voted were 462 persons.

The elected top four nominees was:

Nina Zakharenko with 263 votes
Dustin Ingram with 249 votes
Jeff Triplett with 240 votes
Thomas Wouters with 237 votes

Congratulations !!! Congratulations !!! Omake - means hands in my home language (One way of appreciating someone after the achievement). Cheer to everyone who got elected.
See full results here

PSF Board Election Reform

The result margins was narrow, therefore the Python Software Foundation (PSF) staff, incoming directors, existing directors, and community have already taken time to discuss the participation and representation of our global community on the PSF Board of Directors. Checkout Lorena Mesa from the PSF thread: here maybe you'll be interested in the thread, or you want to share your thought with the community.

Lastly let’s hold hands and support the upcoming directors as one community. I know there have been many thoughts & emotions about the recent election but that shouldn't divert us away from the community we lead.

Thank you all.

How i changed my game to become a Developer.

Ngazetungue Muheue — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 02:20:42 +0000

Watching only YouTube tutorials almost cost me opportunity to become a developer. I spent most of my time sitting behind the computer watching video tutorials trying to get a better understanding of the programming language especially Python but time was my biggest enemy. I wasted one year trying to understand Django without coding much.
I wouldn’t advise beginners to watch only online tutorials without creating projects and following official documentation of any language or framework. Better to use both at the same time.

What help me?

I started focusing on practicing more or coding then watching tutorials on YouTube.
I stop copying codes I found online, I make sure I understand before i do so.
Documentation always my good friend, highly recommend.
I started creating simple projects, to make my idea into reality.
I started reading other people blogs, articles.
Teaching and sharing my programming skills with other helps me.
I started using github, this helps to clean up my codes.
I started participating on python/ django community.
I started giving talks at PyCon, meetup and other conference. Been in UK, Ghana and etc.
I value my time, time is money. No more gaming unless if I am on vacation.

Conclusion

Practicing helps me to become a developer. Some video on YouTube are misleading. If I get stuck, I don’t give up. Instead, I search for help online. We have huge community, there are people who are willing to help other.

Thank you Adam Johnson !!

Ngazetungue Muheue — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 01:09:39 +0000

That time of the year 🙋‍♂️

I'm only left with few months to finish the Bsc of Computer Science (Honours) degree AND I'm working on my final year project using Django/Python.

Hey Man !!!

I don't know how to reward you Adam but the piece of resources you shared with me through blogs, PyCon talks, chatting on WhatsApp and email changed my life. Hopefully, at the end of the year, I will obtain my second Computer Science qualification at the University Of Namibia.Thank you, you played a role in my journey.

Y'All

If you are an upcoming or aspiring web developer or you want some cool stuff about Django and Python i recommend to visit Adam Johnson website for blog post that cover plenty of topics.
Find him here

Who is Adam?

✍️ I'm an author and "solo consultant" working with Ansible, AWS,
 Django, and Python.
🦄 I'm a member of the Django project Technical Board (2.2, 3.0, and 3.1 release cycles), 
and a co-organizer of the The London Django Meetup.

New Book: “Speed Up Your Django Tests”

Released on the 18th May, my new book has lots of advice to 
make your Django project's tests faster.

We first met in Cardiff at PyCon UK 2018 and again in Namibia for our PyCon.
He's always behind my back, pushing me, advising me.
He's one of the special people in my life.
I like his way of doing things, writing cool stuffs and always on point.

Thanks Adam

Python script in Virtual environment – beginners guide.

Ngazetungue Muheue — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 14:41:05 +0000

During my Django and Python tutorials, some of the participants asked me to write an article about the topic at hand since they had problems with connection during the presentation.

What do i have and What Is a Virtual Environment?

In this article, i’ll be taking you through the simple example of running python script in the virtual environment. Virtual environments help us to create and manage our project in the separate environments from the default location. In most Linux environments, Python is installed under /usr/local , and that’s where you would find the libraries.The main purpose of Python virtual environments is to create an isolated environment for Python projects. This means that each project can have its own dependencies, regardless of what dependencies every other project has. In our example, we’d create a virtual environment and then run our file inside the environment. We're using Python 3 in our example.

Let's get started

You’ll need to install the virtualenv tool with pip if you’re not using Python 3. In our case we're using Python 3, then we don't need to install since we already have the venv module from the standard library installed. But below is a simple command we could use should we have different version.

$ pip install virtualenv

Let's make a new directory to work with. Let me assume that you want to create your new directory on your desktop and name it random-virtual-environments. Below i created a directory called random-virtual-environments and navigate into it using cd command. Simple command right.

$ mkdir random-virtual-environments && cd random-virtual-environments

Let's create a new virtual environment inside the directory we created above. randomenv is a name of our environment. In this case we're using python3.

$ python3 -m venv randomenv

After creating the environment you should see the following files below.

bin  include  lib  lib64 pyvenv.cfg

Now it is time to activate our environment (randomenv) so that we can be able to use the packages in isolation, you need to do this, just run the following command:

$ source randomenv/bin/activate

Let's create our file that we want to run inside the environment we have created.

$ touch number.py

After creating our file we could see our file is added to our directory.

bin  include  lib  lib64  number.py  pyvenv.cfg

Open the file by typing the following command on your terminal. Let me assume you know how to use vim.

$ vim number.py

After opening the file, write the codes below on the file.

# This program displays ten random
# numbers in the range of 1 through 50.

import random

def randomNumber():
      for count in range ( 10 ) :
# Get a random number.
            number = random.randint(1, 50)
# Display the number.
            print (number)
# Call the randomNumber function
randomNumber()

Close the file by pressing Esc button on your keyboard and write wq to save the file. Run below command to run the file.

$ python number.py

Below is the output after running the file. Bear in mind that we're expecting random number and your output might be different from the one shown below.

Conclusion

I hope you get a picture of how you would use virtual environment to run your python script or project. Bear in mind that this article meant for beginners who don’t know what virtual environment is or who never use it before. We have a huge Python community, you can always ask around if you have any doubt in whatever you’re doing. As you progress as a developer, be sure to take time to learn how to use different tools to your advantage for example Docker that’s work almost the same as virtual environment. In future I am planning to cover Docker so that we can compare the two.