The final teardown

After writing so many teardowns in tests for software projects for customers, open source projects and in house software, it is now time for the gocept folks to finally work on a last teardown of the company itself. After 23 years of existence gocept will close the doors and stop operating business at 2023-11-30. The developers found a new home at the wonderful company Minddistrict. There we will work in a product team and build software to empower people to take care of their mental well-being.

Customers

We want to thank all our customers for their trust in us over the years and for the often multi year long collaboration. Sometimes gocept was a bit on the bleeding edge of technology and often that was shining through in the development work. But we did our best to provide the individual software applications to the needs of our customers.

Open Source Software

It was in the very essence of gocept to work with open source software. The company grew with Zope and contributed to the Zope ecosystem. Out of this relationship many events were supported like DZUG-Tagung, a EuroPython Conference and in particular in the last years a round of Zope sprint to ensure compatibility and stability in the Python 3 wonderland. We are very happy, that Minddistrict also builds its core product on zope.* packages and that we can further contribute to the open source world.

Most of the gocept.* packages on https://github.com/gocept have been archived or given to the people and companies, that still use them. In case you need to work with them, please contact mail@gocept.com or the respective maintainers on PyPI. We will be able to unarchive the package and if necessary transfer the release rights.

gocept folks

Some parts of gocept already left the company in 2014 and formed https://flyingcircus.io/. They are more successful than ever providing a very good and individual hosting and, more important, operation solutions for bigger applications and complex setups. They took over the dedication to software and to new technology, and they are good colleagues to work with.

The remaining 4 developers at gocept join the Minddistrict company and will work there in a bigger team to empower people to take care of their mental well-being in the Netherlands, in Germany and the DACH-region. We will still keep an office in Halle, so there might be a chance to stop by.

The last Christian of gocept (in a row of many) will continue his management work within the Saltlabs and the Koffij – with the mission to develop modern, contemporary and flexible workplaces in Halle and build communities that motivate and offer pleasant working environments.

gocept.cleanup()

In case you need anything or want to reach us, please find us on GitHub (or the place to be in the future) or write an email to mail@gocept.com.

Ready, set, sprint: Earl Zope invites again

Sprint with Earl Zope at September, 21st and 22nd of 2023.

Earl Zope is already a long time inhabitant of the Python 3 wonderland. Living here for some years with the help of his friends, he sometimes looks back to the “good old times” but mostly enjoys his current live with all its surprises and unexpected turns.

Gocept invites you to sprint for Earl Zope’s future well-being: 21st till 22nd of September 2023 in the SaltLabs of Halle, Germany. Participants of the sprint are also invited to join the gocept-23 party at 23rd of September 2023.

This sprint will the last one hosted by gocept as the company will go new ways by the end of the year. To join please register via meetup.com. (After registering for the sprint, you’ll get the party invitation.)

Sprint with Earl Zope in April of 2022

Sprint with Earl Zope at April, 13th 2022 towards Python 3.11 compatibility.

Earl Zope – once in a while – needs some help to feel well again in the ever changing Python 3 wonderland.

Please join a one-day-sprint at April, 13th 2022 organized by gocept to make Earl Zope more comfortable with the current Python 3.10 and the upcoming Python 3.11.

Especially the new upcoming version has some bitter surprises for Earl Zope: The C-code of some of his dependencies will no longer compile without modifications. An example dependency is already ported, so it should be possible to port other ones by the monkey-see-monkey-do principle.

The sprint will be a pure online-sprint. If you want to join please register via meetup.com.

Zope April Sprint 2021 report

Earl Zope invited to a sprint and nearly 10 people were joining to work on several aspects in Earl Zope’s ecosystem:

  • fix the ZEO tests on Python 3.8+
  • add a “delete all” button for Products.BTreeFolder2
  • fix DeprecationWarnings in Products.CMFCore and zope.sqlalchemy
  • migrate CI system of some packages from TravisCI to GitHub Actions
  • document the GitHub teams of the zopefoundation organization
  • …

By the end of the day the sprinters were joined by Paul Everitt and Jim Fulton to hear some stories of the former glory of Earl Zope and to discuss the current status and possibilities.

Earl Zope thanks all the people who joined the sprint and made it possible that he can feel a bit more comfortable in the Python 3 wonderland.

There is another one-day-sprint upcoming at Friday, 2nd of July 2021. Feel free to join via meetup.com. Earl Zope is looking forward to meet you.

Earl Zope invites to sprint

Two Zope sprints at 23rd of April and
2nd of July 2021.

Already nearly two years went by after Earl Zope got his permanent permit to live in the Python 3 wonderland. He enjoys his new life, the many new friends he made and the old ones who also moved to the Python 3 wonderland. Life could be so happy and so easy but there are always some disruptions appearing and shadows of the past showing up:

  • the automatic verification for Earl Zope and all of his staff broke – aka the continuous integration system for Zope and its dependencies has to be changed from TravisCI to GitHub Actions
  • the laws, regulations and instructions have to be adapted to the Python 3 wonderland standards – aka still large parts of the documentation are outdated: they are describing Zope 2, and should get an update to match Zope 5
  • Python 3 wonderland rapidly changes and develops: each year there will be changes Earl Zope has to handle – aka Python 3.10 is in its late alpha versions now and it is already known that there are changes in Zope’s dependencies necessary to support that new version

So Earl Zope kindly asks for help with this troubles.– Or should he call them challenges? He invites to a two short sprints:

Both sprints will be remote-only due to the unclear pandemic situation. On the other hand it allows participants to save time and money otherwise needed for travel.

To participate, please sign up using Meetup: The dates above are links to the Meetup events.

Earl Zope looks forward to these days and thanks in advance everyone who will be contributing to the success.

Presentation: We have nearly one million lines of Python 2 code in production — and now?

Still running Python 2 code in production is like steering a ship without radar in thick fog: You don’t know, which obstacle you will hit next. But there are ways to see the sun again – even for large code bases. This presentation contains a discussion of the possible ways and a success story.

I have been giving the presentation at

  • Python Web Conference 2020 and
  • EuroPython 2020.

If you did not manage to see the presentation at one of these conferences, you will find now:

Maybe this helps you with your next migration project to the Python 3 wonderland. If you have questions – we are here to help with such migration projects.

Announcing Zope Autumn Sprint 2020

Earl Zope was very delighted that in May 2020 a few of his principal supporters gathered around the virtual campfire due to the pandemic situation and improve the welfare in Python 3 Wonderland. The supporters agreed at this very campfire to meet again in 2020 to crown the newly Earl Zope V. Hope is put into the upcoming relationship between Earl Zope V. and Prince Plone VI., that those two will bring a prosperous future for their respective countries.

As the finial release of Zope 5 was scheduled roughly for September 2020 here, we consulted the time schedule at gocept and found the 28th of September to be a good date. As the pandemic situation is still around we propose another remote sprint. As it was discussed earlier, a remote sprint has less organizational overhead, so even one day is a valid option and should help us with the release process.

Goals

The main goal is to release Zope 5 final, so that Plone 6 can be released later this year with this version of Zope. There is a project on Github with the relevant tickets. In case you want to work already on some of those tickets, feel free to contribute beforehand, or add further ideas to the list.

In addition to this big goal the unification of the testing environment is always an open task.

Organisation

In May, we lit our campfires at slack and zoom. To keep up with this good, low-barrier solution, we request you to join via Meetup, so we can prepare the invitation on time.

We have nearly one million lines of Python 2 code in production – and now?

How to successfully migrate a Python 2 project to Python 3.

Still running Python 2 code in production is like steering a ship without radar in thick fog: You don’t know, which obstacle you will hit next. But there are ways to see the sun again even for large code bases.

I am Michael Howitz and I am going to present a talk at Python Web Conf 2020 on this topic.

In this talk I will show possible approaches for a Python 3 migration of existing Python code running on Python 2.7. I will evaluate which of these approaches seems suitable for a large code base and which principles should be paid attention to to increase the probability of a successful migration project.

I am going use union.cms (a content management system used by German trade unions) to show the story of a successful migration of a project with nearly one million lines of Python code. The story will include the obstacles we encountered and what we learned on the way.

I believe that most of the discussed ideas in the talk and experience can also be used unchanged in smaller projects as the presented principles are very much the same.

The talk is scheduled at 1:00 – 1:45 pm ET (UTC -4h) on Friday, June 19th. (That’s 7:00 pm in MEST (UTC+2)).

To see the talk live on your device, join Python Web Conf 2020 now.

Zope May sprint goes remote

Earl Zope was inviting to the Zope May sprint, from 13th till 15th of May, 2020. He was hoping for many volunteers to come. Due to restrictions to prevent spreading of COVID-19 (Corona) this sprint is going to be remote-only. – By now all of the organizers and their families are fine, so you do not have to worry about us.

This remote-only sprint will be an experiment. We already gathered some experience with remote work, communication and planning. But we neither participated at nor organized a remote-only sprint.

We will prepare channels for communication and collaboration for this sprint. Stay tuned for details. Earl Zope will appreciate your help.

As even a remote-only sprint needs preparation, please join via Meetup, so we are able to see, who we can count on to help Earl Zope in Python wonderland.

Zope May Sprint

Earl Zope has settled down for a good while in Python 3 wonderland. He made friends with the inhabitants and other immigrants. He enjoys his new live.

The sunset of his original homelands took place as predicted by the beginning of January 2020. As Earl Zope was well prepared this was no longer a frightening date for him.

But even living in Python 3 wonderland is not only joy and relaxing. The Python 3 wonderland changes in a more rapid speed than the Python 2 land ever had before: Each year a new policy has to be fulfilled (aka new Python version release). Additionally it is time to drop the last connections to the old Python 2 land to ease the transformation in Python 3 wonderland to make developers and consumers happy.

Earl Zope is grateful for all the help he already gained: There where several Zope 4 releases and a first Zope 5 alpha version was just released. Even though Earl Zope still needs your help to:

  • prepare dependencies to ease transition to new Python versions (aka make repositories more uniform to ease updating to new Python versions.)
  • drop Python 2 support in repositories of dependencies
  • support and test with newer Python 3 versions (aka current 3.9 alpha)
  • improve and update the documentation

You are invited to the “Zope May sprint” located in Halle/Saale, 🇩🇪 from 13th till 15th of May 2020 hosted by gocept. In order to coordinate the participation for this sprint, we ask you to join us on Meetup. We can then coordinate the catering and requirements for space.

Update: This sprint will be held als a remote-only sprint. Details see Zope May sprint goes remote.