Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools

This is a 3-hour tutorial I gave at PyCon 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

It discusses:

• why novice web devs tend to get overwhelmed by fancy frameworks
• why rapid web prototyping is important, even for experienced devs
• what lightweight tools are available in the web ecosystem (jQuery, Bootstrap)
• what complementary Python tools are available (Jinja2, Flask)
• how to put these pieces together to build web apps quickly
• a theory of "inside out" programming, starting with the UI and moving to the backend

View the slides online

Slides can be viewed in compiled form at:

http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/rapid-web-slides/

Note that the slides can be controlled as follows:

• Advance forward / back with the forward and back keys
• Press c to get the "controls", which also allows you to skip slides and switch to outline mode
• Outline mode includes some notes not included in the slidedeck, and also allows you to easily copy/paste examples into your own interpreter

I suggest you run through the slides in slide mode, and then review them in outline mode, doing examples from your own interpreter. That's how I tended to do things when I physically gave the presentation. Of course, you can also contact me on Twitter at @amontalenti if you want to see if I might be giving the talk nearby you sometime soon :-)

How this was built

Using Python, of course. It's turtles all the way down.

I wrote the slides using reST, and specifically Docutils support for S5 export. Scripts are included to compile the presentation from the index.rst file and also to allow development of new slides with live recompilation using pyinotify (Linux systems only). See build.sh and monitor.sh for more information. If you have prince installed, you can also export these slides as a PDF using slides.sh.