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I'm Jim, one of the newest Sixies here at Six Feet Up. This past week, I got the opportunity to attend IndyPy. I'm a recent transplant to Indiana coming here from Florida. Since joining Six Feet Up, this has been the first community activity with a Python group that I've been able to attend. Six Feet Up employees have been actively participating in local, regional, international, and even online open source events often focusing around Python and Plone. I was glad to attend this event and was excited to find out many of the other members of Six Feet Up would also be attending.
Kurt, who is also new at Six Feet Up, also joined me, meeting new faces and hearing about new Python tips and tricks.

This month's session was presented by Steven Githens, an IndyPy Member, on "Grinder." Grinder is a load, capacity, functional, and stress testing tool to test an application or service. He gave a great overview of this tool including the GUI which allows you to run tests to see results from various servers running the Grinder daemons. He also showed some of the tests and setup involved to get Grinder going on your own project.

This was a very appropriate talk for me. I have spent much of my time in the last couple of months working with several load testing applications including Funkload, JMeter, and Apache's ab tool. Grinder is a similar tool. Using one of these types of tools to determine the stability of applications and services is extremely important for developers and system admins. Knowing the reality of how your site or application might be able to handle larger scales of visitors before the day it happens in real life is a much easier way to make sure you have caught bugs and issues that might arise. Tools such as Grinder provide developers the needed information and test scenarios to better plan for those scenarios.

Groups such as IndyPy are extremely useful for developers and all types of techies to introduce them to new tools, techniques, and ideas. If you're not in the Indianapolis area, find or start your own local Python group to get together with others also interested in Python. In my short time here at Six Feet Up, I have seen the amount of effort Six Feet Up and its employees invest getting involved with the open source community, our partners, and customers. So, if you're in the local Indianapolis area, come find us at the next IndyPy. We'd love to see you and chat. If you're not going to be around Indianapolis, look for us at the next Python, Plone, or Open Source event; there is a good chance we'll be there too.

To find out more about IndyPy and upcoming events, visit http://python.meetup.com/182/ or e-mail Calvin, the IndyPy coordinator.