Following in Tyrek Ziade's footsteps:

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2009 ?

I hate to be so unoriginal... Django. I had been mostly using Zope 2/3 and Grok for web development (the latter is actually pretty cool).  But starting to work for PBS I got my first taste of Django and I was able to really completely dive in. Incredibly happy with it, I really appreciate all of the core functionality as well as a lot of contrib (not so much comments though, seriously what happened there?) and I feel like I can just get up and running much more quickly than before with minimal aggravation.

Just because Django is such a boring answer, I'll mention a few other really cool Python libs:

• Piston (been using that one a whole lot, creates RESTful APIs)
• Pygments
• Sphinx
• feedparser.py
• Celery

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2009 ?

High concurrency programming. I just made that name up but basically what I mean are programs where a lot of concurent requests come in and it becomes important to utilize asynchronous, evented and non-blocking I/O wherever possible.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2009 ? What did you do ?

Well... basically none. I'm such a user! I submitted a couple patches to Django but one got the shot down and the other is in limbo, and other than that the only open source projects I've contributed to are my own, on which I am the only comitter anyway. I'm hoping to do better here in 2010 but it's difficult sometimes to contribute back because a lot of your suggestions have ramifications down the road you couldn't quite grok when you suggested them and then you get (rightfull) shot down. As frameworks evolve the problems left to fix become less and less trivial and it's tough to know where to start sometimes.

But so the actual correct answer to the question would be Stark, my web-based visual open MUD project. It's basically a web-based mud that has (non-flash) visual components to it and is open to the world via a sorta-RESTful API. The front-end is in processing.js + jQuery (yes, I owe a lot to John Resig...) and the back-end is Django + Piston. This started as a weekend project to learn processing.js and has turned into a pretty big animal at this point...

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2009 ?

I have a Twitter list with some of the web development people I follow: http://twitter.com/teebesz/dev. I definitely keep up with that...

I also have a google reader feed where I follow a wide range of tech people from Simon Willison to Paul Graham.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2010 ?

• How to build things people actually want :)
• The world outside Django: I think it's easy once you enter the Django world to become pretty consumed by its greater universe, and I need to remember to keep looking at other cool pythonic things as well as other progamming languages (Erlang & Ruby might be cool to learn...)
• Become good at automated testing... tough but essential.

Happy new year's everyone!