It felt like this year Pycon was executed to near perfection. Many struggles I had with last years Pycon were addressed both by the organizers, and some creative thinking.
In this post I will recap everything that happened from my perspective.
WSGI House
I gathered a few close friends from the TG team and a couple of wildcards for perspective to share a house for the continuum of the conference. Having a house gave us a place to go home to at night and meet with friends, often staying up late talking about issues surrounding our favorite software. Having a focused group I feel is important because you spend less time off on wild tangents. The first (and pretty much only) rule of the house was that you pay the same amount whether you stay one night or nine. At least one of our members was encouraged by this rule to stay for the sprints which he hadn’t done before. Success!
Tutorials
For me, tutorials got off to a shaky start, but we seemed to recover nicely. TurboGears has a lot of momentum right now, and it makes it hard to come up with a succinct tutorial when there is so much functionality to cover. I think we were able to recover and that our students managed to soak in enough knowledge from our proverbial fire hose to create some useful applications. I think we have a good start on a new book.
I was extremely impressed with the quality of students who were attending my ToscaWidgets tutorial. Every single student finished every example. I chose Pylons to give the tutorial, and although it is a little harder to integrate TW in the stream than does TurboGears2, it installed quickly and flawlessly. Overall, I think the tutorial was a success.
Talks
This year I did not focus on attending the talks, but instead chose wisely based on speaker and topic and allowed my feet to do the walking if the talk became uninteresting. I definitely missed some talks, but the AV team has done an incredible job putting the talks up on blip.tv so that I can review them later.
This year I did not miss Raymond Hettinger’s talk on AI in python and was enthralled by a speaker who could successfully put a page of code on the screen and keep my interest. I showed up to support Philip Jenvey in his talk on Pylons on Jython but was impressed by his ability to provide a succinct example on where Jython really shines. I am hoping that more people take a second look at this really well done presentation.
Now, I am a SQLAlchemy supporter through and through, but find the domain of database mapping an interesting echosystem. While the ORM panel was littered by advertising chatter from one of the panelists who did not even write an ORM, an obvious dis-inclusion was Robert Brewer who wrote Dejavu, a very nice way to map persistent resources of different types for use in an “objecty” way. Bob’s talk was especially interesting and makes me wonder if SQLAlchemy could leverage some of the work with AST that Bob beautifully displayed with some of the most amazing one-handed keyboarding I have ever seen.
Open Space
Well, I said I was going to give a talk at the Open Space, and ended up not doing so. Part of the problem was the utter lack of projectors in the OS rooms, and part of it was a reluctance to break up the collaborative/discussive vibe that was going on in these sessions. WSGIers hammered out a 2.0 spec, which involved a discussion I only monitored in passing. I was disappointed by the lack of people who showed up for the GSoC BOF, but I think the economy held back a lot of students from attending Pycon. It was also nice to allow my feet to walk around and see what was up in different projects. I met one guy who took REST way to far and got to express some of my dissatisfaction with one of the available tools. On a more positive note, the TG BOF was well-attended and it was nice to see so many users wondering what was up in TG land.
Sprints
This year I refused to let the noobs get me down and actually wrote some code. I am sorry if I did not act as a good host of the TG project, but we have some important milestones coming up and I just wanted to get work done on that. Sprinting remains a cornerstone of our development process and I will see if we can’t get our monthly
sprints happening again in 2009. I was however able to completely re-engineer our dispatch system, and while it is not currently 100% complete, it should be finished in a matter of days. RestController now supports variable arguments for get_one, delete, and put, as well as supporting lookup and default. Anyone can actually now create their own dispatch mechanism, since this functionality has been generalized. Simply subclass Dispatcher, override _dispatch() and go to town. I look forward
to seeing what kind of crazy code this brings to TG land. A lot of discussion has been had on how to make “plugins” or “extensions” for TG, and you can rest assured that we will have this functionality soon.
Thanks
Thanks to all of my house mates who put up with my “mothering”. Thanks to all of you who tolerated my “um”s at my talk on Sphinx, and especially to Georg Brandl who answered some questions. Thanks to the organizers, volunteers and staff that came together to create what has been my best Pycon to date.
Tags: 2009, open space, pycon, sphinx, sprints, Turbogears
The lack of projectors in the Open Space rooms is a hotel problem. Hotels make their money on insane upcharges for little things. The reason the coffe/beverage service appeared and disappeared several times a day is because they want to charge for each up/down cycle. I am told that the A/V prices are even more insane – they wanted $600 per projector per room per day (and we couldn’t bring our own for contractual reasons).
Long story short – conference centers suck.
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