Van Johnson's speech on Intellectual Property was really good. I take a Lawrence Lessig approach to the whole thing so listening to him as sort of like being in a church and nodding to the pastor. Sure, I had my differences, but its good to see an Open Source lawyer explain the real world to the masses. I don't want to get in trouble for not paying attention to the particulars, so this was good for me. I've heard/read much of it before, but the refresher was important to me since its so easy to forget the particulars and get yourself into trouble.
Session Talks
I went to a lot of these, and rather than repeat my notes I'm just going to review highlights and the odd lowlight.
An early favorite was
Chris McDonough's talk on repoze. I had seen it before in November at
ZPUG but this time he demonstrated something stunning. This time he got
Trac to work inside of
Plone. How cool is that?
I had hoped for more on the
Stackless Python talk. However, that was not meant to be. The original presenter cancelled out and he was replaced by someone who was not good at oration. Also, the slides were the same as a presentation 2 years ago. Lastly, the speaker couldn't properly answer any questions so basically was just clicking slides.
The
SQLAlchemy talk was great. The package has really come a long way. A lot of features probably aren't needed for most efforts, but having them there means you have to dip less and less into SQL and database specific items. I like how you can do Sqlite purely in memory for testing, which means for development on the
genwriter project its perfect.
I've been a fan of Alex Martelli since I first opened the Python Cookbook. His talk on
callback patterns was like a firehose of really useful knowledge and lessons learned right into my brain. People left early and I guess I pity them. Sure, some of the stuff he talked about was advanced, but it wasn't that bad.
Also of good note was the
Pyglet talk. Pyglet is a cross-platform multimedia library that lets you code in graphics and audio for anything you want. Unlike Pygame it uses the OS standard bits to do its media actions which means technically its core cpython. I downloaded one demo that is a fractal terrain generator and didn't download the 3-D shooter. Yes, someone made a half-decent 3-D shooter using a high level language. Wow.
I went to the
Iterators talk which taught me about namedcollection.tuples. This is good stuff because you can stick complex data into a list-like object and then do fun stuff like easy sorting and other interesting things.
In retrospect I wish I had gone to the talk on
python containers but the one on
Nose testing was not bad. The speaker, also the creator, was not good at speaking. But his philosophy and tool are great. Very simply, Nose is a script you call that runs all the tests inside what you point it at. It runs anything that looks like a test. Sure, it doesn't have as much finesse as other tools, but its easy to use. And in my opinion, when testing is hard to do, it means you tend not to do it as much as you should.
Finally I was impressed by Mark Ramm of TurboGears. His
talk was not so much on his framework but on that with WSGI all frameworks just become glue bits for bigger and better things. He wants people to play together and adhere to standards so if you want something else to use, you can do so without breaking your tools.
Lightning Talks
I wasn't that much impressed by them. There were, as
Bruce Eckel pointed out, too many commercial based talks which generally were hiring spiels. I've got nothing against recruiters, but lightning talks are supposed to be technical, with maybe a '
...and we're hiring' at the end. So what happened is I didn't pay attention to a number of them, and they blurred together. there were some awesome things presented there, like Larry Hastings of Facebook or Zed Shaw's great humor, but most of it was rather bleah. So sad that makes me.
Summary of Pycon
I'm not done yet! Lots more happened like a BOF or two, touching OLPCs, shaking Guido's hand, eating the odd good meal, and the sprints. That will come in a later post.
