What I learned at Pycon 2009

Why write a repetition about all the things that everyone else has documented the greatness of Pycon 2009 when I can write about the awesome stuff I learned?

• How to use Python via XLRD and XLWT to handle truly brobdingnagian Excel files (8 million records anyone) without anything Microsoft.
• New Internet scraping tools like html5lib and mechanize to reinforce lxml and the fading but still lovable BeautifulSoup.
• Many awesome things about the Sphinx documentation experience.
  
• That spending a day in test focused sessions is an intense experience.
• argparse makes writing command line python interactions so much easier.
• Good rules of thumb for breaking apart applications in not just Django, but for python modules in general.
  
• Git! The Pinax community embraced Git just as I was started to work on it. I owe a lot to Brian Rosner's patient coaching, and Jannis Leidel's patience.
• That I am addicted to checking on the Github graphs to see how I compare.
• 15 minutes of sitting next to James Tauber gave me the grounding I wanted in JQuery event handling.
• That people who hate XML based template languages HATE them. HATE HATE HATE.
• Mashed potatoes and bacon pizza is yummy. And spinach and anchovy pizza rocks. Yes, I ate anchovies and oddly enough liked them.
• I really want to teach python, Django, and Pinax. I may not be the best coder by far, but I think this could be the largest contribution I ever make to this community.
  

Some of what I need to follow up on

• GeoDjango
• sql-python
• content-mirror

Did I miss anything? Let me know!