NOVA-DUG August 19th summary

People were already there at 7:24 pm when I showed up at the Nature Conservatory lobby. They kept filtering in until 8 pm. We had another three new people show up - and all the regulars. I want to thank everyone who came, and Eric Coffman for hosting us yet again.

Some notes:

• We introduced ourselves several times. How does one handle this when each person showing up is awesome and you want everyone to know each other throughout the meet up?
• I did my two stock Django presentations. I need to not only touch them up and extend them, but practice them more. Thanks to the next bullet I was a bit flustered when I presented.
  
• Yup, I was star struck by the presence of Steve Holden. Its funny how I can easily deal with large numbers of people but my fan boy nature screws me over when someone like a python rock star enters the room. Steve was down-to-earth though, and did an ad-hoc presentation on testing that impressed the heck out of me.
• If Steve flusters me, what happens if I have to ever have to present with Guido in the room?!? I am Guido's biggest fan...
  
• As a group, we talked about testing, wonders of django, pitfalls of django, virtualenv, and many other things. I think one presentation a night and more general talking might be good.
• Johnny Dobbins of Media General showed up. They are in the midst of converting many newspaper and media sites to Django/Pinax from various other systems. He said once they converted everything over they would be releasing some of their code as open source.
• Afterwards we sat outside and had drinks. We talked the state of python in the DC community and what could be done to enhance it. More on that to come!

What comes next:

• Meet on August 30th for a Northern Virginia day of coding Pinax!
  
• Meet two weeks from today on September 2, 2009 at the Nature Conservancy.