PyCon 2011 Tutorial Report

As mentioned many times in previous entries of this blog, with Brian Rosner I taught the Pinax Solutions tutorial. We had some last minute people sign up so turnout meant nearly every seat in the room was taken. The second-half being a workshop seemed to go smashingly well. That said, one person had serious problems with getting things running and they left the tutorial without having anything running. I'm not sure how to deal with that besides having a spare laptop setup for that invariable bad laptop that always seems to show up.

The next day I took Noah Kantrowitz' (Re-)Introduction to C for Python developers. It was my first time every trying to code in C, and it was done by solving problems on this day. He dumped us right in the deep end, which was awesome for the first exercise but then I got a bit lost. I think he should have shown the answer code after everyone got a chance to try to solve things. He finished up the second half of things with some incredibly good content that made me want to use C a lot. I hope he gives this tutorial again next year since I think with a little fine tuning it will be a showcase class.

I kept my eye on a few tutorials, and was pleased to see that all the introductory Python classes were full. That is a good sign because more beginners means a stronger community.