PyCodeConf 2011 Report

As my fiancee said, "PyCodeConf is a new kind of Python conference with a radically different format. Speakers are invited to speak about whatever they desire relating to the theme ("The Future of Python"), in front of a room of round tables. In between talks there are long breaks to encourage discussion. As a result, talks are edgier, and you really get to know people and possibly shape the future together."

This summer (2011) I was invited by Chris Wanstrath to be an invited speaker at the first ever PyCodeConf, to be held in Miami, Florida. I've been using Git and Github since early 2009, and more importantly, I've known Chris since DjangoCon 2009. I've always appreciated his interest in not just providing tools for the community, but also his efforts across languages and platforms to improve the lives of developers and those who support developers. And that he and his partners seem to make a pretty penny at it and share what they make (drink-ups and now conferences) is only a good thing in my opinion.

So I accepted Chris' invitation. :-)

The theme for the conference was the future of Python, and I submitted a talk proposal about Collaboration. Chris helped me figure my talk topic, which was awfully nice of him. Shortly afterwards my fiancee, Audrey Roy, received her own invitation to speak.

Between the time that Chris invited me to speak and the start of conference, Chris Williams of JS Conf got involved.

Alright, let's review things...

Accommodations

Everyone stayed in the Epic Hotel, in downtown Miami. The rooms fit the name of the hotel, being Epic in size and having amazing stuff in them. The rooms had free/good internet if you signed up for a hotel mailing list. Since we rehearsed and polished talks the night before the conference we ordered room service and were pleased with what we ate. The hotel had a heated outdoor pool on the 14th floor, which I'll get into later. In any case, the only time I've been in a comparable hotel was the incredible arrangements provided by the PyCon New Zealand folks who put us up in the Museum Hotel for a few days.

Sure, $189/night is high, but 3 nights when you split it with 2 or more people makes it not so bad.

Result: Superb

Conference Meals

If you are serving me food, you can't go wrong with salmon, steak, good cheese, fresh vegetables, coffee, and juice. I can report that PyCodeConf did quite well in this regard.

Outside of the conference I really enjoyed the food. Andiamo was a crazy good pizza place. I also got some really nice grouper which you can only seem to get in Florida.

Result: Superb

The Conference Room

The conference took place on the 14th floor of the Epic Hotel. This was a single track conference, with all the talks were given in the same room. The room was large, but everyone had a comfortable seat at large round tables. That was a nice touch, because it encouraged you to socialize with everyone nearby.

That worked out for the most part, except for a couple of developers sitting at a table who had backs turned to the speakers and were talking loudly while pair programming or something. I asked them to quiet down but 30 seconds later they were back at it. We moved away, but in retrospect considering their rudeness, I should have politely asked them to take it outside.

Anyway, the acoustics were good, the temperature comfortable, and the seats comfortable.

Result: Superb

Speakers

Speaker selection was done magnificently well. There wasn't a dud within the lot of speakers. I normally expect that in any conference you'll get at least one dud talk per day, and pycodeconf didn't have that problem (unless my talk sucked).

Jesse Noller opened things up with a great encouraging talk, Raymond Hettinger gave a talk on Python basics that was so full of nuance that I'm terrified of attending an advanced talk by him, Alex Gaynor filled us with hope for PyPy, Tracy Osborn taught us how to bootstrap entrepreneur projects, Travis Oliphant wants Python core and PyPy to collaborate more with the Scientific Community, Audrey Roy gave up some of her community building secrets, David Beazly explained the issues of the GIL in terms mere mortals such as myself can understand, Gary Bernhardt gave an amazing talk comparing Python and Ruby, and Leah Culver made Django + backbone.js look easy, but if you talk to her you know whatever she does is sophisticated and not for beginners. Dustin Sallings sold me on a neat idea for testing to help catch edge cases and Armin Ronacher opened my eyes on WSGI.

The wonderful thing about these talks is that since everyone knew the upcoming tracks, or had seen the previous ones, we could relate to each other. So David Beazly, Travis Oliphant, and Avery Pennarun raised interesting concerns about PyPy that everyone got the chance to hear about. They weren't show-stopping issues, just raising awareness about things that Alex didn't cover in his talk.

I live-noted the event as much as I could, with notable gaps in Leah's talk (she talks fast and is very technical and wanted to give her my full attention) as well as Armin (his talk shocked me a bit - I'm still a WSGI newbie). You can see my efforts at my PyCodeConf live-notes.

Speaking of live-noting, Josh Bohde also live-noted the event and captured a ton of stuff I missed.

The gaps between talks were also a nice 15 minutes. That meant you could stretch your legs, get a drink, and talk to people.

Result: Superb

Parties

We (me and Audrey) missed the first party (hosted by New Relic at a place called DRB) on account of preparing for our talks. We always do our absolute best on talks, and both like to practice a lot. Also, Mark Pilgrim's disappearance had touched me and I wanted to talk about it. We heard it was a great party, so we'll assume that it was. :)

The next evening the party (hosted by Heroku) was on the 14th floor, which meant it was a pool party! There was great food, good drink, and a latin jazz band playing. One of the pools was heated, so most people stayed in there, and drank many watermelon mojitos served by the staff. The pool was a huge hit because it was comfortable and people just talked freely. No laptops, no phones, just talking. Chris Williams served us drinks himself, Chris Wanstrath got wet, and everyone just relaxed. I have to say, a heated pool party is something EVERY conference should give. MOAR POOL PARTEEZ PLEEZE!

The final night's party was at the News Lounge and was hosted by Github and Droptype. The drinks and people were awesome, and I have good memories of being in a circle listening to Chris Williams and Audrey Roy talk. I did go beyond tipsy, overdid the Capoeira, and tried to convince Chris Wanstrath to give up the whole DVCS hosting thing to do wedding planning. There was also a bunch of us getting kicked out of a Karaoke bar because of the antics of a Python core developer. Ha ha ha. It was a crazy night that took me two days to recover from.

I'm glossing some important discussions that happened while I was still sober at these two parties, and maybe in the future if things play out right I'll go over them.

Result: Superb

People

Part of attending conferences is to meet old friends and make new ones. I got to spend time with Mark Ramm, Jesse Noller, Nick Coghlan, Alex Gaynor, Ben Firshman, Armin Ronacher, Raymond Hettinger, Rachel Hettinger, Chris Wanstrath, and many other excellent people. I also got the chance to meet and befriend Kenneth Reitz, Chris Williams, David Cramer, Wayne Witzel, and Leah Culver. I'm missing at least a dozen more. It was great to put faces to people, and in some cases, hear their side of a story.

Also, I got to gush at programming heroes like David Beazly and Travis Oliphant like a total fanboy.

Believe it or not, I got a bit shy. I'm kicking myself over not introducing myself to more people. Next time!

Result: Superb

Summary

The conference was amazing. Like all conferences it had its own character and fun. Because it was a purely commercial conference I was a bit worried going into it, since I've heard about the corporate feel of these things. Those fears were completely mitigated by the open attitude and decentness of the conference organizers and sponsors. I look forward to attending PyCodeConf again in the future.

If you've got good senior technical staff and you want them to benefit from a conference, this is a good place to send them.

Overall Result: Superb

Amtrak Review

Audrey and I got invited to a wedding in the Pacific Northwest. And mostly to try something new, we decided to take Amtrak's Coast Starlight from Los Angeles' Union Station to Seattle, Washington's King Street Station.  There was some incredible awesomeness about the trip, and a lot that... wasn't so awesome.

No Internet (Bad)

Thanks to encroaching deadlines we planned to take advantage of Amtrak's wireless Internet, otherwise we would have flown. Each direction took 36 hours, which is basically two days. Which meant four working days on the train. Sure, we would have liked to have sat back and just enjoyed the journey, but for us that wasn't an option on this particular trip.

Unfortunately, both the ride there and the ride back lacked internet. In the first case the car with it wasn't part of the train. On the way back the car was part of the train but the Internet was nonfunctional. Which cost us nearly 4 days of work.

We did manage to use our cell phones for tethering, but coverage on rail lines is not that good. Each time we hit a town we connected and caught as much as we could. It wasn't ideal, but it worked. We're still trying to dig out from under work time lost.

What you should know is that more experienced Amtrak passengers all said that they've never had working Internet. There is always a problem on long journeys on the Coast Starlight. Which means don't use the train for business.

The Room (Okay)

We aren't big people and are fairly flexible and athletic. So the roomette we got was quite snuggly. Larger people or those unable to maneuver in tight spaces will probably be uncomfortable.

However, I think if I did this again I would get a bigger room. They have restrooms built in, but I think I would use external bathrooms so as to keep the room smelling nicer.

Food (Okay)

The breakfast eggs and dinner steak rocked. So did the ribs. The coffee was good. Everything else was mediocre at best.

The juices they served tasted like they lacked any connection to natural substances.

Room Attendants, Conductors, and Lounge Car attendant (Good)

The room attendants were amazing. They worked their butt off and got no sleep. I made sure to tip them well. The conductors were also extremely helpful. The first lounge car attendant, a guy named 'CJ' was incredible - he lacked a real lounge car and simply made do.

Diner Car Service (Unacceptably Bad)

The service in the Dining cars was uniformly bad. They were rude, obnoxious, and did their absolute best to avoid eye contact. One meal, when we waited two freaking hours for our food while others got seated and finished after we ordered, was unbelievable. If we asked about our food or drink refills we got snapped at. In retrospect, we should have gotten up and left - or filed a formal complaint.

After several attempts to weather the bad service we took all meals in our private roomette.

Scenery (Outstanding)

This is the part of things that was incredible. The Coast Starlight goes through some amazing scenery, from the beaches of Southern California to the incredible forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest.  Pictures just don't do it justice - you have to see it sometime for yourself.

Conclusion (Okay)

The lack of Internet was annoying. The abominable dining car service was infuriating and Amtrak should give their dining car servers some basic lessons in proper restaurant hospitality.

Those things said, because the scenery was just that lovely, I might consider taking another multi-day train ride over a time when I wasn't trying to hit deadlines and would avoid the dining car at all costs.

Picking a Django powered CMS

Note as of October 2011

The CMS options have changed greatly since I wrote this blog post in 2009. I might write a more current post. In the meantime, instead of FeinCMS, use Django CMS, Mezzanine, or use the CMS grid on Django Packages to make your own decision.

Back to the old blog post...

A few months ago I asked the community to help us (NASA SMD) pick a Django powered CMS.

The response of the community was awesome. We were provided a decent sized list of CMS candidates to evaluate. We got a lot of responses, both in comments on my blog, twitter messages, and even direct emails. We compiled the list and got to work.

Now it was time for evaluation. As much as I wanted to do it myself, this was given to the capable hands of my co-worker, Chris Adams. I was a bit jealous because I like to explore, but that's how it worked out.

First Chris used a process of elimination to weed out the ones that were unusable based on my published requirements:

• Was it actually open source?
  
• Was it 508 compliant or easy to make so?
• Runs on PostGreSQL and MySQL?
• Is there an active community?

That narrowed things down a bit. Now Chris added some more filters:

• Could you show pages nested inside of pages? In order words, could you rely on Tree Traversal for display of content?
• Was there documentation? In English?

That reduced things to an even smaller list. Chris took the revised list of candidates, downloaded the code, and started them up. During this process he removed candidates that required patching to get working at the most basic level. He also looked at the code and made a few judgments there as well.

Day by day it was a sad to see the list get smaller and smaller. Each project was the labor of many hours by talented people who cared about their work. Yet Chris had a job to do, and while he didn't drop candidates easily, he did drop them.

Chris now added our sample content to each surviving candidate and invited the rest of the team to look at the code and the results. It was now up to our subjective evaluation. Two finalists stood out as winners, FeinCMS and Django CMS 2. They were so close that one might consider the results to be a tie. Both met all our needs, their code bases smelled pretty nice, documentation felt complete, code had test coverage, and the community active. They even shared a lot of the same dependencies!

The call was very close but in the end we picked FeinCMS.

Django CMS 2 was a very, very close second. I cannot say that enough.

In a few months we'll announce the front facing site we are building. We'll contribute the work we can to the open source community, which will either be work done on FeinCMS or stand alone applications.

Finally, I want to make clear the amount of effort and clarity of work Chris Adams put into these evaluations. He did the hard work and he did it well.

20 more posts to go!

Pluggable Authentication System for Plone

It took me a little to get started, because the paster template for Plone 3 Pluggable Authentication System (PAS) products doesn't work for me. Not sure why, so I submitted a ticket.

Anyway, once I figured out that it was the template, and not me, things went very fast. PAS is rather straightforward when you get the hang of it. The quick summary of how to do a PAS plugin as how I've done it:

• Grab the gmail auth plugin and use that as your base.
• In your 'content type', import and register the appropriate method and in the content type's class, create the appropriate method.
• Follow the PAS documentation on Plone.org for different actions you might need to do.
  

Yeah, very basic. I also figured out how to detail properties that can be set via the ZMI. Easy, but the documentation is not as easy to find as it should be.

I might document things in more depth since in some ways this took much longer than it should have considering the simplicity of the end code. I'm sure the Plone folks would love a detailed set of PAS examples to reinforce the current documentation, and I seem to enjoy doing that quite a bit.

Heh, while I'm at it, maybe I should finish my KSS documentation that I left hanging since the Naples Plone Conference in 2007?

Anyway, my quick review of PAS is that its really powerful. That each element (Authentication, Authorization, Challenges, etc) is seperated into its own plugin/module means that you can switch out components without jeopordizing the security and role system that might already exist. So, for example, if you want to use LDAP for authentication and SQL for authorization and a Smart Card to handle security challenges, you can do that without having do rewrite the core Plone engine. Another big bonus is that to do the actual replacement of individual plugin/modules is really easy once you figure out how. And that is pretty damned hot.

Me Grok Smash!

So as I started on yet another graphviz application for the web, I decided to go with a new framework. I would use Grok!

Grok comes out of the Zope community, and has its foundation in the rather mature components of that application server. The difference is that tying bits of Grok together does not rely on seemingly arcane xml files. You just code in Python and a bit of TAL for the views. If you want you can leverage in more bits from the Zope world, such as zope.formlib and other interesting bits.

It is a matter of public record that I have a like/hate relationship with zope.formlib.

There are some really nice things I discovered about Grok:

• Intuitive.
• Only one magic bit, in that class defined as views look for their lowercase template automatically, and you can override this if you like.
• The framework is out of the way.
• Inheriting models is a cinch.
• Lets you play with either the ZODB or SQL ORMs.
• Easy use of TAL.

Some negatives:

• A possible gotcha when you instantiate an object inside another object requires you to do a super(MyObject, self).__init__() inside the object's __init__. Not sure why I should have to write this out and it might be I did something wrong.
• Um... still trying to find faults.

I'm rather pleased. Grok has grown up lots since I really looked at it in late autumn of 2007. I look forward to working with it more.