Pycon 2010 report II

The first half day report for formal conference activities on February 21.

Plenary: Introduction

I helped in registration so I arrived late to listen to Van Lindburgh start the conference. Which was a shame because I like to listen to him speak. Nevertheless, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I had contributed my time and service to help him launch what turned out to be an amazing conference.

Keynote: Steve Holden

In December Steve had presented to the NOVA-Django a much earlier draft of his speech. As much as his stuff back in December was good, what he did at Pycon was right on the money. He was in fine form, and the conclusion was very much Steve Holden at his best.

The next night Steve was in rare fine form, but that is a story for another day...

Keynote: Guido Van Rossum

Being that I am Guido's biggest fan, and have trouble breathing in his presence, you might think I'm a bit biased. Alas, in this case, Guido's talk was not my favorite of the conference. If memory serves, at last year's Pycon he mentioned a desire to remove the "For Life" from BDFL and this year I think that showed a little bit. It was nice to have him field questions from the Eldarion supplied pycon.djangodose.com feed and the audience, but from Guido I guess I want vision and on-high judgements.

Leafy Chat, et al by Alex Gaynor

Alex Gaynor is great at public speaking. He is unafraid of crowds and speaks with good clarity. His talks are always informative, and this was no different. The downside was that for his talk he had 35 minutes to present a lot of information. So he didn't have the time to explore some of the technical hurdles they overcame in each effort. Nevertheless, it was informative, and by the end it seemed clear that one of the lessons re-learned was to focus on a simple core architectural design and make it work.

A Short Pinax Tutorial by Me

I've given variations of this talk at least three times previously. Once at DjangoCon, once for NOVA-Django, and once for Django-District. So I'm rather practiced at it, which turned out to be a good thing. Because, brand new good luck charm or not, this talk ended up having a host of problems.

First off, we couldn't get any Apple laptop to work with the projector. So we started 7-8 minutes late on a Windows machine. So I had to speak very quickly, especially if I was going to include the technical side of things.

So I finished the majority of slides with time to spare and then things went wrong again. The Windows machine... didn't do what was needed. Displaying Pinax and showing off its tricks just wasn't going to happen. So we ended up with an extended Q&A session.

Not my best presentation, but memorable.

In the works is me giving the talk a least a couple more times. Once with my local friends at ZPUG-DC and once at LA Django.

Managing the World's Oldest Django Project by James Bennett

James is always on the ball when it comes to presentations. His stuff is well researched and documented, and his voice is both relaxing and invigorating. It was good to hear about lessons learned, experiences, and some of the more interesting foibles they've been through.

An Underwater Python: Tortuga the Python Powered Robot by Joseph Lisee

Python powered underwater Robots? I was so excited by this talk!

Yeah, odds are it would have almost no professional applicability, but sometimes you just have to see what other people are doing with one of your favorite tools. I was impressed by the energy and creativity of the students at the Robotics group at the University of Maryland and am trying to figure out how to include robots in my next project.

Learn something new every year

As developers, we all make that pledge, don't we? Some of us learn new languages, new frameworks, new APIs, new methodologies. Rarely do we learn a new operating system.

30 years ago I was using whatever they called the operating system on the Apple ][ series of computers. 20 years ago I learned to use MS-DOS. 17 years ago I added Windows 3.1 to that mix. 15 years ago I ran into Windows 95 and the subsequent set of 98, 2000, Me, and XP. 10 years ago I started to play with Linux and Unix, mostly learning the simple shell commands needed to shuffle files around. 3 years ago I commenced working on Mac OS X.

During my Windows 98 days I was forced in doing help desk and system administration work. I hated it. The pop-up menus were not intuitive. Documenting what you did was hence agony. I begged my job to make me a pure developer but they forced me to continue down the path of Windows administration. Eventually I left that job and became a pure developer.

Over the years I got better at Unix and Linux. I even set up two servers for production use, one running Apache 1.3.x around 2001 and and the other a whole bunch of JBOSS stuff in 2003. Finding documentation was a pain, but the sense of logic compared to the chaos of windows pop-ups was a relief. After that when I would touch Unix or Linux it was basic file management stuff and nothing sophisticated, and my beginner skills never got a chance to grow further.

Flash forward to 2007 and beyond where I did serious Python development for Plone and then Django applications. Development was on Mac OS X and production was Linux. My neophyte level skills no longer where quite enough. Our system administrator and other co-workers helped out or did the work but it limited and frustrated me. Nevertheless, the time to really bone up on Linux never happened.

Well, this past week has been a crash course in ramping up my Linux skills. The next version of SMD Spacebook will be put into production as an RPM. Its been assigned my task to do it. This would involve a lot more in the way of Linux that what I was used to, since I needed to create an environment to run the RPM build commands, and that couldn't be our testing or production environments. That meant a chunk of setup and configuration of a lot of packages, and various proprietary bits and pieces in order to meet government and corporate requirements.

I tried not to bug my co-workers too much except for when their documentation didn't quite explain everything, and then I added to their documentation. I'm still a beginner but I feel like I've finally gotten a chance to spread my wings in this arena a little bit and learn a lot.

This will make it easier for me when I finally get around to getting this blog off blogger and into what will probably be Django-Mingus.

I don't like Integrated Development Environments

I really don't like Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). I don't like code completion, class browsers, object inspectors, class heirarchy diagrams, source control management in whatever I am editing coding with. I find such tools arcane and frustrating.

Why?

Its because I want to be able to feel the design of a module. When I manually introspect things I feel like I am sifting through the sand of the module to see what it gives me. I feel it in my gut that this is how I learn a language and use it best of all. Python makes that very easy for you with its powerful introspection capabilities which you use on the shell. I find switching to the shell lets me separate the capabilities of the module from the code I are working on. Which for some reason I find a lot more comfortable and intuitive. Your own mileage may vary.

If I do need a class hierarchy diagram, I just write a fun little python script which generates some dot notation and run graphviz's dot or neato utility.

If I do need source control management, thats what the command line is for!

Also, there are times I have to go and do things on systems besides my own. I can't expect to have Eclipse or NetBeans there. Or if they are there by some weird chance, they won't be configured the way I want.

Keep in mind I do like code highlighting. So I guess that makes me a text editor fan. And now on to my favorites:

Textmates (Mac only) http://macromates.com/
Kendall Clark introduced me to this tool back in April/May of 2006. I was very quickly hooked. It was much better than the TextWrangler that was giving me grief. And also much less arcane than Emacs. It is the one piece of software I'll actually pay to buy to use on the Mac!

Emacs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
Back in the 1990s I did Perl for a short time and was introduced to Emacs and Vi. Emacs clicked for me, because even its arcane commands worked better for me than Vi. These days my Emacs skills are not superb, but I can get by on any machine that has it installed. So that means any Mac or Linux machine I stumble across.

Textpad http://textpad.com/
So my dark secret is that until December 2006 I did much of my work in Windows. Yes, my first python work was all developed on Windows! Anyway, I had stumbled across Textpad during a Java job and kept using it across other languages and efforts. It was light, did code highlighting, and kept out of the way. Perfect! Well, maybe not since it crashed about once a day. Still, it was better for me than more sophisticated alternatives.

Changing over to .NET

After a lot of thought and meditation I have decided that it is time for a change. This change has been in the works for a long time. I want to belong to something monolithic and proprietary, and I think that .NET on Windows is the way to go.

The .NET platform empowers me with the ability to choose from a host of languages like C#, asp.NET, vb.NET, Boo, IronPython, IronRuby, and many more. And after long and careful consideration I have decided that my next language of choice will be C#.

C# is under the stalwart auspices of Microsoft itself, instead of some guy from Denmark. It has static typing and thanks to compilation most bugs are caught quickly. The curly braces clearly delineate code blocks, and the semi-colons show me when a statement ends. Partial classes will let me spread my object code across many files, and lambda expressions will let me compress complicated functionality into generic functions. Documentation is done via XML rather than the RestructuredText used across the Python community.

Of course, Visual Studio has a lot of visual elements. I am not sure what that means, but being Visual is obviously superior to the TextMates and EMACS I have used in the past. I can't afford Visual Studio yet, but if I don't buy any groceries for myself, wife, and son, I should be able to pay for my copy in only 2-4 months!

In summary this year looks very exciting.

Update: This was an April Fool's joke.

Sick but Ubuntu

I was out of work for a couple days. Stuck at home, the first evening I grabbed an old machine and installed Ubuntu plus a surplus wireless card. This was my second Ubuntu install, the first suffering from a Microsoft wireless card. I was amazed by how fast and easy the install was to do. I kept the old XP on a seperate partition and got on the house network in 30 minutes.

Of course the basic installation doesn't have all the python tools I like to use. That took me another 30 minutes.

The only real downside I discovered was a lack of Mac's Textmate. I can do emacs, but Textmate is my preference. So I toyed a bit with gEdit and was pleased. Its also free!

One thing that Ubuntu beats out Mac and Windoze for is speed. Granted, this is a new install but I have to say I love the speed of the machine. And this machine is about 3.5 years old.

Good times indeed.