The Mouse Vs. The Python

When I went to PyCon this year, I didn’t even think about the sponsors. However, I saw their names on everything and it still didn’t bother me until the first day of the conference itself. While I think the MC, Mr. Goodger, is a great guy, I thought the sponsorship announcements were sometimes misplaced. When Guido got up to do his talk, he had to wait until Goodger ran to the back of the room and search for some paper. Everyone was kind of going “What the!?” When Goodger got back to read “Guido’s talk is sponsored by…”, I was kind of shocked. I mean, what is this?

I’d never heard of the “Lightning Talks” either. In fact, when I DID hear about them, I thought they sounded like a lame idea. So I skipped it on the first day. The second day I decided to check it out because I was bored. Of the four that I saw, 2 were sponsored talks and one was just some guy ranting about why he thinks Python sucks. All of those seemed kind of out of place.

There’s a lot more to be heard on c.l.py:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/2b6cb0e7245347be/363c0a5eb952a263

I agree that sponsors help lower the cost for the conference and I’m all for that and for the free swag as well as the opportunity to network with them. But they can be overdone in some cases and if you read the thread above, you’ll notice that the Lightning Talks were the ones that were damaged the most. I hope to attend next year and I expect the organizers will have learned how to handle this better in the future.

My last day at PyCon was Sunday, March 16th 2008. I was one of the unlucky who had work the following morning. This day just seemed rushed to me, which is probably why I learned the least.

The first Plenary was Making Client-Side Python Suck Less with Aza Raskin. It was about Mozilla to some degree, but Raskin focused more on making Python into an easy-to-update program. It was a call to arms to make “freezing” your Python applications easier and the whole update and pluggability of said programs easier. His main idea can be summed up in this quote “Python needs to be a platform”. He didn’t really give any ideas on how to accomplish this though. You can read more about it here: http://www.toolness.com/wp/

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Saturday, March 15th I was finally getting the hang of PyCon. I wandered around a little and got into the conference room as soon as the doors opened. This was one of the largest rooms I’ve ever been in. It reminded me of a Colosseum except without the high ceilings. The opening talk was about Twisted and how it was getting some kind of backing that would make them a real entity. There were multiple people playing hot potato with the mic and I soon found myself confused. Then again, I haven’t ever been all that interested in Twisted to begin with.

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The first talk I went to was entitled “Developing with Repoze2.Zope” by Chris P McDonough. It was a pretty interesting presentation on middleware that can re-implement ZPublisher in such a way that it allows Zope2 to run within Apache + mod_wsgi. Repoze depends on Python Paste and setuptools. If I recall correctly, he gave a demo where he gave Trac a Plone-like interface without modifying either.

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The first day of PyCon (not including the Tutorial Day) took place on March 14, 2008.  I finally got to see the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), Guido van Rossum. While I knew he was from the Netherlands, I hadn’t really thought of him with a Swiss-like accent. It was cool! He was mostly interesting as well as he described the next iterations of Python; namely the concurrent release of 2.6 and 3.0. He hopes to have them released in August, 2008.

Before Guido though, there was a guy by the name of Chris Hagner of White Oak Technologies spoke on “Why Python Sucks (but works for us)” or something like that. Anyway, he pointed out Python’s weaknesses and then showed how they have been used to their advantage. The disadvantages that Hagner had were:

• low number of Python developers
• few organizations have Python solutions (which makes them somewhat nervous to try something new)
• Python “weirdness”
• Python is slow

He addressed each of these, but my notes are incomplete so I’ll just talk about the highlights. The fact that there are relatively few Python developers did not dissuade his company because the Python programmers he talked to were usually of much higher quality than those from other languages. He used the “rarity” of Python solutions as a selling point: “Hey! We have something different.” This also applied to the “weirdness” factor to some degree. Finally, the slow part of Python wasn’t a problem for what they do most of the time and it made them that much more aware of testing and optimizing or writing C/C++ extensions for those “slow” bits.

I’ll write about the talks I attended next time.

Tutorial Day, as the name implies, is a day where PyCon attendees get to attend tutorials on all kinds of Python topics including Django, Plone, wxPython, Python 101, SQLAlchemy , Python Eggs, Python and the OLPC and much more. According to the keynote the following day, more people attended the Tutorial Day than have attended PyCon itself in past years.  Also, most people that took tutorials attended three.

I attended 3 myself: Eggs and Buildout Deployment in Python (Jeff Rush), Advanced SQLAlchemy (Michael Bayer, Jason Kirtland, and Jonathan Ellis), and Tail Wags Fangs: What Python Developers Should Know About Plone (Rob Lineberger).

The Eggs tutorial was the best one I attended. Mr. Rush is very knowledgeable and good at communicating said knowledge. While it was very fast, I think I learned the most at that one.

Advanced SQLAlchemy had the author (Michael Bayer) of the module presenting. While obviously extremely intelligent, he had a tendency to talk too fast. I’m not a SQL guru by any means, so I wasn’t always able to follow anyway. I probably would have done the same thing though. He tag-teamed with Jason Kirtland and it was pretty cool to listen to even if I couldn’t always follow everything.

The last class was probably the biggest disappointment for me. The Plone tutorial seemed to be aimed at users and designers more than developers except for a section on Archetypes. I was hoping for more on the ZPT than anything. Also, while the presenter seemed knowledgeable, he changed my mind by constantly making little mistakes or by telling us one thing only to tell us to disregard what he said a few moments later. This made taking note’s nearly impossible.

By the time that tutorial ended, it was time to go to the hotel and sleep. The “real” start of PyCon would begin on the morrow. Don’t change that channel! I’ll be talking about that soon…

 This is my first post. I thought I should start writing about my Python experiences and coincidently, PyCon was just getting ready to start. So I decided to wait so I could write about something that could be truly cool. This will also be my first PyCon and my first time in Chicago. My company paid for the trip and it’s been an interesting experience so far.

I live in the middle of Iowa so the trip took about 5 1/2 hours of driving or 299 mile, according to Google Maps. To get here, I decided to use a Garmin Nuvi 350 GPS unit. It worked flawlessly other than that it took me on to some toll roads. I haven’t figured out a way to fix that.

Upon reaching my destination at the DoubleTree Inn, I quickly checked in and after dinner, I went to see if I could help the ChiPy (Chicago’s Local User Group) stuff swag bags. They actually seemed to have too much help, but I met a few interesting folks.

I will write another post about Tutorial Day soon.  See you then!