The Mouse Vs. The Python

Jim Hugunin kicked off his talk, PyCon 2009 – IronPython: Data, Directions and Demos with mentioning his colleagues at Microsoft. He then went on to talk about the newest release of IronPython, which is 2.6 Alpha, which actually matches the Python 2.6 version as much as possible. It sounded like the recent version of IronPython 2.0 Final also has lots of cool stuff, like 500 bugs closed, more builtins and the ability to compile to a dll. (more…)

The How Pycon is Developed talk was given by Brett Cannon, a Python core developer. Brett spoke on how to start helping out with programming Python Core. To start off, he recommended learning the bug tracking system and how to use it, then start fixing bugs. To get started, go to news-bugs-announce or python-bugs-list. there you can submit bugs and learn about the current ones. As you become better known (through fixing bugs), the developers will give you additional privileges, with the highest one being commit privileges. (more…)

The Windmill talk was given by Adam Christian. It is an IDE for testing websites in various browsers. It allows the developer to build, record and edit tests. The playback and debugging is done in the IDE. It can launch Firebug in Firefox or use Firebug-Lite in the other browsers. It also has a DOM explorer.

Windmill uses ipython for running and debugging from the command line. It also has a Python Proxy API, which could be pretty cool. He ran a few videos which demonstrated how Windmill does its thing, but the text was too small to read. Hopefully Christian will put his videos online. For one thing, you can export the error reports into something that is compatible with JUnit. While I didn’t get much out of it, you might. Give their website a look over at least.

The first PyCon talk I attended was entitled About Python Namespaces (and Code Objects), presented by Jeff Rush. This talk was a little over my head. Be sure to grab the slides and watch the video when and if the PyCon organizers post them. (more…)

On March 27th,  2009, PyCon Chicago really started off. Some might call the previous two days of tutorials a pre-PyCon, but the “real” conference didn’t start until today. This morning, the organizers have scheduled an opening Plenary and some morning lightning talks. After the lightning is over, we have a break and then it’s on to the meatier talks. (more…)