February 2010

This year, I decided to volunteer at PyCon. At both my previous PyCons, I had planned to help, but wasn’t sure how to join in. The evening before the tutorials started in 2009, I wandered all over the hotel looking for PyCon staff and found no one. Once the tutorials started, I felt pretty drained […]

The last morning Lightning talks were on Sunday. I wasn’t able to stay for the Lightning talks that were given in the afternoon. Here’s a quick run-down (note that I wasn’t able to get the presenter’s name on a lot of these because they would show their first slide for just a few scant seconds):

PyCon 2010 continued the practice of Open Spaces (if you don’t know what those are, click here). I really enjoyed the Open Space track last year and greatly looked forward to it this year. Unfortunately, I only managed to get to one and that was the wxPython BoF that I had posted on the board.

I only attended one of the two talks in the last session of the day. It was presented by Ms. Leigh Honeywell and called Think Globally, Hack Locally – Teaching Python in Your Community. She started “Python Newbie Night” in Toronto, Canada. It was an informal, peer-taught class which often put code up on the

For the morning session, I went to “Decorators From Basics to Class Decorators to Decorator Libraries” and “Interfaces, Adapters and Factories”, which were in the first and second sections. I skipped all the middle talks as I just didn’t see anything that I thought sounded interesting. Unfortunately, Open Space was almost completely under-utilized during the

After the technical difficulties that ended the Lightning talks this morning, Van Lindberg got up and stalled for time while they got it fixed so he could introduce the first plenary. He did a really good job and let us know that this PyCon had set two records: First, it has the largest attendance ever

On Saturday morning, PyCon hosted some Lightning Talks for about half an hour. Here are the topics and authors (when I caught their names): Joseph Tate – A web anti-pattern Securing Python Package Management – Justin Samuel The State of Crypto in Python – Geremy Condra Haystack for Django, has custom search, includes tests and

I went to three sessions in the morning: Building Leafy Chat, A Short Pinax Tutorial and Import This, that and the other thing: custom importers. If you’re interested, you can read on to see what I thought.

It’s the first official day of PyCon: Friday, February 19th, 2010. In my experience, PyCon plenaries can either be really interesting or extremely boring. I’ve rarely seen one that was in the middle. The chairman of PyCon is Van Lindberg (The Python Software Foundation’s lawyer, I think). Steve Holden was the first plenary speaker.