PyCon 2009 Day 1 – Plenary and Morning Lightning

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.
David Goodger is still the conference chair and gave a good intorduction. Barry Hawkins then spoke on Open Spaces. The lightning talks covered DCVS (Brett Cannon), PyCon itself (Doug Napoleone), Cassandra database (Jonathan Ellis), Python and wiiMote (John Harris), some kind of database talk by Shawn of ChiPy / PyCon Networking, and more. For the most part, they were pretty good although Shawn’s made my mind wander. He has a tough job keeping he PyCon network running properly, so I appreciate what he does. Hawkins and Cannon seemed to get the most response from the crowd with Napoloeone and Harris bringing up a close second.

That’s all for now. Come back for my reports on the talks I attend as I attend them (and as the flakey network permits).