Everyone else is doing it...
So I found PyCon to be really informative, really enjoyed the whole
week. I learned a lot about Python itself, which is especially helpful
with my static-language background.
Katie started a Sprint feedback page, which we all edited during the
sprints - we learned a lot of lessons from the sprints. I won't go into
it here, though its probably the information most relevant to OSAF:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/PyCon2005SprintFeedback
Here are highlights from the talks I went to:
- Traits was surprisingly relevant to what we're trying to do with
Kinds.. I'm still trying to get a good url for this one. We could learn
a lot from their experience writing attribute editors. The 2003 talk is
here: http://python.fyxm.net/pycon/papers/traits.html
A short description of the 2005 talk:
http://www.python.org/moin/PyConDC2005/Presentations#82
- Michael Weigend's presentation on Extreme Programming with Python
was pretty interesting. Helped me understand more of the development
process around Extreme Programming (no paper)
- Holger Krekel's py.test framework is fantastic - makes it SO easy
to write unit tests. Basically you sprinkle tests throughout your code,
and then sic py.test on it. - so much better having one silo for code,
and one for tests, plus you don't have to buy into any huge testing
framework, it just does a recursive find for all .py files and runs
tests on them.
http://codespeak.net/py/current/doc/test.html
- Bruce Eckel's talk on OOP in python was incredibly informative...
really changed my perspective on dynamic languages.. probably worth
looking at if you come from a C/C++/Java background
http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/papers/44/OODesignInPython.pdf
- Both Yarden Katz and our own Philip Eby each gave very
interesting talks on two sides of rule-driven software.. one on
inferring rules, and one on integrating rules into the language of your
code.
Philip's paper: http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/papers/53/img0.html
- I learned a LOT about generators from Nat Goodspeed's talk on
animation. It demonstrated a really development pattern to break up
heavy processing with events and generators. Something you can't do in
any other language...
http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/papers/51/SeqEventCode_files/frame.html
- I also learned a lot about python's memory management from Evan
Jones' talk - he described the arena/pool mechanisms in the
interpreter, and a patch that he has that improves stuff slightly.
Might be worth investigating further to see if we should include his
patch. (it applies to Python 2.4, and will most likely be included in
2.5)
http://www.sauria.com/~twl/conferences/pycon2005/20050325/Improving%20Python's%20Memory%20Allocator.html
Alec
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