This was my very first PyCon, and it confirmed for me that the
beloved dynamic language we use in Chandler is very much alive and
growing. Overall, there was a great sense of energy and enthusiasm
about Python.
I started out the conference by attending one of the Thursday
tutorials, "Agile Development and Testing In Python". This turned out
to be very interesting and informative: the presenters, Grig
Gheorghiu and Titus Brown, have done a lot of research into various
testing and development tools while putting together a web mail
aggregator. Highlights of these for me were: twill (Titus's web
navigation scripting and testing tool), selenium (the javascript
testing framework), Trac, various unit testing frameworks, and the
twisted buildbot.
Outside of OSAF-related stuff, the technical highlight for me was
probably Guido's "State of Python" keynote; there are some nifty new
features coming out in 2.5. I finally took the chance to read up on
coroutines (PEP 342), the "with" statement (PEP 343) and setuptools.
I tried to attend talks on as wide a range of topics as possible: it
was very cool to see people using python in applications from
robotics to analysis of osteoporosis clinical trials.
On a somewhat tangential note, Katie shared the PyCon calendar on
cosmo-demo; it turns out that on the trunk of Chandler (i.e. with
section support), you can view the schedule in "All" mode, sorted by
date, and this gives you a nicely grouped display where you can
easily see which sessions you can can choose from in any given time
slot.
The OSAF talks and sessions were well-attended and seemed to go well.
As other people have mentioned, there were good questions asked at
the Chandler BoF session. Katie did an admirable job of demoing
Chandler (including new features) within the confines of a 5-minute
lightning talk. Brian's rock star alter ego made his i18n talk
entertaining (as well as informative), Jeffrey explained his vobject
library clearly and succinctly, and drummed up several participants
for the later vobject sprint. For me, it was good to get out in
public and give a talk (on zanshin), despite having been somewhat
trepidated beforehand. Afterwards I did have a couple of really good
hallway conversations with people related to the talk's content.
On the sprint days, I ended up working on adding ICalendar VTODO
(task) support to import/export. It was good to take a whack at this
while surrounded by Chandler expertise in a lot of areas! As other
people have mentioned, on the second day of sprints, it was good to
have a lively (and somewhat mind-bending at times) discussion of
ideas (mainly pje's) for upgrading user's data.
--Grant
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