grep.ro

So I went to PyCon this year, took some photos, gave a lightning talk, organized an open space, but most of all, learned a whole lot and had a great time.

The lightning talk was about Cork, my side project that I've probably been obsessing too much about. I tried to give a demo and failed miserably, but several people were curious enough to show up later, at the open spaces room, to find out more. I've since been hacking at the code, and I'm hoping to get a 0.1 version up on PyPI.

I've also had my mugshot taken by Andy Smith as part of his Beards of Python project. He took great photos of a lot of bearded attendees.

The conference was alive with twittering. At some points the #pycon "channel" was projected up on the presentation screens. I mostly missed out on the fun; maybe my input bandwidth is not good enough, or maybe I'm trying to read everything too carefully. I'm pretty sure I've missed out on some of the best talks though, and watching the twitter stream would have surely steered me better. Most (all?) sessions were filmed and uploaded to pycon.blip.tv but I won't ever get around to watching them.

I was really excited about the post-conference sprints and expected to get a lot of coding done. Trouble is, I had no good target to work on, and jumping into a project you don't know much about is apparently not so easy. I ended up finding a couple of bugs in repoze.bfg and TurboGears, implementing a small feature in CherryPy, and talking to a lot of smart, interesting people.

I learned a lot about WSGI, what it does, how people use it, and what's out there. Middleware is the name of the game: you stack a bunch of pluggable, WSGI-compliant pieces of code in front of your application, and have them do stuff you need but don't want to write yourself: routing, error handling, database connections, authentication, maybe even some skinning of HTML output. You also get to choose among several WSGI-compliant web servers.

There's also Zope. It didn't make a big appearance at the conference sessions, but it's alive and kicking, getting streamlined, repackaged into smaller libraries, with some really powerful helper tools around, and playing nicely with WSGI stuff. The TurboGears folks might be using Zope Interfaces to create a pluggable applications API (sort of like Django apps), but don't quote me on that.

I also managed to visit downtown Chicago, where I snapped some more photos, climbed up to the John Hancock Observatory, walked on the shore of lake Michigan and rode on the subway. It's big, busy and kind of nice, but I got the feeling people go out in the street only because they have to; I didn't get much sense of a community.

All in all it was a great experience. I still have trouble comprehending my luck of having attended PyCon. :)