TheThiers

Day 3 has now come and gone, and after some rest my brain has recovered from information overload. I would like to give a big shout out to the Pycon organizers. They have done a wonderful job!

Keynote: Robert Lefkowitz – The Importance of Programming Literacy

r0ml gets ready for the keynote

The last day of pycon began with a very strong keynote for Mr. Lefkowitz. Not only was the talk very engaging, but thought provoking as well. The talk weaved through lingustics, history and computer science. His basic premise is that he wants to change how we define Computer Literacy. Today’s idea of computer literacy is teaching children how to using Powerpoint. His desire is to redefine that to include computer programming as well. If this were to come true, it begins to bring up some interesting thoughts and questions. For example, most kids can’t get through high school with out studying one of Shakespeare’s works. Are there any works of code that would be worth having students study in school? This idea also makes you want to think a little differently how you write your code. There’s way too much that I could get into in this blog post, but I highly recommend checking out the video and audio of the presentation when it is available.

Testing Talks Galore

The last day was jammed pack full of testing talks. The highlight for me was finding out more about twill, scotch, and figleaf. At a very basic level, twill is a scriptable interface to the web that you can use to test web interfaces. Mix in a little wsgi, and you get a very easy to write unit testing for your web interfaces. Scotch is a web transaction recorder that will record all of the actions going through the web, so that you can play them back at a later time. Figleaf is a more powerful code coverage tool for python that will report how much of your code has been tested.

On a bit of a related note the trac talk included showing off a new plug-in called Bitten. Bitten is a continuous integration tool that fits very nicely in trac. As code is checked in, it will build, and test everything, and provide nice reports showing how many tests passed or failed, code coverage, etc. If you are using trac, you should be using this plug in

Every good thing comes to an end

If you haven’t been to Pycon yet, I highly recommend it. I found out a lot about new technologies, and made a lot of friends. I hope to see you there next year!

Day 2 at pycon came and went faster than day 1. Another exciting day, with lots of stuff to talk about.

Keynote: Adele Goldberg – eLearning Does Not Belong in Public Schools

While I highly respect Adele for the contributions she has made to Computer Science, I was very disappointed with this keynote speech. She gave a very impassioned diatribe which basically said that eLearning is why public education is as bad as it is today. This is one of those subjects that’s much like trying to argue politics, or religion, or vi/emacs I have thought about all the things that I would like to say about this, but then I would basically be no different, so I will leave it at that. Though I will add that I found it highly entertaining that after this long invigorating speech, she then demoed the “new” eLearning software that she is developing.

soaplib: an easy-to use SOAP library

I am very excited about this project. Python has needed a good, pythonic, easy to use SOAP library for a long time. If you have ever used soappy or ZSI in a large production environment, you will know what I mean soaplib makes it super easy to expose SOAP web services in python. And guess what! No writing WSDL!!!!!!! It was also nice to see that out of the box, it will support integration with Oracle SOA Suite, Axis 2, .NET, and Java 1.6. While it is still a bit young, they are heavily using it at their company Optio, and it seems to have a growing community coming around it as well.

The Star Schema in Python

This was a highly entertaining talk about how he used python to implement the star schema pattern. He showed how there are times you can do things efficiently directly in python without the overhead of a database. I think that unfortunately several people got lost trying to figure out what a star schema is.

Scaling Python for High Load websites

I was disappointed in this talk as well. I’m very involved at work with improving the performance of our web applications, and was hoping to learn some nuggets that might be able to help. Unfortunately, they brought up some of the first things that you look at. The one thing that they were way off on though, was suggesting to cache static content (javascript, css, images, etc.) with memcached!!!! Please!!!! Don’t do that!!!! Use a squid cache or a separate media server instead to serve the static content.

UPDATE — Please read Jamie’s comment below as he clarifies what they were presenting. Thanks Jamie!

Extracurricular Activities

Hanging out with some of the Pylons and SQLAlchemy guys was a lot of fun. Dinner was great, and I really enjoyed getting to know them better. I also got to hang out while some of the TurboGears and Pylons people had some amazing discussions. Before I knew it, it was 12:30! Sometimes I feel like a fly on the wall when history is being made, and a big thank you to those guys for letting some random geek hang out.

Pycon is here! (And to all of Angie’s friends: Yes I am a geek, you will just have to suffer through it )

The first day has been very exciting. Some of the highlights included:

Opening Keynote: Ivan Krstic – One Laptop Per Child

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this talk, but it became very intriguing very quickly. Many of us are aware of the goals of the project — change how kids learn, which is cool by itself, but it got really cool when he got into the nitty gritty details. I also knew that they were using python, but I didn’t realize how much. They even have a view source button! At any point while a kid is using the laptop, they can hit the button, and it will show the source of whatever piece they are looking at. How cool is that?!!! Python is used in the GUI, communications, security, cryptography, file system (yes… filesystem!), and most user space code. Pretty much anything that can be done in Python is. All of that on a 366MHz AMD Geode processor with 128MB of RAM and 512MB NAND flash drive. I’ve watched this project from afar for a while, but after this talk I have been much more impressed by this project, not only in a humanitarian way but from a technological stand point as well.

This lucky guy won an OLPC

WSGI

This talk gave me a much better understanding of WSGI. It’s a thing I have been wrestling with for a while, and Ian simplified it quite a bit. In reality WSGI is such a simple concept. As Ian put it, wsgi is basically HTTP serialized as a function call. Not only does this allow you to easily hook WSGI based apps to multiple servers, or have this idea of WSGI middlware where you can intercept the HTTP stream and do some really cool stuff. But you can also link together several WSGI based apps into a single application. I really hope that the momentum behind WSGI continues, and we seem more integration in to the plethora of Python web frameworks.

Various other talks

There was a talk about unicode and internationalization which wasn’t quite what I had hoped for. Basically I learned that unicode and internationalization is really hard

While web panel was fun, not much was said that I’m sure most people would know already if they lurk much around any of the web frameworks presented. Hopefully, at the very least, it introduced many to the plethora of options that are available. A transcript of the events can be found here.

I did get a chance to talk with someone with Enthought, and was excited to find out that there is some interest with integrating their Traits project with an ORM, and building a web front end for that. I’m really excited about the possibilites that could result from that, and hope to talk with them some more about that.

Meeting new friends

I got to meet many people that I had only talked to virtually. It was really great to meet some of the faces from some of my favorite projects, and I look to meeting more tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to see what tomorrow has in store. And in a closing note, I know that anyone at Pycon reading this will roll their eyes, but the company that I work for is hiring python programmers. If you are interested and happen to see me, let me know, or leave a comment — at least I didn’t do it in a lighting talk

And a last special thanks to all those behind the scenes putting this event togther. Each year it gets better, and better!