PyCon UK
I’ve just got home from PyCon UK, and a rip-roaring success it was too, IMHO. There were 190 attendees, which certainly exceeded my expectations, and many interesting presentations.
Eye-openers for me included Tim Parkin of Pollenation showing how easily Twisted could be used for web application development and Matthew Pontefract of the Moving Picture Company discussing a Twisted-based framework for distributing computation for CGI movie effects and all kinds of other services across a mesh of loosely-coupled nodes. I also found Christian Tismer’s introduction to Stackless Python to be useful, and I enjoyed the keynotes greatly - particularly the one by Simon Willison on OpenID.
The event as a whole cost far less that some other tech conferences that I’ve attended, and the organisation was superb. I reckon I’ll be back next year…
September 18th, 2007 at 11:12 am
[…] This was a talk by Nick Efford and Tony Jenkins about their experiences of using python as a first language for undergraduates at the University of Leeds. It started with an interesting picture showing two mountains and asking which was harder to climb. One was the Matterhorn the other was Everest. The point was that to someone unskilled in climbing they both look daunting but to an expert the Matterhorn is probably the slightly easier. This analogy was then extended to programming languages. C and C++ had been the mainstay at Leeds but then Java came along and seemingly offered a much easier option. Sadly though for the beginner this was still the difference between the Matterhorn and Everest. […]