Pythoneering

PyCon UK 2008 has been and gone and, once again, it was an intense and stimulating experience. Our presentation - a follow-up to the one we gave last year - seemed to go well. Once that was over, it was possible to relax and enjoy the other sessions.

The keynotes, from Mark Shuttleworth on Saturday and Ted Leung on Sunday, were both interesting. I picked up a couple of very useful tips from Simon Willison’s demo of advanced Django admin customisations, and it was great to talk to other Djangonauts in Sunday morning’s Django BoF.

Other talks of note included Jonathan Hartley’s demos of pyglet - something I must check out soon as a potential alternative to Pygame - and John Pinner’s entertaining account of how he made his central heating system Python-powered. However, the highlights for me were probably the talks given by Raymond Hettinger. Raymond’s introduction to descriptors and how Python’s dot operator works was truly enlightening, as was his presentation on doing AI with Python. He presented with great enthusiasm and explained the difficult concepts clearly and concisely.

See my PyCon set on Flickr, or the PyCon UK photo pool.

Got back from SPA2008 earlier this evening. The past couple of days have been pretty exhausting, with some good sessions and some that didn’t quite hit the spot. The Erlang session ended up being a little disappointing, as there was insufficient time to get to grips with many of the exercises and hence develop a feel for the language. Another session, on embedding domain-specific languages in Java, turned out to be really thought-provoking. I was familiar with the concept of method chaining, but it hadn’t really registered with me that doing this essentially created a domain-specific language from Java syntax. The final session I attended, on the principles behind MapReduce and Hadoop, also turned out to be very interesting.

I didn’t get to many of the diversions, but I did make time for the Spanish guitar recital by David Harvey on Tuesday - an excellent way of winding down after a long day.

On balance, I’d say this was an even better SPA conference for me than the one in 2005. I’ve come to the conclusion that these are tremendously valuable events, even for folk in academia. I can’t think of many better ways of picking up on current trends in industry. SPA folk are friendly, passionate about their profession, keen to share what they know with you, and equally keen to learn from the things that you have to say. The event is intense, stimulating, but good fun, too. I hope it won’t be another three years until my next visit…

A good day today.  Went to an intense but stimulating three-hour session on Python generators in the morning, which had gone beyond my prior knowledge of them within the first half-hour.  I was struggling to grasp some of the more advanced aspects of what was being demonstrated, but I certainly came out of the room with a better understanding than when I went in.

Other sessions of note included a panel discussion asking whether software practice had actually advanced over the past 15 years, and a thought-provoking presentation on the design of domain-specific languages.  Between this and the evening meal, I had the chance to run a Django BoF (basically just a demo and a discussion).  Four people turned up and we had some good discussion of Django vs. Rails.

I’m at SPA2008, the BCS conference for Software Practice Advancement - feeling quite tired after having led a 6-hour introductory tutorial on Python and Django.

I think it went reasonably well, although we were very pushed for time towards the end.  Cutting out one of the exercises helped, but the final group exercise on Django was still somewhat rushed.  I reckon we got far enough to convey the flavour of Django development, at least.

I might offer a BoF session on Django as a follow-up, to discuss some of the things that were omitted from the tutorial and to give other delegates an opportunity to learn about the best Python web development framework…

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…