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.