Saturday, March 15, 2008

Live from PyCon

Yesterday, I was wondering whether this year's PyCon was really turning out to be as amazing as its attendance suggested.

I'm not wondering today. I saw some excellent conventional talks earlier in the day. Mike Bayer showed yummy new SQLAlchemy with infectuous enthusiasm. Kumar McMillan gave a blessedly clear explanation of Unicode in Python. Brandon Rhodes laid out ideas like Adapter patterns very nicely, and showed magnificent stage presence, too.

During discussion of Boston's PyCon 2010 bid:

Steve Holden: "I'm not surprised food is expensive. You send them perfectly good tea, and they throw it in the harbor."

And then, as the pre-scheduled talks ended, the Open Space board went white-hot. I learned a lot at well-attended Open Spaces for DevChix, DBSprockets, and usergroup leaders, and could have enjoyed a dozen other sessions if only I could fork myself.

Right now, I'm finishing my day at Steve's "Teach Me Twisted" session, and wow. I didn't even really care about Twisted, I just wanted to see how the learner-driven idea would work out, and it's going great. About a dozen fat brains and fifty hungry brains are here, and Steve is doing a masterful job of herding us along with skill and humor. How he's managing to absorb this all at the same time as he guides it along with well-placed questions, I don't know. I guess that's what years of teaching experience can do.

Itamar Shtull-Trauring: "Can't we refactor the code a bit more?"
Alex Martelli: "No."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No photos?