sixtyPercent: Cochlear Implants, Aviation, Technlology, and Philosophy 2006/02/25
PyCon 2006 Day Two
I'm back from the second day of the PyCon2006 Python Conference. I thought today was better in many ways, as I've shifted my focus from trying to learn more about technologies that I already use to trying to learn anything at all about new things. This shift paid off both in terms of both personal and directly work-applicable knowledge gains.
The day didn't start out well though -- there was no coffee available before Guido's 9 AM "Python 2.5" keynote. Despite the coffee disaster and Guido's obvious illness, the talk seemed to go well. There doesn't seem to be any major revolutions in Python 2.5, but quite a few nice improvements to the language, runtime, and standard libraries. The next two talks -- Jeremy Hylton on the Python Byte Code Compiler, and Jim Hugunin on IronPython where good followups to the keynote, and each speaker was clear very enthusiastic about their work.
The other two major talks of the day that I found interesting were Alexis Lê-Quôc discussion of using Python to synchronize data from PDAs to a central database (leveraging Palm HotSync), and Ian Bicking's talk about Python Eggs. The synchronization talk was all the more interesting to e since I spent five years of my life in and around HotSync at Palm.
At the end of the day I participated in the Lightning Talks -- a rapid series of five minute presentations to the entire conference. This was quite fun -- topics ranged from a web testing tool to a joke IRC bot. I spent my five minutes quickly summarizing the good, bad, and the ugly from our experiences building a big web site entirely in Python. For those interested, my slides are available.
by David Creemer : 2006/02/25 : Categories python : 0 trackbacks : 6 comments (permalink)
