PyCon 2006

Despite being a Python user on and off for a decade, this year’s PyCon in Dallas was my first. I doubt it will be my last! I had a great time. There were quite a few interesting talks. Hearing about Python 2.5 in detail from the source was good. As someone heavily involved in Python web development, the Plone, Zope and Django talks were interesting and educational.

To see some of what you missed, check out the PyCon 2006 photos at Flickr. My talk seemed generally well-received and I enjoyed giving it. It’s amazing how quickly 25 minutes can zoom by!

The highlight of the conference for me was definitely the interaction with so many smart Python programmers. I saw many names that I’ve pop up over the years in Pythonland, and had a good chance to talk with a few.

There were so many great conversations in the hallways, the lobby, the bar and the nearby restaurants that it’s hard to imagine not being pleased with the overall experience. Python has a great ecosystem of all kinds of people doing interesting work. On Saturday night, a bunch of folks involved in Python web development got together:

The only problem with this dinner was that we only played musical chairs once. While I’m sure the serving staff appreciated that, it meant that I didn’t get a chance to talk with most of the folks in the picture at left above.

TurboGears sprinter Mike Orr wrote a good overview of the conference: PyCon 2006 Dallas LG #124.

If you use Python seriously, it’s really worth the trip (see you in Dallas next year!).

The TurboGears sprint that followed the main conference was fun and interesting. We specifically went after bigger things that needed kickstarting and would benefit from being face-to-face with other people. One example is the Docudo project: a tool to handle software documentation in a way that works a lot better than a normal wiki. The Docudo team (Joel Pearson, Karl Guertin, Mike Orr, Arthur McLean, and Kevin Horn) started the project from square zero and will have the project eating its own dogfood before we know it.

David Stanek and Mike Pirnat were running tests and experimenting with Kid’s internals with an eye toward making it faster and simpler. They made progress on both of those counts, but it’s not quite done.

I worked with Ian Bicking, Matt Good, Gary Godfrey and Bill Zingler on improving TurboGears’ WSGI support. We created a branch with the goal of really ripping things up to see how far it could go (the answer is: a very long way). On the tgpycon branch, it’s possible to do all kinds of neat tricks with application composition. This work will also make it possible to integrate and share code with other frameworks in many more ways than we can do at present. I’m really excited about this branch, and I’m looking forward to the day when it gets promoted to the trunk.

We could have spent our sprinting time knocking off tons of little items in TurboGears. The path we took worked out better, I think. It’s easy to tackle those little items individually as we do our other work. The stuff we did at PyCon will ultimately have a big effect on the project. Thanks to everyone who participated!