Pycon wrap up
Posted 2005-04-08 9:59 p.m. by mick
tags: python
I’ve held off posting anything on pycon 2005 since most folks are covering it much better than I ever could. I think I’ll just post my list of highs and lows:
Pycon 2005 highs:
- Meeting lots, and lots, and lots of cool python folks. In particular getting to work with the pypi folks.
- The obvious adoption of python in lots of big business and government places. Lots of US Department of Defense folks knocking about with cool “network access permitted” stickers on their laptops.
- Jim Hugunins’ and Greg Stein’s keynotes, lots of cool info there. Remember, ironpython took only 2 months to go from 0.6 to 0.7 ;) I particularly liked the incite into Google’s operations.
- Q2Q, definitely going to be a winner. It reminds me a lot of David Cheriton’s ideas for using nat to route things around instead of switching everyone to IPv6.
- Lightening talks, seriously cool. Like programming crack or something.
- New twisted Perspective Broker, of definite interest to my work (since I’m switching to PB for inter-server chat).
- Python for Series 60, gotta get me a new phone.
- Dabo and schevo, some definite use in corporate areas where Access type apps and VB dominate.
- Alex Martelli’s stuff, though he packs a lot in.
- Anything the pypy folks did, definitely lots of cool stuff coming from them. Yes, even execnet.
And some lows:
- Missing the first day’s lightening talks, d’oh!
- The web off. While a good talk, there was an element of “the sky is falling”. Things aren’t that bad, python just needs to figure out the pattern that works well. Ian’s WSGI talk and subsequent blog posts offset this a lot I think. He offers rational ways out of this. WSGI definitely represents the kind of pattern we want, a way to let people pick the best bit for the task in hand, and still plug everything together.