After a long year of exiting projects and neverending days at the office, I found myself again from EuroPython conference at Vilnius. The first conference day was full of interesting happenings, mainly reviving old and creating new connections.

For all the sessions I attended during the day, I made some notes on few of them. Here are some basic notes about selected ones:

Build an App in a Week by Marcin Kaszynski

• favpico.com etc
• Suprisingly many of the attendees (about half) use Django
• Use aDjango admin for users, too (not only for admins)
• “Commit early, commit often”
• Share code only via vcs
• Use conventions
• @with_template decorator
• Note: you can use admin docs (template name)
• Tests Do save time
• self.login(), get, find
• coverage.py
• Instant Django

This talk was interesting but didn’t really give much new stuff (at least for me). There was a discussion about how it makes sense to use convention of naming templates like app/viewname.html but I pointed out that if you for some reason want to part from that convention (that I believe most Django developers use), you can just point Django admin site help section to your designer and just document the fact in your modeldocs. No phone calls necassary still and you can have full control of your customized software.

My God, it’s Full of Files by Tommi Virtanen

• “I want to work with files in a uniform way no matter where they are”
• path.py
• eagain.net

This talk was interesting, but we clearly need someone that says “yes, I can do this”. I, for one, will buy a beer to anyone who makes file- and directory handling more uniform and easier with Python.

py.test — Rapid Testing with Minimal Effort by Holger Krekel

• looping tests
• HTML generation
• javascript tests

This talk was really interesting. It made me want to try py.test with Django test framework but I suppose that it’s not compatible. The talk also made me miss my old two-display setup. Automatically looping tests are very neat.

Data Portability and Python — Christian Scholz

• OpenId
• Yadis
• Oauth
• FOAF
• RDF
• microformats
• pydataportability.net

Very nice talk in every possible way, but there were nothing new for me this time.

Keynote, Guido van Rossum

• “Open source needs to move or die”
• what breaks and why
• new features
  • argument annotations
  • abstract base classes
  • extended iterable unpacking
  • new string format method
• enables future evolution
• 2to3 tool
• switch when 1) youre ready and 2) all your dependencies have been ported
• “well help libraries to upgrade”
• do now
• use dict.iterkeys()
  • “Django has been separating unicode for. years now”
  • 2.6 warns you with -3 flag
• q&a
  • documentation is changing (will be up for 2.6)
  • distributing different versions is easy

Quido has been brainwashing us. Only a couple of more times this same time and I’ll actually agree most of the features and if want to try them.

For me this day was a success. Made a couple of new friends, hooked up with old friends and got to listen sme brilliant sessions. During the night we went to a couple of small bars in the old town nd had even more fun.

The only unsure thing about this evening was if we’re going to see the girls again or not 🙂