EuroPython 2008, day 3

For me, the main theme for the third and last day of the conference was Django. Day started with a session by Honza Král about Django newforms admin, which gave me a pretty good idea what I have to do in preparing for the migration to the new admin interface. Later on the day I had many interesting discussions about varions Django-related things, including ideas about having something like Django release party here in Europe, too.

At Vilnius TV TowerTurns out there are quite a lot Djangonauts here in EuroPython, we just arent organized very well so most of us don’t know about each other. Lively after-conference discussions about career choises, Web Design and working with Django in general were definitely the high point of the conference so far.

A couple of hour later on the evening, decisions about quiet evening at the Sky Bar (at the 22nd floor of the conference hotel) were forgotten and, again, we headed for the old town. This time we ended up in some night club and, well, yeah, we had a great time 🙂

EuroPython 2008, day 2

I skipped most of the sessions for the day as they didn’t seem even remotely interesting to me. But, the ones I did attend where really good.

Last nights partying kept me pretty much in bed for better part of the morning. Descriptor tutorial by Raymond D. Hettinger was very good and I think it was actually the first conference tutorial ever that actually teached me something about programming and Python in general.

There was quite a bit testing-related material on the Lightning talks. One thing I wrote down on my notes was the phrase “Given enough tests, all bugs are shallow” (originally from Linus Torvalds in a form “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”).

The keynote talk for the day was something that absolutely blew my mind. Hans Rosling talked about Gapminder and how statstical data and databases should be free. First thing that crossed my mind when listening to him was that “I wonder if Adrian Holovaty has ever talked to this guy — they’d have much to talk about”. If you havent heard about Gapminder or Hans Rosling before, you should definitely see his talk on last years TED conference. In Django-terms, thats some cool shit 🙂

EuroPartyPython 2008, night 2

Smile!

After Roslings inspiring keynote there was the conference dinner. We ate well and headed again to down town Vilnius. (Todays dream team was Edgars, Nicolas and me.) The two girls from last night showed up as they had promised. We had great time with them for a couple of hours untill they left early. We stayed at the bar and eventually hooked up with three cute Lithuanian girls. Lots of dancing, beer and fun until the bar closed at 3 am. What a great night — again!

EuroPython 2008, day 1

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 🙂

Lightning talk: Hacking EuroPython.org (with Django)

I gave a lightning talk yesterday at the EuroPython conference about my little MyEuroPython mashup. The intention of the talk was not to promote the site but to raise a conversation about how to make better conference websites (and especially EuroPython.org).

Main points of my presentation were that conferences are about communication and interaction. Current EuroPython.org does not give any tools for that, and it would be great to have something more 2.0 for the site.

For example:

  • Simple site structure with good (live)search
  • Registration and personal preferences using OpenID
  • Allow commenting of sessios
  • Provide a personalizable timetable (that is useful for example when using a mobile phone)
  • Free the data; RSS feeds (and possibly other APIs?)from everything
  • Aggregate blog entries, images, links to the main site

Good thing was, there was talk about the presentation afterwards, and we actually volunteered for doing the EuroPython.org with Django next year. Hopefully the discussion lives on!

At EuroPython 2007

I arrived at Vilnius Lithuania with my colleague on saturday. We spent the weekend by exploring the beautiful old city and today we’re getting into the business with EuroPython.

Only a couple of weeks late, I today published MyEuroPython, which provides an alternative to the EuroPython conference schedule (powered by Django — of course). It’s very untested and unpolished at the moment, but at least I’m using it myself 🙂 I’m giving a lightning talk about the site later on today.

Hopefully we’ll get a some kind of Django-meetup arranged this week. I’ll be posting more on the conferense soon. Meanwhile, my Jaiku page updates somewhat often and Flickr images, too.