So yesterday was the first day on the PyCon UK and it was great :D The mix of topics and personalities was simply astonishing. But let’s look at it from start to finish: My day basically started (at least it’s the first thing I can remember right now) with a great breakfast right next to the conference venue with something called a “Traditional Breakfast”. I guess this has been the weirdest combination of great stuff I’ve ever had for breakfast. It was some eggs, a sausage, half a tomato, bacon, and beans. More than enough for a whole day :D
But now to the actual talks: First thing in the morning was a talk about using Python to facilitate working on embedded systems. Next came a talk about introducing students to Python as a first language. This was the time I was finally awakening for real and so I actually really enjoyed this one. “Now we are finally more popular than Maths courses” made my day :D
Next, Simon Willison gave a presentation about some of the cool stuff you can do with the new admin interface for Django. If you’ve been on my site during that talk and noticed some slow-downs, well, that was me implementing some of those things on the fly, so there were quite a few things that I’ve never heard of before that talk. Right after Simon Zeth and Andrew West presented some of their work around integrating Django with an XML-database backend.
After lunch-break (which I used for getting my new iPod Touch ;-) ) came probably for me the best talk of the day: Raymond D. Hettinger’s “Core Python Containers – Under the Hood”. It was just great getting some deep information about how the containers internally work without having to skim through the code of CPython ;-) The last talk I attended was about Open Source testing tools.
OK, the containers talk was the best talk of the day for me … until the lighting talks started. There was enough humor for a whole week packed into this with for instance Simon Willison showing how much he loves Zeppelins and many other great presentations. Well, now I’ve got to stop typing in order to be able to listen to the last talk of the 2nd and last day: “Developing a Very Large Python Web Application LEAN style” by Steve Alexander ;-)
Ahh, before I forget: Dinner was also great. Big props to the organizers.
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