Richard Jones' Log: PyCon day 1

Thu, 24 Mar 2005

Wow, what a day. I started the day off tired as I only slept about two hours last night (I guess the jetlag finally overcame the adrenaline). I managed to stay awake though, and got to meet a whole lot more people face-to-face. It's all a bit of a blur, but one of the highlights was meeting Ping, even though I was a bit addled and didn't really make much sense ;)

Highlight talks included some of the "web" track including the PyWebOff and dynamic web GUI talks. It was good to hear the Zope roadmap in Jim's presentation too - it cleared up a lot about where Zope 2, 3 and the ZODB are going. Holger's talk about the "py" library was enlightening, though I missed the start of the py.test section. By the afternoon my brain was just too fried for going to the serious OO programming talks, so I just kinda drifted around talking to people.

I had an open-space discussion with some Roundup users (including Ping :). We discussed some of the warts, and one of the ones I've known about for a long time - templates are hard to edit and fall out of sync with schema changes - might have a solution.

A number of people stopped me to thank me for Roundup, which was nice. A few other people were interested in the PyPI development - though there's still a huge number (most likely a comfortable majority) of people at the conference who don't even know it exists. I've lined up another Lightning Talk entitled "PyPI: Python's CPAN" in which I'll give a demo. The five minutes is plenty of time to show the basic submission interfaces. Unfortunately, at one point someone (I forget who, it's all a blur) started asking questions about the python.org machine and services and I started to talk about the need for someone full-time to look after it and implement some of the services we'd all like -- and I think the discussion ended up going a little sour, so I apologise to whoever it was as I was not trying to be offensive, I was just plain exhausted.