Pycon 2009

PyCon is wrapping up and I just thought I'd mention a few things of interest that I saw.

Adam Christian gave a presentation on windmill which is a functional test tool like selenium, written in python. It looks pretty good, but I didn't really see how it differentiated itself from selenium.

Adrian Holovaty gave a talk called "Behind the scenes of EveryBlock.com" If you don't know about everyblock you should check it out. His talk was mostly about technical challenges they faced and how they addressed them. I won't go into detail, but want to say this is a very cool project and I think it offers a glimpse into the kind of useful things that would be possible if government could find a way to share their public records online.

Michael Foord gave a great lightning talk called "Metaclasses in 5 minutes" Plus he has an awesome "Knuth is my homeboy" shirt (see picture). Be like mike and get one here.

Guido Van Rossum gave a keynote. Two things about that: First, he is trying to "fade away" from being in charge of the python community. Second, python is very similar to lisp. If someone could explain to me what he meant by python and lisp being close, I would be grateful.

Joe Gregorio gave a talk on "The (lack of) design patterns in python". It was good and really applies to most any dynamic language. Read the slide deck to see that popular design pattern names are less likely to be talked about on the python mailing list than say, "the pope" or "sausage". Also some great quotes in there about why dynamic languages with metaprogramming basically have all these common patterns built in.

Jack Diederich Gave a very detailed talk on class decorators in Python, and how they make your code more readable than metaprogramming. Good info about this python language feature can be found here.

Finally, Gregor Lingl a high school teacher from vienna who wrote the turtle module from python 2.6 and 3.x spoke about "Seven ways to use Python's new turtle module" He showed off this beautiful demonstration that animated the path of the earth and moon going around the sun. Check out slides 15 and 16 of his talk. Also see slide 28 for a screenshot of his nice animation of building a penrose kite. He wrote a book on this "Python für Kids" Too bad it is in German. Logo rules!