PyCon Roundup - Days 0 and 1

Fri, Feb 26, 2010

This year’s PyCon was completely and utterly awesome, to the point where anything I point in writing won’t do it justice. But I’m going to try to anyways.

Day 0

Day 0 was Wednesday, I got in pretty late and didn’t do much of anything besides meet up with people in the hotel lobby for an hour or two. Still, it was good to be able to catch up with people, and put some faces to people I knew exclusively via the internet. Finally I had to finish up some homework (in Ruby on Rails of all things) so it wouldn’t be an albatross around my neck for the rest of the conference.

Day 1

Day 1 for me was Thursday, for most conference atendees this was the last day of tutorials, however I was going to the language summit instead. The language summit impressed me with the Python community in ways I can barely describe. We had a laundry list of issues to cover, ranging from the state of packaging, to the Unladen Swallow PEP, to what policies for pure Python and C modules should be in the standard library. Besides a heated discussion about setuptools, distutils, and distribute every decision was handled extremely professionally, covering pros, cons, and impact on users. A few of the conclusions (which you’ve probably already heard about) are that The Hitchhikers Guide to Packaging is awesome, Unladen Swallow PEP accepted, stdlib modules that come with a C variety exclusively for speed must also have a pure Python version, stdlib modules written in C to interface with other systems are ok (but optionally having a ctypes version should be nice for alternate distributions). At lunch I met Antonio Rodriguez (one of the keynote speakers) and two Red Hat (and Fedora) developers. It was interesting to discuss the state of Linux, Ubuntu, and other distributions with people who are professionally involved in them.

I’ll be trying to dedicate a full post to each of the remaining days, though as I’ve said there’s a ton to cover. Really the takeaway for you should be: PyCon is awesome and if it’s humanly possible for you to make it, you should.