[Dev] PyCON musings

[Andi Vajda]

With the ample feedback already posted to this list about last week at PyCON, 
here are few things I can add:

   - PyCON is much much nicer than Java One. It is much more informal, much
     more to the point, completely un-corporate.
   - Sometimes, it felt like some religious organization run by very nice
     zealots. For more on that see http://www.pythonology.org/ and then compare
     it with http://www.scientology.org/ :)
   - I went to a number of talks, most of which were very interesting. The most
     entertaining of all was a talk by Michelle Levesque about the scattered
     state of python-based web technology implementations.
   - The main reason I went was for PyLucene and the talk I gave there. It was
     the first time in 15 years I spoke in public, at least this time I got to
     use English (last time I talked in 1989 at the FAW in Ulm, Germany, in
     mostly German).
     I got to meet with some people interested in PyLucene. One PyLucene user
     was there too, Wai Yip Tung, who also gave a lightening talk about his
     project, MindRetrieve.net, built with PyLucene. Wai Yip Tung is local and
     I invited him to come present his stuff at one of our OSAF lunch/staff
     meetings as his app could become a nice Chandler parcel.
     Other PyLucene users I had never heard of before just walked up to me and
     warmly thanked me for doing it and shook my hand. Kind of nice :)
   - Lightening talks were a most refreshing way of presenting things.
     Basically it goes as follows: you cram a bunch of geeks into a too small
     room and have ten of them in one hour come up to the mike and talk about
     their project in 5 minutes or less. Very interesting, no time to get
     bored. I must say that all ten people had something interesting to say.
     I wish there was more of that.

I'm very glad I went to PyCON. Lots of nice people, lots of opportunities to 
meet people and find synergies between projects.

Andi..