[Dev] PyCon trip report

[Grant Baillie]

This was my very first PyCon, and it confirmed for me that the  
beloved dynamic language we use in Chandler is very much alive and  
growing. Overall, there was a great sense of energy and enthusiasm  
about Python.

I started out the conference by attending one of the Thursday  
tutorials, "Agile Development and Testing In Python". This turned out  
to be very interesting and informative: the presenters, Grig  
Gheorghiu and Titus Brown, have done a lot of research into various  
testing and development tools while putting together a web mail  
aggregator. Highlights of these for me were: twill (Titus's web  
navigation scripting and testing tool), selenium (the javascript  
testing framework), Trac, various unit testing frameworks, and the  
twisted buildbot.

Outside of OSAF-related stuff, the technical highlight for me was  
probably Guido's "State of Python" keynote; there are some nifty new  
features coming out in 2.5. I finally took the chance to read up on  
coroutines (PEP 342), the "with" statement (PEP 343) and setuptools.  
I tried to attend talks on as wide a range of topics as possible: it  
was very cool to see people using python in applications from  
robotics to analysis of osteoporosis clinical trials.

On a somewhat tangential note, Katie shared the PyCon calendar on  
cosmo-demo; it turns out that on the trunk of Chandler (i.e. with  
section support), you can view the schedule in "All" mode, sorted by  
date, and this gives you a nicely grouped display where you can  
easily see which sessions you can can choose from in any given time  
slot.

The OSAF talks and sessions were well-attended and seemed to go well.  
As other people have mentioned, there were good questions asked at  
the  Chandler BoF session. Katie did an admirable job of demoing  
Chandler (including new features) within the confines of a 5-minute  
lightning talk. Brian's rock star alter ego made his i18n talk  
entertaining (as well as informative), Jeffrey explained his vobject  
library clearly and succinctly, and drummed up several participants  
for the later vobject sprint. For me, it was good to get out in  
public and give a talk (on zanshin), despite having been somewhat  
trepidated beforehand. Afterwards I did have a couple of really good  
hallway conversations with people related to the talk's content.

On the sprint days, I ended up working on adding ICalendar VTODO  
(task) support to import/export. It was good to take a whack at this  
while surrounded by Chandler expertise in a lot of areas! As other  
people have mentioned, on the second day of sprints, it was good to  
have a lively (and somewhat mind-bending at times) discussion of  
ideas (mainly pje's) for upgrading user's data.

--Grant