Buzzword Compliancy

I overheard in the atrium that VGER-heavy websites have a better ROI on SEO.

I’ll have to investigate

Swimming between tutorials

Yesterday, between tutorials, some brave soul went swimming. I couldn’t do it. The pool is very exposed.

I’d post a picture but I don’t have one. I mean, I wouldn’t take a picture of a stranger swimming in a pool. That’s creepy. But, I mean, someone must have. I can’t be the only one to have been transfixed by the tutorial-day swimmer.

Tutorial Day

This is my second PyCon – I went to the first one in Dallas 2 years ago. It was awesome. I haven’t been to many conferences – these two PyCons and CodeMash earlier this year (CodeMash rocks!).

I went to all three tutorial sessions:

1) Eggs and Buildout

2) Advanced SQLAlchemy

3) Web Testing

Eggs and buildout was okay, but I already knew most of the egg/setuptools-related stuff. Review isn’t a bad thing, though. Unfortunately, the handouts for the talk were unavailable and with the state of the wireless network, it was impossible to follow along with the examples. (If you can’t hit the CheeseShop, nothing works). Others in the room said it was overheated – but I was fine. More on internal climate later.

Advanced SQLAlchemy was awesome. Mike Bayer and Jason Kirtland were utilizing a very cool “handout” mechanism: Python scripts that you run at the command line, which invoke an interpreter, and have sectioned code examples. For instance, I run “python ormquery.py” and this is what I see:

% SQL echo is now on
% Quick mode on (enter will advance to the next slide)
% This is an interactive Python prompt.
% Extra commands: commands, next, goto, show, info, quick, echo
% Type “next” to start the presentation.
>>>

I’m left in an interpreter where I can do anything – in addition to the “extra commands” mentioned. By typing “next” + enter (or just enter), it “runs” the next slide. The example code they had on the projected presentation ran in my interpreter – I didn’t need to type up the examples myself, laziness wins. At the end of each section were exercises (questions that you could try to code in your interpreter)

Very very cool. Very well-prepared. Awesome presentation.

I was originally scheduled to go to the Advaned Pylons/TurboGears2 tutorial, but instead went to the Web Testing tutorial when I heard they’d be talking about Selenium (among many other testing tools). Selenium is something I want to start using at work (and at home too of course).

Titus Brown gives a great presentation. Informative, funny. Very good. I use nose for tests, and have used coverage.py. I was newly introduced to scotch for replaying web requests and figleaf for code coverage. I like that figleaf has html output (maybe coverage.py does too, and I just don’t know about it). I know I need to do more testing and this talk really helped motivate me. Grig Gheorghiu gave the other half of the talk, about buildbot, etc, but unfortunately I didn’t find that quite as interesting as the testing stuff itself.

All in all, I enjoyed tutorial day. It was long as hell, and I bitched a lot, and thought about skipping out on one (very glad I didn’t), but it was very cool in the end.

After tutorial day, we hung out in the bar with Gary (from ClePy) for a while. The Crowne Plaza lost two points – apparently, I wasn’t able to order the Pasta Primavera – only appetizers. Bastards. (If you didn’t already know, I’m staying nextdoor at the DoubleTree).

Wednesday Night on the Town

So, the first group of AG Interactive pythonistas (myself, Mike Pirnat, Mike Robellard, Dave Noyes and Cory Sitko) who came early for the tutorials, ended up spending Wednesday night making our way downtown to dinner.

Leaving the Crowne Plaze around 6:30, we walked for a bit to get to the station, spent half hour on the L train to get downtown, then walked down to Frontera Grill. Frontera Gril is attached to Topolobampo, which I’m told is more upscale and probably wouldn’t want me to be there. The wait was 90-120 minutes, or just jump over to the first-come first-served bar area…which would also probably have a long wait.

As the five of us walked in, a table of people stood up to leave. Which was awesome, as we were damn hungry. So after about two minutes we were able to sit down. The food was good. It was spicy (to be expected, being a Mexican restaurant). The ambiance and company were enjoyable.

Later on, on the walk home, someone who doesn’t need to be named (we’ll call him Dave N.) explained that at the bar behind us, there was plenty of “side boob”. I’ll leave it up to the imagination of the reader to fill in details (no one other than Dave saw it, but we have no reason not to believe him [ I mean, just because he's the only one who saw the guy with all the White Castle, doesn't mean he can't be trusted])

We ended up getting back around 11:00. It was cold as hell during that last walk from the station to the hotel. All in all, it was a good night

Did you get your PyCon2008 cookie?

I’m a procrastinator, always have been–and let’s face it: always will be. I couldn’t figure out my schedule for PyCon this year until the last minute. While I got scared and registered for the conference itself a few weeks back, I didn’t both making airplane/hotel plans until this past Friday (truth be told, I hadn’t decided whether to come for the tutorials or not).

By the time I got around to making hotel reservations, the Crowne Plaza was booked – nothing available even for normal/non-conference rates. Nothing. So I ended up booking at the DoubleTree next door.

I ended paying a bit more than I would have had I not waited so long. (I’m not too disappointed though, because fortunately my employer, AG Interactive, is paying for my excursion to PyCon). I also have to walk next door every morning, rather than just stumble downstairs. Plus, most people with the conference will be at the Crowne Plaza, which will be the place to hang out.

The up side?

4 words: DoubleTree Chocolate Chip Cookie

Upon checking in to the DoubleTree, not only was I given a room key and a smile – I was offered a freshly-baked, still-warm chocolate chip cookie. Never before have I ever been immediately handed food upon checking into a hotel. It makes sense, though – whenever I finally get to my destination, I’m usually pretty damn hungry. It was good . It contained walnuts, but I’ll forgive them this time (my wife, who’s allergic, is not with me, so I could safely eat the cookie).

While I’m excited about the conference itself, and looking forward to the tutorials in the morning – I can’t stop thinking about that cookie. It made my day.