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).
