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It's conference time once again. In two weeks, I'll be attending PyCon, a conference that no Pythonistas should miss, then one week later, I will be at ConFoo, a conference that we are organizing at Montréal-Python along with other local user groups.

If you've been to a multi-track conference, you know the drill. As the speaker wraps up for his conclusion, instead of paying attention, you rush to unplug your laptop and to reach for your annotated program. Indeed, you've got only a moment to find out in what room the next talk that you planned to see is.

But this year is different.

One week ago, PyCon unveiled a very nice track selector application. It's very nice because it allows you to select in advance the tracks that you don't want to miss, to add them to you calendar application or to share your schedule with friends. That way, no more last minute rush to find where you go next.

I was really happy to see that so I shared the word with the ConFoo team, mentioning that it's the kind of things that we should develop for ConFoo 2011 next year. Well, it turned out that Anna, the ConFoo webmaster, really liked the idea and she came up with a schedule builder for ConFoo after only 48 hours. Both selectors have their own strengths and weaknesses but at least they get the job done. Hopefully more conferences will follow the trend of implementing track selectors; this is the kind of simple features that really improve the user experience.

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Since I'm coordinator of the Python track at ConFoo.ca, I like to keep track of what's going on at other Python conferences. PyCon recently published the list of selected talks so I decided to summarize it into a few high level stats:

• 96 sessions, that's 32 per day;
• 69 presenters, 1 for 3 sessions, 8 for 2 sessions, 60 for a single session (there are panels and sessions with more than one presenters);
• 75 sessions of 30 mins, 20 of 45 mins, and one that my scraper missed somehow;
• 27 'beginner' sessions, 60 'intermetiate', and 8 'advanced'.

How does that compare with PyCon 2009? Honestly, I don't know. Quick like that I can say that it's going to be a larger PyCon and that the level of the talks is increasing but that's about it.

How does it compare to ConFoo? Hard to say since we have not selected the talks yet but it's sure to influence us on the number of talks per speaker and on the level of the sessions. By the way, the ConFoo call for speakers was extended by a few days so it's not too late to submit something over the weekend.

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Blogging live from PyCon. Guido van Rossum opened the morning session with the keynote talk. He covered a lot of ground but one idea that struck me is that he wants to more of less freeze the standard library.

He proposes that with a perfectly valid rational: if the Python dev team removes a module from the standard lib, some program out there will break and on the other hand, if a new module is added to the standard lib, it has to be extremely stable since it will now be tied to the somewhat slow release schedule of CPython. That position is obvious but Guido also mentioned that more work is getting done on the specification of modules dependencies and that is the key to a dramatically new landscape in the Python world.

Setuptools already did a very good job at dependencies specification and Guido did acknowledge it. With Setuptools, one can define that his package will depend on some other package with a dependency spec of the form "depname>=1.3.5". Once you know the dependencies of a package, it's almost trivial to write a tool that will install a package and all its dependencies; easy_install is a good example of such a tool.

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Blogging live from PyCon. I'm still at PyCon learning new tricks and meeting pythonistas from around the world. The first conference day went smoothly; the wifi was a bit shaky so I was forced to listen to all the good talks.

With four tracks, there is a lot to variety, no matter what you are looking for. Testing, quality assurance, research, design, games, tales from the trenches: they are all here. There are two one-hour sessions of lightning talks per day; that gives us a really good overview on who's working on what and that makes sure that we know when to go to the open space sessions. Open space is great: we have a bunch of smaller rooms where people can meet to work or talk about whatever they want. There's a pin-board where we can put the subject of a meeting and book a room. Rooms a are booked in one hour slots; the formula is similar to Bar Camp but more oriented toward working groups rather than on presentations.

We went for a tasty snack and few beers at People and Slice in Chicago (they sure love generic names in here). Fortunately, downtown Chicago is not at depressing as the area around the hotel. It's pedestrian friendly with lots of pubs and cafés.

Looking forward for another day of dynamic talks. More to come.

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Blogging live from PyCon. One thing that I found really interesting during the tutorial sessions was to see what kind of development environment other Python hackers were using. At first, I found it quite unusual to see Joe Gregorio using gedit, an editor that I found very limited compared to the very rich traditional Unix editors like Emacs and Vim. Then Joe started giving us and overview of what appengine can do and I was blown away.

I mean, I was blown away by appengine but I was also really impressed by how efficient Joe was with his editor. One feature that was pushing him quickly from one from-scratch example to the next was the snippets plug-in for gedit.

Snippets are templates for typical programming constructs. There are things that we code over and over, boiler plate, repetitive code, almost always the same but not quite. You know what I mean, classes, for-loops, method definitions, test-cases. Python do well without most of the boiler plate code that is mandatory in other languages but you still have some of it and when you code all day long, it adds up to a lot of boiler plate at the end of the week.

I'm not ready yet to move to gedit so I looked for the snippet modes available for emacs; there's a lot of them. I know ELisp but as some people commented on the emacs wiki, a template language that is Lisp based tends to become too syntax heavy and hard to read for the kind of small pieces of code that you use snippets for. After looking at the non-sexp options, I decided to go with YASnippet. It has a very engaging demo screencast and unlike most of the contenders it's both actively maintained and easy to setup. I haven't used it much yet but I really like it so far.

update: the former link to the screen cast was obviously wrong. Sorry about that.

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Blogging live from PyCon. I'm still in Chicago having quite a good time learing stuff related to Python. My second tutorial for the first day was on functional testing with twill and selenium. I already do a lot of that stuff but it was nice to see a good overview of what a mostly automated test suite for functional tests can look like. There was a lot of nice tools that were used to glue everything together. I was a casual user of nosetest and I really look forward to unchain all the powerful features that I didn't know about.

Day two started full speed with a tutorial on Tosca Widgets by Chris Perkins. The level was perfect for me and I like the fact that the framework used for the hands on session was Pylons. It's not just that I already know Pylons quite well, it has something to do with the fact that Pylons is so light as a framework that you can really understand what's going on. Many exercised with a very tight feed back loop and one-on-one help. Wow! Why can't universities hire people like that to give the lectures?

After my second dinner at PyCon, I know that the vegetarian menu, no matter how tasty it is, is sure to keep me slim. It must be the first time that I ever go back to get a second serving of salad.

Last tutorial was on advanced SQLAlchemy with Michael Bayer and Jason Kirtland, the main implementors of Alchemy. That one was quite unique as it featured interactive slides: the slides consisted of a Python scripts that execute code with syntax highlighting when you moved from one slide to the next then give you an interactive interpreter so you can play with the new classes and objects that were just created. That's great but the pace of the presentation was extremely fast and I had a hard time to catch up. When the Alchemy guys say "advanced", they really mean it. Fortunately I still have the slides with me so I can decipher them when I get some time.

I'm now waiting for Francis to get out of his plane so we can go for a beer. What a day; I feel like just one week ago I didn't know anything about the language that I use everyday. That conference is worth it more than I expected. More to come.

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Blogging live from PyCon. Here I am attending PyCon in Chicago or at least somewhat close to it. The Hotel is very nice but the location is somewhat depressing. My room as a good view on both the train track on the highway; I can't see a single point of interest at a walking distance. It's a good thing that meals are supplied and that the bar at the hotel is filled with Python super stars.

The tutorial on Google AppEngine is very interesting; it moves fast and the presenter know his stuff extremely well. What else to expect when you get the opportunity of being trained by an AppEngine implementor. More to come.

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March is a busy month in the Free Software world. From 2009-03-21 to 2009-03-22 I'll be attending Libre Planet in Boston then from 2009-03-25 to 2009-03-29 I will be at PyCon in Chicago. Lot's of great speakers and two days of advanced hands-on tutorial by the leaders of the industry. You can't go wrong with that.

I still don't know how I will travel to Libre Planet though. Traveling by train would require going up to New York then back north to Boston and all the bus fares that I found so far take 12 hours or more to reach Boston. I might end up taking the plane but the best option would be to find someone else for car pooling. If you are in on around Montreal and that you plan to attend Libre Planet by car, let me know.

update: I'll be car pooling with Pascal Charest from Laboratoires Phoenix. Woohoo!

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