GIS programmer writing Python in Emacs

I've finally managed to get the slides on my site, so here you go! On an almost unrelated note, here's a tiny cute one-liner that I've used to create a zip of all the code used in slides:

grep "\\lstinputlisting" slides.tex | \
sed 's/.*{\(.*\)}.*/\1/' | \
zip -@ pycon2011-code.zip

It's now almost two weeks since PyCon has come to an end and so it seems as a good time to write a short report about the conference.

I must say that this was my first time at PyCon and actually my first time at a conference of such huge size and thus I was a bit overwhelmed. Nevertheless, I was able to serve as tutorial instructor, bag swagger, session runner and beer drinking in the 7 days I spent at the venue. And of these positions, the hardest one was being a tutorial instructor. Not only I felt pressured by the fact that people actually paid to get to my tutorial and this was my first tutorial given in English, but I also spent more than two months adding, updating and removing material. In the end the tutorial went OK, but I think I hurried a little bit and the fact that tutorial wasn't meant to be one of "code as I talk" types seemed as a disappointment to some of the listeners. I'm still waiting for some feedback from PyCon organizers about the overall rating of my tutorial, but I'm happy that at least nobody walked out of the room during my tutorial.

Main conference featured tons of interesting talks, but of course I couldn't possibly make all of them, apparently because I don't scale to 5 rooms in a nice reproducible fashion. I'm still in process of watching the talks at http://pycon.blip.tv and I suggest anyone interested in Python doing exactly this -- watching all talks, one by one. Some of them might generate more interest, though. For example, I remember how crowded it was at Alex Martelli's talk about API design where people had to stand, because there wasn't a single empty chair in the room. And the same happened at both Raymond Hettinger's talks, where people where starting to reserve places 30 minutes prior to the talk. Some talks were not meant to be educational, or rather, emphasized the fun at the expense of content. I do like talks like these, because getting absolutely massive amount of information whole day non-stop would likely cause brain damage. So, don't forget to watch "Obfuscated Python" by Rev. Johnny Healey and "Exhibition of Atrocity" by Mike Pirnat when you get bored (and I hope you don't).

I also had some time to take part in sprints. I wouldn't say I had much choice in whom to join, as I mostly use Twisted at my current project. Well, I must say that Twisted people aren't that twisted after all and I had quite a bit of fun trying to fix and reproduce older bugs from their bugtracker. I admit that their way of doing code review leads to much higher code quality at the expense of longer ticket processing time. Still, I was able to provide fixes for two tickets and get to first twenty at Twisted Highscore which I find quite cool.

And, as a short summary -- PyCon 2011 and its attendees were awesome and I really want to make it to Santa Clara next year.