Going to Europython 2009
Tags: europython2009
I’m going to this year’s Europython conference
again. It’ll be my fifth (after 1xCharleroi, 2xGotenburg, 1xGeneva), hurray!
It is always a fun conference where you learn a lot and meet lots of friendly
people.
- Blogging. The best way for me to get the most value out of a conference
is to make summaries of the talks. It forces myself to pay attention as
I have to extract both the overall structure and to extract handy details
and tips. Tim Bray says words are important
and he’s right. The information density of a good summary is incredible.
Who will listen to the audio files of all the talks? Who will at least
browse all available blog summaries? Probably more. Better yet: read the
summaries and cherry-pick audio or video files of the highlights. Seeing a
video of a memorable talk makes it more memorable.
- Food. Wow, the lunches we’ll have sound like a
jolly good idea. So after a lot of discussion, for EuroPython 2009 we’ve
decided to go for what is essentially British peasant food: simple,
satisfying, sustaining and quick to serve. Good idea.
- Program. To give an impression of the kind of talks at Europython,
here’s my pick of the talks that I’ll probably attend:
- Tuesday: mostly testing talks in the morning, perhaps with a small look at
django. I’m looking forward to the afternoon: theming with Deliverance,
XML document publishing, reportlab PDF stuff in combination with django.
And again some testing, now of javascript.
- Wednesday: First a look at TurboGears. I do my work with grok, so a look
over the fence is handy to get extra ideas. Something I’m looking forward
to: the 11:00-12:30 slot in lecture room 1: a semantic web and a web data
handling talk. Not sure yet about the afternoon talks. The “python coin”
talk at 15:30 in the man hall is highly recommended. I heard it once
and that’s just great fun.
- Thursday: man, this is looking to be a good conference. Three interesting
talks on thursday. Decorators and metaclass programming by Bruce Eckel;
an always-interesting talk by Martijn Faassen; “software apprenticeship”
by Christian Theune.
- Sprinting. I’ll attend the Grok sprint
on Friday and Saturday after the conference. Let’s take a couple of big
steps towards a final 1.0 release!
