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!