Sunday, June 27, 2010

Conferences are awesome especially #Pyconau

I've just finished a weekend at the first PyCon held in Sydney. A fantastic conference, well done to everyone involved. Here's Mark Pesce giving the opening keynote where he unveiled his Facebook killer:

pesce.jpg

For me, it only takes one or two new insights to make the whole thing worth while and this year is was Graham Dumpleton's talk on his mod_wsgi where I discovered I should be using DaemonMode. After his talk I rushed out and updated my deployment to use this and now I can go to top and see my processes named after the virtual host they are serving right in top.

As a Django user, it was great to see presentations by Russell Keith-Magee and Malcolm Tredinnick.

Google not only sponsored but provided first-class speakers Pamela Fox and Brian Quinlan.

Brian showed some snippets of this video of creator of xkcd, Randall Munroe speaking at Google. I like the bit where he takes a question from Don Knuth then figures out who it is.



Twitter seems part of all conferences today and it was a great way to follow comments from others as well as useful urls from speakers. I question whether IRC would be just as good though.

The funnest talk was a "war story" by Simon Wittber who provided a war story about controlling 15 tonne industrial robots with Python and ended with a hack that let him control them using a Wimote.



A great conference, a great crowd, lots of fantastic insights. Thanks to everyone.

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