Armin Ronacher

EuroDjangoCon was awesome! I came back yesterday evening after 5 days of great talks and sprints from Prague. For the week there I had to postpone some exams for university, but it was totally worth it.

If you haven't been there, some of the best moments of the week in recap:

Talks

Zed Shaw, known for his extravagant presentations decided to use a terminal as his presentation tool that wrote the “slides” to stdout and where then projected to the wall. At the same time he was broadcasting the talk to twitter, sentence by sentence. However seems like he breached the Twitter API limits half way through so the talk is now available in full length in his blog: EuroDjangoConf2009 Keynote All Over Your Twitters. The main point he made during that talk was that it's important for programmers to have interests besides programming that emphasize on the concept of creativity and practice.

The talk by Simon Willison was probably the one that motivated me the most. I have to admit that I often when the easy way replacing a whole part of the Django infrastructure for projects with external libraries instead of trying to find a solution for the problem and improving Django. Simon's talk was addressing one of the problems I had with Django, if not the problem I had with Django. The infamous DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. And I'm not talking about that being an environment variable but that magic singleton named django.conf.settings that is loaded once and nearly impossible to change at runtime.

His talk was addressing mainly replacing middlewares and the URLconf with view-like callables that take the request and return a response, but we where brainstorming with Adrian in an open space later and soon we've had a healthy discussion going on about breaking Django internally into multiple systems that can be optionally configured separately and changed at runtime in a thread-safe manner. The slides from his talk are online on slideshare: Django Heresies.

Joe Stump from digg was talking about large data sets and rethinking the stack. For me this was very interesting because the only time I was personally working with largish data was when I was working for Plurk and it wasn't that big back then :) I personally still have the feeling that the larger the data the weirder the code, but maybe that's how things are. I suppose as a result of his and Michael Malone's talk people will start working on message queues for Django. I was unable to find the slides for the data set talk online, but the one about Rethinking the Stack is online as keynote source: Rethinking_the_Stack.key.zip. Michael's talk was about scaling Django at Pownce and was interesting as well. You can find the slides online on his website: Scaling Django.

Adrian was briefly showing some of the history of Django before it was open sourced in a lightning talk. Even though I was using Django since the first open source release it was interesting as hell what happened before that. Did you know there were like 8000 changesets before the first release? That means that until recently there was more stuff happening before the open source release than afterwards :-) Also I didn't know that Ian Bicking was responsible for Django no longer using code generation (yay!). Really seems like he has his hands in every Python project out there.

There was a lot more, but I think these were my favorites.

Sprints

Sprinting on Django was great fun. The first day we were 50 people in the offices of centrum holdings, the company that provided the room for the sprints. Honza was ordering 30 pizzas and Jacob came with two or more bags of chips and sweets. I got 9 tickets closed so far, 6 still in the pipeline. Alex and I also refactored the file system in Django slightly so that it doesn't require monkey patching of __class__ and replacing all methods in subclasses, like it was the case before.

There was also a dedicated pinax sprint, but I didn't take part of that.

Prague

Prague rocks. What do I have to say more? When I stepped of the train I draw 2000 crowns from my account (~75€) and I was unable to spend all of it the week even though we went drinking and eating every single day. The party was in a place where they had beer taps in the middle of the table and the number of liters the table drew was shown in a scoreboard on the wall. Unfortunately we often went in really large groups which made it hard to get to the really interesting places (like a Jazz bar), but now we know better.

What else?

I didn't take any pictures myself (and I have the ability to avoid photographers) but there are some nice galleries on flick. Next time they should decide on a better tag than edc which is hard to search for on flickr.

• eurodjangocon on flickr
• EuroDjangoCon website
• EuroDjangoCon wiki
• Website of the congress hotel

Can't really wait for djangocon in Portland.