Armin Ronacher

Wow. DjangoCon was a blast. Not only because of the topics there, but also because of Portland itself and the people I met there and at the conference. I learned tons of new stuff and finally got the chance to meet some of the guys I previously only knew from IRC. Django really got one of the coolest communities I've seen.

The Highlights

The best parts of the conference were not even the talks, but the stuff that happens after the conference as always. The coolest talk in my opinion was Simon talking about “Cowboy Programming”. I loved it because the idea of hacking on stuff on a fort for a couple of days, disconnected from the internet is a honking great idea. I will totally do that in Austria next year with a small group of people who are interested :)

The other kind of highlight was the Django and HTML5 talk which turned out to have nothing to do with either Django or HTML5, but instead with Sproutcore. Because it did not really explain what Sproutcore was, except that it makes 5req/sec a clarificatory website appeared right after the talk.

Ian Bicking's talk turned out to be something completely different than what everybody was expecting. Ted Leung described it as “a free software programmer’s midlife crisis”.

Unfortunately neither Jacob nor Adrian where at the conference, but that did not matter too much because that did not harm the conference at all. It might have helped for the sprints though to see Jacob there, the legal part was not really covered at all these sprints.

What did we do?

Whenever Python programmers meet somewhere they hack on stuff. DjangoCon was no exception.

Ian and I started working on an updated version of PEP 333 but we immediately got some negative feedback from Graham (who unfortunately wasn't there) on some of the changes. I will update the PEP next week to clarify the points he brought up and read up on the web-sig to not miss anything.

Alex Gaynor and Eric Florenzano spend a whole night to start a comet framework on top of tornado called Hurricane. They actually started with a chat application first as far as I remember. When Mike Malone joined it was promptly rewritten into something more abstract that works on different queue backends. I had fun helping out a little bit but so far my contributions to that project where not that interesting. Let's see what comes up next.

Amazingly I also found some time releasing a new version of Jinja 2 and fixing some bugs in Werkzeug. Also very cool: there are Werkzeug users in Portland and they do some amazing stuff.

Embarrassingly I did not work on any of the things I wanted to work on for DjangoCon. Neither my WSGI changes for Django nor my idea of a stacked settings module, but I will probably try to hack on that after the GSOC branches are merged in which my changes would depend on. On the bright side: I think I did something useful for Django by explaining packaging to Simon.

I also did a brief talk about Solace at the PDX-Python usergroup meeting and at DjangoCon as lightning talk. Unfortunately not yet confident talking in a non-native language, hope I will do better next time.

And of course I did not drink a lot of alcohol with Mike Malone and Michael Richardson ;)

What's up next?

Meh. Not much I'm afraid. The only bad thing about DjangoCon is that it makes me sad going back to where I was before. Missing all the people sharing the same interest, missing the startup-esk flair of Portland, missing Michael Richardson, Adam Lowry, Michael Pelletier, Jason Kirkland, Brett Carter, Mike Malone and all the others I met there and had a very good time with. Hope we will see each other again on PyCon or DjangoCon somewhere.

Related:

• pictures on flickr
• DjangoCon Website