Pylons @PyCon 2008 Wrap-up

Sprints

Wow, they were great. A lot got done, quite a bit more than I was expecting. I'd like to give a big shout-out to the Pylons sprinters (in random order, sorry if I missed anyone):

• Karen Lo
• Mike Orr
• David Montgomery
• Mike Verdone
• Wes Devauld
• Ian Bicking
• Phil Jenvey
• and many more TG2 sprinters

WebHelpers saw some significant gains, including the addition of a literal object for safe HTML escaping, and default Mako auto-escaping in Pylons 0.9.7.

There will definitely be more Pylons/TG2 sprints in the future, in multiple locations around the country.

Tutorials

Ouch… setuptools came through, unfortunately the network didn't, nor did my first built egg of Pylons (unfortunately I got a new laptop recently that was missing some things…). Mark Ramm and I did get the show under way, but the delay in starting up definitely affected how far the tutorial attendee's made it in the basic Wiki project and proved frustrating for all.

I made it through all the Pylons information I had in the Mastering Pylons/TG2 section, but unfortunately had no time left to go into more detail on various aspects of it in a more hands-on style. I definitely won't be doing any more tutorials without ensuring lots of USB thumb-drives are handy with virtualenv Pylons/TG2 ready to go.

Sessions and the Conference

They seemed ok, several of them seemed very, “And this person is giving this talk…. why?”. Note to session presenters, honesty is great but I really do wonder why you're presenting when your opening remarks are, “What I'm about to show you, anyone who's used this already knows, so there's nothing to see here.” Show us something with some zing!

The lightning talks, despite a first day of some awkward sponsored ones, were actually the highlight for me. I almost spit water laughing on the “Speech Recognition does war”, followed up by “His base of God would have I done now” (Originally intended to be ‘Speech recognition does work. oh god, what have I done now?'). Unfortunately Ian Bicking failed to give us an update on ZhangoPyloGears, I can only imagine it has fully attained consciousness and freed itself of his clutches.

Coming up

Pylons 0.9.7 is close at hand, just waiting for some final bits of WebHelpers to drop into place and it should be ready to pop. And one last side-note, I think I finally found the documentation tool of my dreams… Sphinx!