Not sure how to break out the parts. But I’m sitting in Dallas this morning after a flight of questionable enjoyment at PyCon 2006.
Of course, so far there’s nothing of terrible note — I got wireless access finally and I’m waiting for the Python 102 class to start. Unfortunately, it looks like I’ll have to miss out on the Agile Testing tutorial this afternoon, but I’ll supplement it by going to the Twisted one this afternoon.
(Note to self: Follow up with the Agile Testing teacher to get his material and review them.)
Python 102 Review:
In all honesty, I was hoping this would cover things like MetaClasses, generators and more detailed information about the “next tier” of Python::Dev in my mind. In reality, and the instructor noted this up front, while covering some interesting aspects of things like generators, the more “meaty” parts were not covered.
However, I stuck around, and ended up learning a few things. The initial overview was in the context of a scalable file duplicate finder. While I don’t care about finding dupes — some of the internals he used (using os.walk to provide a generator for the comparison iterator) as well as read things in controlled chunks in a specific method and using the first 1k of a file as the initial “is this a dupe” pass (while not novel concepts, it gave me some good ideas).
I ended up working on those ideas during the second part — putting emails in Databases. Just not an interesting domain for me. But I did try to perk up for the wxPython tutorial. At which point I swore that I would never do UI programming. The wxPython stuff in and of itself is really cool…
But trying to manage a UI app makes me want to hurt myself.
In any case, the morning tutorial did not cover a lot of new ground for me, which is fairly disappointing. However, I got some ideas, and learned a little — so I’ll throw this into the “win” category.
However, I’m now sitting in the same room to learn about twisted. OH TWISTED HOW YOU TAUNT ME. (And, the Agile Testing thing is filled).
Twisted Review:
Dear god. Twisted is one of those projects that I think would be excellent to leverage in house for some of the applications I maintain. The biggest issue is of course — Twisted is huge.
Twisted also requires you to turn your head on it’s side and “rethink” you methods of doing things. The presentation was very up front with this fact, and mentioned that re-architecting your application to act as a library Twisted calls is the proper method of design.
He covered a lot of ground — and to be honest, once he covered the Perspective Broker (PB) my brain began to shut down. Things like the avatar system and the deferred stuff is just mind blowing.
But I took notes — and of course I learned a lot from the presentation. When I get back to sunny old boston I am going to have to spend some “quality time” with twisted. Given that I am in the throes of re-architecting the ATF (Automated Testing Framework) we use in house, now might be a good time to examine Twisted.
The Conch module will be of special interest for me, given I do a lot of parallel SSH work, and the basic SSH client has some nuances that make me choke sometimes.
All in all — I think it was a good day. I wanted to network a bit more, meet more people and *cough*recruit*cough* people, but everyone was locked in tutorials all day long, and when most of you have your brains leaking out — well, describing highly distributed archives just doesn’t get the brain functioning again.