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Ahh, Day 4. The day I get to crawl through the air­ports back to Boston. It’s going to be a short day (we have to leave @ noon for our flight) but I’ll catch the keynote and at least the sec­ond revised run of the Agile test­ing presentation.

I had a bit of a Good Thought last night, and once I get back to Boston, I am going to check with my Robot Mas­ters to see if I can start com­mu­nity work on some­thing instead of mak­ing it a Prod­uct thing. Since I already have Secret Project A-X, I will call this “Secret Project Squir­rel Swarm” (a hint is in the name).

I’ve been sit­ting in the Bram Cohen keynote for awhile now. The inter­view has had a few inter­est­ing points, but for the most part, it’s non tech­ni­cal, and not very com­pelling. I would have liked to have hear more of his thoughts about Python, imple­men­ta­tions, etc.

Largely, the inter­view style just sim­ply did not work. Of course, lis­ten­ing to the tan­gents and the dis­cus­sion on how to scam credit card debit was inter­est­ing. (ok maybe not)

I think more com­pelling keynotes (in the thread of Guido’s would be good for next year).

I’m going to sit in on the Agile test­ing fol­lowup now.

Well, I’m actu­ally sit­ting at the air­port. I ended up leav­ing mid­way through the Agile pre­sen­ta­tion. I’m already very clear about the sub­ject mat­ter, and again, another pre­sen­ta­tion on the test­ing of web applications.

I know the tools involved, Build­Bot, Coverage.py, etc. Largely, none of these tools (out­side of Sele­nium and maybe Twill) are remotely use­ful in my work. There’s a rea­son we write our own test­ing framework.

Kudos to the guys for pre­sent­ing the sub­ject mat­ter. I’m irri­tated I missed the full ses­sion, but I have the slides. Again, I’m look­ing at this through the nar­row view of “how does this apply to me”. And none of the Agile stuff pre­sented really did (or it’s old hat for me).

So, now I am sit­ting in DFW grind­ing through my post con thoughts — I’ve already posted my ini­tial cri­tique (and filled AMKs ears with some before I left), but I think instead of being a pas­sive critic, I am going to try to help to make next year better.

I plan on (when I get back and sane again) begin­ning to out­line some pre­sen­ta­tions I might like to do for next year’s Con (pro­vided I get to go). I am also going to give active feed­back to the PyCon team, who should be com­mended and lauded for the job that they did do.

I enjoyed it in a lot of ways, but I can’t com­ment on the ROI for the trip. A 500$ room bill, food, plus 300$ worth of reg­is­tra­tion fees makes me balk at a trip next year (esp. as it could very well be on my own dime).

Some abstract things I did learn this year:

• I need to work on get­ting more of my time fed into the com­mu­nity, I need to exam­ine exist­ing projects, and see if I can find a way of con­tribut­ing to them, or I need to begin my own
• The mar­ket for expe­ri­enced Python peo­ple *does* exist (of course, I knew that ahead of time — there’s a bunch of places in Boston hiring
• There’s a lot of wicked smart peo­ple within the com­mu­nity, again — I reg­u­larly feel as if I am the jan­i­tor in a room filled with rocket scientists.
• In addi­tion to being smart, there’s a lot of nice peo­ple there.

I need to do a tech­ni­cal brain dump for work this week, I’ll prob­a­bly post that here too.

(note, I finally got to post this monday)

Ahh, Day 4. The day I get to crawl through the air­ports back to Boston. It’s going to be a short day (we have to leave @ noon for our...