jessenoller.com

Well, I knew I was going to get called out on this one — I’ve already had some emails com­ment­ing on my cri­tique, so I fig­ured I’d expand on things a lit­tle more.

Again, a caveat — My hat goes off to the orga­niz­ers, and to every sin­gle pre­sen­ter, and every­one involved. I had high hopes com­ing into this, and I’m just one dis­ap­pointed per­son in a largely happy group of attendees.

(and yes, I gave this same feed­back via the feed­back form, and again — these are my opinions)

I believe that as a lan­guage con­fer­ence, we can not con­cen­trate on the “hype du-jour” of the day — while that does help recent adop­tion, I think we need to cover our “core” bases as well. I think we need to go back to systems/program design, and show­cas­ing the core fea­ture of the lan­guage. Now I know the hype attracts the bees, but I know at least a small hand full of peo­ple who we’re not talk­ing on the same level as any­one else, I think we need to work on bring­ing every­one up to a nice level (gen­er­ally a teach­ing view).

We can not sim­ply show those suc­cess­ful appli­ca­tions writ­ten with the lan­guage — we have to show peo­ple how to make those suc­cess­ful appli­ca­tions and tools. We have to show them how to suc­ceed, not just the suc­cess stories.

I for one would have killed to have lis­tened to Bram Cohen (instead of the Debt Man­age­ment Dis­cus­sion) talk about the exact why’s and how’s of Bit­Tor­rent — not just the exact imple­men­ta­tion, but about poten­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties for it and his thoughts about system’s design within python applications?

He did gloss over some of that — and he even men­tioned that BT and Twisted share a lot of the same things, but what things? How? How can we inte­grate those things into our appli­ca­tions to suc­ceed? (god, I sound like a sales guy.)

Another exam­ple, Tur­bo­Gears is really cool — and a lot of the web frame­works get a lot of sound­bites, but how do I, as some­one know­ing the core lan­guage build some­thing like that?

I’d just like to see “meatier” dis­cus­sions. Although, as the AST BoF showed me, some­times things can be so meaty that I want to run scream­ing. I would like to see more tech­ni­cal pre­sen­ta­tions on Appli­ca­tion design, library design, etc. Just things that are less Niche/Hype, and more core to the language.

All of this is just my opin­ion — I know you can’t serve every­one — and that you have to serve that which brings in the most bod­ies. I really did like meet­ing peo­ple, and I loved get­ting to shake Guido’s hand (duh) and putting faces to names like AMK, Guido, Ian Bick­ing, etc was awe­some. I just wanted to learn more.

Well, I knew I was going to get called out on this one — I’ve already had some emails com­ment­ing on my cri­tique, so I fig­ured I’d expand on things...