PyCon: A followup to my critique.
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.
February 28th, 2006 at 4:18 am
OK, so you went to a tutorial, which caused you to say, daming the instructor with faint praise, that you “ended up learning a few things”. If you learned five things then the tutorial cost you a maximun of twenty bucks a thing. Which I happen to think (disclaimer: I taught two tutorials) is exceptionally good value for money. Except that you also “learned a lot” from the Twisted presentation despite the fact that “my brain began to shut down”.
Since you admit in your blog title that you aren’t good with computers, maybe what you need is a bigger brain.
Looking at the whole of your 3.5 days as reported in your blog my primary impression is of someone who doesn’t know the true value of things. I’m glad you are planning to help make it better next year: that one response saved you form a flaming :-)
February 28th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Ouch. I’ll take that hit, it’s not entirely underserved given the lightness of my posts.
As for the two tutorials - I’m not going to completely throw out the value of what I did learn. And maybe I have been overly critical of what I *did* learn, and maybe I was not receptive to things outside of my domain.
And yes, the twisted thing did “make my brain shut down” - Now, going into more detail, twisted is an extremely dense framework, and to be honest, I think the presenter was trapped between a rock and a hard place (and we discussed this offline, later). He did not have enough time, or some other resources to really cover some of the material, and he admitted this. This goes back to my comments about the stucture of things.
Looking at this from a cost/value perspective, if I paid 20$ per thing learned, I would gladly pay more to have more time to cover more information. (Which I did state in my feedback to the con).
(Speaking of which, I heard wonderful things about your tutorials, which makes me which I had been able to go to them).
Admittedly, I do need a bigger brain. And as I think I pointed out, I frequently felt as if I were in the company of Giants.
I’ll take the hit I rightly deserve based on my comments, but I think I do know the “true value of things” as it pertains to me.
Other people got a lot more out of it than I did, and I said, very up front, that this was my first conference of this type, so caveats apply.
However, I don’t think either my admittedly small brain doesn’t discount my feeling that I did not learn as much as I wanted to. Perhaps this is because I did not pay close attention to things outside of my own domain, but perhaps it is also because the material was not supplied.
As I have noted, I would gladly pay money for hours of talks about the standard library, applicationd design, etc.
This is why I want to take a proactive role in next years conference, in hopes that I can help those who are maybe like me in some respects, but largely, to help myself learn more and the community.
February 28th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Also steve, I would actually like to talk this over with you more, if you’re open to it, email me at jnoller at gmail.com