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Since being back in “the real world” — things have been crazy. I’m work­ing on a PEP (albeit slowly) and try­ing to ramp up on python core-development while simul­ta­ne­ously try­ing to work on the safet­head­ing stuff and sev­eral PyMag articles.

Did I men­tion that I can’t work on any of this dur­ing the day? *head explodes*

Oh, and there was Easter Din­ner to attend to as well? I do so love cooking.

I envy the Googler’s out there and the oth­ers who get an allot­ment of time to “con­tribute to open source” or explore other tech­ni­cal avenues for many rea­sons, the obvi­ous of which is “hav­ing more time to do some­thing else”.

To boot, I’ve been com­pul­sively sav­ing things to read/catch up on in my newreader. I’m up to about 205 items to cycle through.

All the whin­ing done — I never did get to “close out” PyCon.

The last two years I’ve gone, I never stayed long enough on Sun­day to see or do any­thing use­ful. This year, I wanted to stay through the core sprint, but alas — I had to go back Monday.

I was at least able to fin­ish out the con, see some great talks and do a light­ning talk on con­cur­rency stuff. I also got to sit through Brett’s intro to core devel­op­ment (which was great by the way) and try to get up and hack­ing on core.

I unfor­tu­nately spaced out dur­ing most of the morn­ing keynotes (except for the OLPC update) as the mozilla-world isn’t my par­tic­u­lar cup of Joe. In addi­tion to that, I got tapped by Jacob Kaplan-Moss to do a light­ning talk (they had an open slot) — I said yes, and promptly went heads-down to grind out and con­dense as much infor­ma­tion as I could as fast as I could.

I hit up “more iter­a­tors in action” — it was a great talk, and I am look­ing for­ward going back over the mate­r­ial. It was “infor­ma­tion rich”. After that was one of my favorite talks of the con­fer­ence: Core Python Con­tain­ers by Ray­mond D Het­tinger — that talk was fan­tas­tic. I need to re-watch the video when it goes on “the youtube” to really absorb the con­tent again, but it was really a great talk.

Then I hopped into the 2to3 talk — but then skipped out as I’ve been over that one before, and slipped into the OLPC test­ing talk by Titus (yes, I was the guy who cheered when he showed his kid on the screen). Titus is prob­a­bly one of the best pre­sen­ters PyCon has. He’s engag­ing, funny and knows his stuff cold. Some of the tools he showed in the OLPC talk are really inter­est­ing for test automa­tion, even if UI stuff is not my cup of tea, the back end stuff he’s done with peek­a­boo is awesome.

Also, Titus’ post on the “Death Spi­ral” is a must read. I liked my anal­ogy (in the com­ments) that all Good Chefs (and cooks!) taste their food as they pre­pare and cook it to ensure it well, tastes good. The same applies to testing.

After that — it was fear. Yes, I was scared out of my mind to stand up the few hun­dred peo­ple left at the con­fer­ence and do my light­ning talk. Accord­ing to peo­ple I trust, it was well received — and I got infor­ma­tion out, which is great.

After that is was sprint-time, and a good time indeed.

PyCon this year was great, even if it did have it’s “warts” with the spon­sor stuff — it was also huge. I can’t wait for next year. And thanks to every­one who asked about the kiddo and house. Right now, things are going well (albeit expen­sively with the house).

Onto the Miscellanea:

I stum­bled onto this blog in the last few days, namely — this post. The author has made a few inter­est­ing posts on the (for lack of a bet­ter term) “pro sta­tic lan­guage” argu­ment, here, here and here. It’s an inter­est­ing read, even if I dis­agree with some of what the author says. Both sta­tic and dynamic (read: Duck/Runtime) typed lan­guages have their pros and cons.

Speak­ing of Types, I found this arti­cle “What to know before debat­ing type sys­tems” quite good.

In Non-Typing news, this post (and this one) on Python Dec­o­ra­tors is quite good, although more recently I saw some code that looked like this:

@foo
@bar(…)
@baz
@what
@yourekiddingmeright
def func():
insert lollerskates

Which made me real­ize, even among con­sent­ing adults, there’s some peo­ple who drink way too much and code.

Which brings us to my final tid­bit: Con­cur­rency. There was some hub­bub around the new Fork/Join stuff com­ing to the Java 7 JRE, the stuff out­lin­ing what’s com­ing (includ­ing the orig­i­nal paper) is a series of “good reads”.

I’d like to carve some time (yeah. ok.) out to think about a con­cur­rency library sim­i­lar in nature to java.util.concurrent for Python. I think it would be a use­ful addi­tion, espe­cially with the hope­ful prospect of safethread­ing com­ing to town.

Back to my arti­cles and other asso­ci­ated work.

Since being back in “the real world” — things have been crazy. I’m work­ing on a PEP (albeit slowly) and try­ing to ramp up on python core-development while simul­ta­ne­ously try­ing...