On the plane ride back from PyCon today, right before getting all excited about a new code idea, I sat there reflecting about PyCon and about all of the things that I remembered.
I remembered feeling like a saturated sponge, soaking up all the knowledge that was possible from all of the amazing people who I met. I remembered Macs and Ubuntu, and the sea of laptops on which they were operating. I remember the panels and discussions, where insight into the development process was shared. And I remembered every night getting back to the hotel room, crashing down into the bed, and being blissfully exhausted.
PyCon brought me to a new place with open source software. Before going, I knew that I wanted to help, in an abstract sort of way. But I wasn't really motivated until I saw the type of creative thinking that was going on. It must be that creative thinking is infectious, because new ideas have been popping into my head ever since the convention. It would be great to take a month or two and just brainstorm and program and implement all of the things that I'd like to do, without having to worry about where I can slot in that coding time.
Very interesting, as well, was how non-age-discriminating everyone was. I was expecting to be looked down upon since I'm only 20, but even in the van on the way to the hotel, I was asked if I was giving a speech. Next year, maybe!
Things that I'm excited for in the upcoming weeks and months: databrowse (will be huge in the Django community), hot club of france (vital for the community aspect of Django), Python 3000, Hopefully an array interface built directly into python (thanks NumPy guys!), and finally my own new brainchild: autoapi. I'm not fully ready to talk about it, but it is a mechanism triggered similarly to Django's admin interface, which provides automatically a publicly accessible api for your app.
Also, the DjangoForge app is in Alpha stage, currently attached to www.flosblog.com. I don't know what will happen from here, however. Comments on the app ranged from "Hmm" to "Ooh!" but mostly "Hmm"s. It didn't feel great to have people be so unenthusiastic about my work, but that just means that it's not good enough. Also since it's a community project, it really should have been a community effort (which the hot club of france will be, hopefully). In all, it was as good of a learning tool as anything else could be, and possibly something to put on a resume.
So in all: Excellent! I met so many new people and learned so many great things. I wish that I could have split up and attended multiple talks and BoFs and lectures all at the same time! After having only worked with this technology for 6 months, I can't imagine anything having a greater impact on my aspirations than what this community has done to them.
I'm, right now, sitting in the advanced Django tutorial at PyCon. How cool is that?
I've never been to PyCon before, nor any other conference for that matter, but I'm leaving tomorrow and so I've come up with a list of talks that I plan on attending. This is preliminary, obviously, but for now this is my plan:
Tutorial Day (Thursday):
- Advanced Django Tutorial in Addison
- Attendee Bag Stuffing by Volunteers in Bent Tree I
Friday:
- Plenary: Chair's Opening Remarks - Ballrooms A-E and F-J
- Plenary: Keynote 1 - Ivan Krsti? - Ballrooms A-E and F-J
- Writing Your Own Python Types in C (#95) - Ballrooms F-J
- Writing a Python Extension module in C++ using Swig (#45) - Ballrooms F-J
- Using Stackless (#76) - Ballrooms F-J
- Lunch & Plenary: Sponsor Lightning Talks (Fri) (Probably Django BoF)- Ballrooms A-E and F-J
- Python inside Imageworks (#2) - Ballrooms A-E
- pyweek: making games in 7 days (#32) - Ballrooms F-J
- Python for Visual Effects and Animation Pipelines: A Case Study of Tippett Studio's JET (#86) - Ballrooms A-E
- Break w/o Snacks (Room Divider Change)
- Plenary: Lightning Talks (Fri PM) - Ballrooms A-E and F-J
- Python Lab: Solve This! - Ballrooms F-J
Saturday:
- Plenary: Keynote 2 - Adele Goldberg - Ballrooms A-E and F-J
- SQLAlchemy -- the Front-to-Back database toolkit (#47) - Ballrooms A-E
- Understanding and Using NumPy (#52) - Ballrooms F-J
- Lunch & Plenary: Keynote 3 - Guido van Rossum - Ballrooms A-E and F-J
- Becoming an Open Source Developer: Lessons from the Django Project (#20) - Mesquite
- The Absolute Minimum an Open Source Developer Must Know About Intellectual Property (#25) - Mesquite
- Dateutil to the Rescue! (#88) - Ballrooms A-E
- Break w/ Snacks - All Ballrooms
- Interactive Parallel and Distributed Computing with IPython (#50) - Ballrooms A-E
- Why and when to use ctypes? (#51) - Ballrooms A-E
- Break w/o Snacks (Prep for Lightning + Room Divider Change) - All Ballrooms
- Plenary: Lightning Talks (Sat PM) - Ballrooms A-E and F-J
- Dinner Break - All Ballrooms
- Hands-On with the One-Laptop-per-Child - Mesquite
- The Advocacy of Python - Community Discussion - Mesquite
So there it is, and I'm looking forward to seeing all of these interesting talks!
A glimmer of tomorrow tugs mercilessly on the fabric of tonight.
Well a few things have happened over the past few months. Firstly, I have failed again in keeping this blog up to date. Hopefully this post will be cathartic and I'll enjoy writing it so much that I will begin to post more often. Secondly, I have been busy with new classes, Algorithms and Programming Languages being the most interesting of the bunch. Thirdly, I have registered for PyCon! Fourthly, and this is more recent, I've been working on a Django-related project which, until now, has been secret.
I have been working on a DjangoForge application. It is not ready for release yet by any means, but it is at the point where I know I'll continue working on it until it's completed. Right now, the Model classes are all created, and almost all of the public interface views. Now all that's left is templating and CSS. It's a well-known fact that you should do the hardest things first.
In this case, I should have done the templating and CSS first, since website DESIGN is so hard for me. However, I have not followed the conventional wisdom, and am now paying for it with my design unskillfulness. In any case, I am really grinding on this with every spare moment, in the hopes that when PyCon comes around, I'll at least have a prototype to show a few people.
Also, if you're wondering when Part II of the gallery application is coming: I don't know. I was developing that gallery application for my brother's band website, and recently the creation of that website has gone down on his priority list. That means that it has gone down on my priority list too, especially with PyCon coming up and all of the work on DjangoForge.
If you read this and have any ideas on functionality that DjangoForge should have, or on anything else, just leave a comment and I'll get back to it as soon as I can.
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