EuroPython 2008 - Day 2

I took way too much coffee during breaks on Day 1, that kept me awake till 3AM, so it was a tough day. Nevertheless, today was better than Day 1. Let's see where I've been.

Designing Large-Scale Applications in Python by Marc-André Lemburg basically was a beginner oriented tutorial on how to do enterprisey stuff properly. It got more serious later on when he started mentioning concrete patterns and techniques. It's good that this conference has a (so so, but still) working WI-FI that kept me entertained till the next session. It's good to chew on some RSS feeds in the morning.



Then Steve Alexander from Canonical gave an inspiring talk on how they developed a very large python web application LEAN style. Launchpad to be exact. One of the greatest points was the use of pre-commit continuous integration, which ensures the developers that trunk is never broken. Also, he mentioned that canonical is hiring ~20 python developers (see their ad in my post about EuroPython 2008 Day 1).



Cool stuff with Jython by Frank Wierzbicki (from Sun) and Jim Baker was somehow boring and Jim's words "we write Java so you don't have to broke my heart, so I got back to reading RSS feeds". Frank was bragging about new hot NetBeans refactoring, which Eclipse has since.. uh.. forever? Read more on this topic in this great post. Dear pythonists, throw away your NetBeans CDs and visit eclipse.org instead.



There were a few Lightning Talks worth noticing.



Here's the full list.



I liked Jure Vrščaj's talk on Remote Module Importing where he showed us how to implement custom Python path resolvers that can seek modules from internet or source control repositories.



Mikhail Kashkin introduced a better style of Python programming - The Drunken Monkey style. Thumbs up for this one. :)



It was amazing to see how Holger Krekel unit-tested JavaScript with pytest.



Geoffrey French deserves a medal for his very alpha code editor gSym Prototype, which visualizes Python code with as AST and adds a Lisp View (with lots and lots of braces that all pythonists just love).



Here's a screenshot of gSym visualizing some mathematical functions.



Finally, a charismatic professor from Sweden, Hans Rosling, made a totally mind blowing keynote called "Code that make sense of the world". It can be basically rephrased as "Instead of letting people generate images from raw statistics in their head we should generate images in front of their heads".



It was one of the best talks I've seen in my life. This 60 year old professor knows people like Larry Page and Bill Gates, he knew Fidel Castro he's also good at GTA 2. Possibly this has something to do with Fidel Castro :).

Some more pictures from his talk...







Here's a great point on how data should be represented to the public.



And the following symptom that technical people tend to have made the audience laugh and applaud.



Most of what he presented can be seen in the following video. You HAVE to see it.



One day to go. See you tomorrow!