PyCon Wrap Up

PyCon is over, and I head back to balmy Indiana tomorrow. Overall PyCon was once again an excellent conference. I will, however, remember this as “The Year of Stairs.” For the first time ever the conference was split between the 1st and 3rd floors of the Marvin Center at GWU, and as a result I climbed lots of stairs. And my room is on the 8th floor of Hotel Lombardy, which has a slow, small elevator with an actual elevator operator. So as a result I’ve been using the stairs instead. Am I ever out of shape.

As with past years, there’s lots I want to look into post-PyCon. So in no particular order:

• I had the opportunity to talk about Roundup with it’s principal developer, Richard Jones. I’m hoping to modify a Roundup tracker to help manage crash reports from CC applications.
• Yarn looked darn cool, and I want to explore the possibility of building a “desktop information client” that uses Yarn to consume email, RSS, etc. I’m just not satisfied with my current email clients, and Yarn looks like a very capable tool.
• I want to take another look at Zope 3’s component API, and how it might work outside of Z3.
• Traits looks like a cool way to do type checking and validation in applications. When they actually ship code, it’ll be worth looking at.
• I want to download Chandler 0.5 when it’s available and see what I can do with it.
• I want to look again at rule based “inferrence” engines.
• Lots of efficiency and implementation talks made me want to download the source to Python and start seeing how Python works under the hood.

But first, ccPublisher maintenance release and catching up at work.