Plone Conference in Naples
Spent the last few days at the Plone conference in Naples.
The conference was run very well, it had a very good set of talks and everyone I spoke to about the talks found they had a good mix of talks. It's probably one of the strongest sets I've seen at a Plone Conference. Some of the talks I saw were:
- Lennart's talk on what Zope did wrong and where to go next.
- Philip's talk on opening up Zope and Plone to other Python programmers.
- Veeda's talk on project management.
- Matt's talk on testing workflow.
- Duncan's talk on testing workflow.
Without exception they were good talks. Matt's was interesting from a technical point of view because they covered the exact thing I had to do about 9 months ago. Testing workflow resulting in a huge amount of test to test all the possible variants. Matt takes a table outlining workflow permissions and builds test out of it. My next steps from that I had planned all those months ago was to then build another table outlining transitions. Take the two and you can build a workflow.
On that point a while back I wrote a patch of testrunner.py that outputs the results as xml, so then you can send the data to a database. Buildbot can track this, but I wanted something that I can run repeatedly and record what happens (and use the same xml to record Selenium, Rails and Django unit test results). I asked around but no-one knew, is there a -xml or some other magic flag that already does this?
Last day I had my talk and I completely flubbed it. Apologies to everyone, I had in my head that it was starting at 4pm, not 4.15pm. I waited for a few more people to come and started around 4.05pm. I'm really sorry that was just a stupid mistake. I think I need to start using Keynote a lightning talk is working well in S5 but I'm struggling with notes to stay on focus. To make up for all those people who missed it, I've turned the talk into a blog post (once I've got it linked up I'll post in the next day or so). Sigh I swear I had the talking foo once, but this time I lost it.
The conference was very well run, although I always had problems figuring out the agenda (see previous paragraph) and the lunch queues were very long. A credit to all involved, well done and have a good rest. Thank you, I'm glad Liverpool didn't win :)
For us the only downside was Naples is not for quiet space loving law abiding Canadians. Trying to get 2 kids down a street whilst kids on mopeds using cell phones ride down the sidewalk is not good for the blood pressure. Never, ever, ever, drive in Naples. Unless you are in tank. Preferably don't walk either.