Northwest Python Day
Headed down for the Northwest Python Day on Saturday. Seattle really seems to be becoming a home away from home these days, I was surprisingly able to easily navigate around and knew a lot of people. I went down Friday night and stayed over and had a few beers and chat with Jon Stahl and his wife.
Despite that I still somehow ended up getting there at 10:30, most of which was figuring out that if you go into the University of Washington, one way and one way only since that way has the parking ticket booth. If you go in any other way you are left puzzling over how to get a ticket.
There were a few talks, the two highlights for me were:
Google App Engine talk was great, as I've deployed stuff to the App Engine, but held back on anything big. There's too many wierd thing's limitations and so on. It's brilliant wonderful and I love the deployment. But running unit tests is pain, dropping into a pdb is a pain and the limits worry me. I do have the impression it feels like Zope in the old days (I'm sure Guido doesn't read this, but if you do - sorry for comparison), for different reasons, but it makes using the tools I know and use hard.
The talk about Sage was brilliant had all the wow factors you could ever need. I'm not a math head, things like matlab are completely beyond me, but the stuff he was demoing in Sage looked brilliant. Clearly a bunch of very bright and intelligent people have worked on that project. Scarily so.
I met a bunch of new nice folks including John DeRosa and Ted Leung. Also nice to hear that Brian Gershon is happily building up a cool business building Django and Plone sites.
In what seems to be a mad flurry of meetings, it's off to Vancouver Python meetup Tuesday.