PyCon 2010: Saturday Session 2 (early afternoon)

I managed to make it to three talks in the middle session. Here's the list: "508 and You: Taking the Pain out of Accessibility" with Katie Cunningham, "Actors: What, Why, and How" with Donovan Preston and "Python Metaprogramming" with Nicolas Lara. I'll see you after the jump!

The reason I went to Ms. Cunningham's talk mainly because I work for the government and I thought this topic might be useful. She focused a lot on how Plone and Django do 508 out of the box. If you don't know what 508 is, then you should check out her talk. A brief explanation is that 508 are the U.S. accessibility rules for websites. Basically, they tell you how to make your website compliant such that people who are blind, deaf or dumb can use it. The talk had no Python whatsoever. Instead, it was more of a collection of tips and tricks for getting your websites set up right. It's more interesting than they way I've explained it here. See also www.section508.gov

Mr. Preston's talk was on a topic that I knew nothing about. It turns out that Actors are a way to do threading or multiprocessing. The speaker wrote an actor implementation as there are no builtin actors module, although he did list a few 3rd party scripts. They were Parley, Dramatis, and Candygram. Since I don't know much about this, I'll leave it to you to read his notes.

The last topic was on Metaprogramming, a topic I've been meaning to dig into and thought this was a good choice. Mr. Lara definitely knew what he was talking about. You can learn a lot of good stuff from this talk. Check it out when you get the chance!