PyCon 2009 - Saturday Morning

I didn’t get a chance to write about what happened on Saturday at PyCon, so here’s a quick rundown of what I saw and did in the morning: I walked over to the Hyatt from Crowne Plaza with a researcher from Belgium. Then I attended the morning lightning talks and Guido’s keynote.

I always expect Guido to be really interesting, but in fact, I’ve found both this year’s and last year’s talks to be rather dull. He talked about retiring sometime in the next 5-10 years, the likelihood that Python 2.7 would be the last of the 2.x series, how Twitter has changed him, and why he thought that Python (and its users) were too smart to fail. He occasionally had some interesting insights, but I tended to zone out far too often.

The original plan called for me to go to three talks in the morning. Instead, I went to an Open Space gathering for Python authors and editors. Steve Holden, Andrew Kuchling, Doug Hellman, Brandon Rhodes and various other authors/editors (and wannabe authors) and O’Reilly reps  which caused me to miss the first two sessions. I thought it was very informative and interesting to listen to. It was a good place to network. Next, I went to Christopher Barker's talk on building a browser interface which had a mix of wxPython and website stuff. That was the last morning session I went to and then it was time for lunch.