PyCon 2009 - Reddit Keynote and Morning Talks (Sunday)

On Sunday, I went to the morning lightning talks a little late. None of them really jumped out at me as I was distracted by updating this blog and trying to update myself on other things. I'm sure I missed out on some good stuff, though. What I didn't miss was the Reddit keynote.I still don't know exactly what Reddit is, but I now know that it was coded with Python, at least partially. The guys who presented were fairly interesting, but they cursed a lot and didn't seem to know how to talk into the mic consistently. The question and answer period was long, but the way they answered questions made me think they would make good politicians, what with all the side-stepping a smoke blowing they were doing. Occasionally they did answer a question straight and that was cool, but most of the time...not so much.

After the keynote, I went to Gustavo Barbieri's Python Enabling Mobile Media Centers. Alas, this wasn't very interesting...more due to my lack of comprehension on the subject than anything else. I do know he talked about EFL and openbossa, but don't ask me what those are.

The 2nd talk of the morning Christopher Perkins' Creating Robust Documentation with Sphinx and Doctests. He did a really good job with only one technical flub. He used some screencasts he'd created on using Sphinx and ReStructured text (REST) that he talked over and it was a very effective use of technology. Chris is a part of the TurboGears project too, which uses Sphinx and REST in their documentation and project.

Oddly enough, the following talk was also on REST. It was called Leveraging REST in Your Projects and was given by none other than Jeff Rush. As is usual with Rush, he covered a TON of information in a very short amount of time while talking quite fast. As long as you can keep up, his talks are always worth going to. He seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge on whatever topic he presents, which leads me to believe that he either uses the project a lot of researched them to death.

I recommend getting the slides and watching the videos for both Rush and Perkins. It will be well worth your time.