PyCon 2010: Friday Plenaries

It's the first official day of PyCon: Friday, February 19th, 2010. In my experience, PyCon plenaries can either be really interesting or extremely boring. I've rarely seen one that was in the middle. The chairman of PyCon is Van Lindberg (The Python Software Foundation's lawyer, I think). Steve Holden was the first plenary speaker. He is the Chairman of the Python Software Foundation and his talk was entitled "Building the Python Community". He introduced various staff members and thanked the volunteers as well. He spoke about what the PSF was for (i.e. "shoveling crap so that we could program in Python"). Then he switched topics to diversity and his hopes that the Python community will continue to grow around the world. He also told us about how people in the Python community tend to be friendly and welcoming. He had a weird, but fun transition from his talk to Guido van Rossums' talk which entailed the use a cell phone call and a goofy song.

Guido is the creator of Python. He used the PyCon DjangoDose feed to receive and answer questions, which was interesting and fun. Unfortunately, this made the talk a little unfocused. He did announce that Python 2.7 would be the last official release of the 2.x series. Someone asked about the history of the dict comprehension and its future. He also received a question from the Django Pony about how many roads it would need to trot down before it became a horse. Weird, but ignored. Alas. Anyway, he also received a few questions about Unladen Swallow and the GIL. As you can see, he received a lot of goofy queries.

I think that these plenaries were pretty good. It was definitely the best Rossom talk I've seen so far. Holden's was a little dry, but my mind didn't wander a lot so it was good overall. Stay tuned for the talks.