PyCon 2010: Friday - Session 3

The third session only was only two talks long. I decided to check out Ecommerce in Python: Introduction to Satchmo and GetPaid (#144) by Christopher Johnson and Chris Moffett. My primary reason for attending this talk is because I've thought that opening an online store sounds really interesting and I might be able to use the information at work since we have been doing a fair amount of online payments for various services.

Satchmo was born because a bunch of guys had girlfriends or wives who wanted to start a business. He mentioned Toys R Us Australia is using Satchmo as one of the largest companies using Satchmo, which is cool to know. Satchmo is a Django "plugin". He said that it's just normal Django code and over a hundred templates. The only example he showed was a screenshot that was extremely simplistic.

The GetPaid project started with a BBQ Sprint. Moffett isn't a programmer, but more the organizer behind the project and raised support for it. GetPaid is for Plone / Zope3. Both projects are "easy to use", "flexible" and "easy to extend". Oddly enough, I wasn't engaged with either of the presenters. Admittedly, I was distracted by an inane discussion on the #pycon IRC channel about the abstractness of Alex Martelli's talk.

I had a hard time picking a second talk as there were several that I thought looked interesting. I ended up going to How Are Large Applications Embedding Python? by Peter Shinners. He seemed to be in the film or gaming industry, so he focused on software from that group that was embedding Python in their programs. The examples he covered were Maya, Nuke, Houdini and Blender. I've been interested in computer animation and film for a long time, but I had only heard of the first and the last of these programs. Mr. Shinners focused on how Python was embedded in each as well as their differences and similarities.  While interesting, the differences appeared to be pretty subtle to me.

Overall, this was a decent session. I learned some new things and that's always a plus!