Sat, 10 May 2008
PyCon Italia Due
I'm enjoying the wonderful weather in Florence this weekend while attending PyCon Italy 2. Yesterday's highlight was Richard Stallman's thought-provoking keynote titled Free Software in ethics and in practice held in the jaw-dropping Palazzo Vecchio. Stallman's alter-ego Saint IGNUcious (of the church of Emacs) even made an appearance.
My presentation on Sunday covers Application Development in IronPython. It's mainly an introduction to IronPython for Python programmers. Being very much an an Italian language conference, there's real-time translation of English presentations to Italian (mine included). Conversely there's translation from Italian to English in one stream.
The conferences organisers and attendees are being patient with my lack of Italian language skills. I feel very lucky that many Italians can speak English. It's easy to be complacent about learning other languages when you already know English.
I've been fortunate to have met some great people including Raymond Hettinger (core Python team), Arkadiusz Wahlig (Skype4Py) and some of the organisers Simone, Giovanni and Lawrence. It's always great to be able talk shop, exchange perspectives and be inspired. (Resolver One has been getting plugged too!) I'm looking forward to more conversations as the conference continues. The best stuff at conferences always happens outside of the lecture theatres.
ps. The food rocks! The conference lunch today was amazing and last night's Florentine style steak was super-tasty.
posted at: 15:02 | permalink | 6 comments
Posted by Arkadiusz Wahlig at Mon May 12 02:01:05 2008
Hi Menno! I was searching for some references to PyCon Due and found your blog.
I fully agree with you, the conference was just great. It was very well organized (including translations between Italian and English), the talks were very interesting, the location (Florence) was beautiful and as you said in the footnote, the food was splendid.
The last talk by Raymond Hettinger (Core Python Containers: Under the Hood) was very interesting. He talked about the implementation of basic container types like lists, sets and dicts and how do they handle memory allocations/frees while adding/removing items and how to handle things in Python to keep them fast and cheap. It's nice to know some details sometimes and it definitely helps you while optimizing your code.
I'm very happy I could meet you at PyCon Due and I'm looking forward to see you again at the next Python conference (UK maybe?).
Take care!
Arek (short for Arkadiusz)
Posted by Emanuele at Mon May 12 17:54:29 2008
Hi Menno !
The conference was very well organized with some very interesting talks that introduced me to the pythonic-world. I'm very happy i could meet you at the William brewery, it was a nice talk.
Bye,
Emanuele
Posted by Menno Smits at Tue May 13 13:53:07 2008
Hi guys,
Nice to hear from you both. Hopefully we see each other again sometime. Perhaps at another Python conference? Let me know if you plan to visit London.
Ciao!
Menno
Posted by euxle at Sun May 18 15:10:29 2008
Hi there,
I could not download the zip file of the sample code. I got a 403 forbidden.
Could you please enable the download.
Kind regards,
euxle
Posted by Fabio at Sun May 18 22:52:39 2008
Hi All!
It's great that you've enjoyed the conference! Also because it was a non english speaking conference ( the translation team did a great job ;-).
Next Python conference is Europython @ Vilnius ( from 7th to 12th july )... hope to see you all there!
p.s.-You forgot to mention that also the desk girls were just as great as the food! :P
Posted by Menno Smits at Mon May 19 11:04:41 2008
Hi Euxle,
Thanks for letting me know about the problem. It's fixed now.
I've reorganised and documented the files so it should be easier to find and retrieve what you want.
Thanks,
Menno