Can You Defeat My Swordstyle?

So tutorial day of PyCon 2007 is now over. This is what I signed up for:

• Django Tutorial : Jacob Kaplan-Moss
• Testing Tools in Python : Titus Brown, Grig Gheorghiu

I have to give Jacob some credit on his tutorial. I mean, first off, how do you go over some as broad a Django in roughly 3.5 hours. You can’t. But he did an admirable job of putting together a nice presentation and I do appreciate his passion for Django which comes through in his Django presentations. And while you could - literally - hear some of the audience a bit confused (damn Unix gray beards!), I still found the presentation to be enlightening - especially the end where he quickly covered generic views. Also, I think I might have come up with yet another idea for a web site that I won’t ever do. Still, I think the idea is super sound and might be a good web app excercise.

So that was the morning. The afternoon was all about testing. I’ve been using Titus’ Python module Twill for quite some time now and I’ll concede that while I was skeptical at first (hey, I was seduced by the sexiness of Watir and Selenium) it’s saved my ass enough that I’ll have to purchase Mr. Brown a couple of drinks while I’m here in Dallas. I read Grig’s blog all the time since it’s an excellent resource for testing in a agile setting and plus he really seems to have his fingers on the pulse of testing in the Python world. Their presentation was excellent combination of slides and demo’s and while I had a good grasp on almost everything that they were saying I did nab a couple of insights into Fuzz Testing and more on Continuous Integration. Looking forward to getting back to the work terminal to make some Twill plugins, which I’ll give back to the Twill community.

Tomorrow is talk day part 1 - how’s this for nerd-core?

• Python, Unicode and Internationalization
• Parsing Revisited: A Grammer Transformation Approach to Parsing
• WSGI: An Introduction
• Web Frameworks Panel
• Goodbye, Hello World: Rethinking Teaching With Python
• Iterators in Action
• The State of Python Advocacy

Now that, my readers, is a full day of more nerding out.

In other news, word on the street back in Chicago is that almost 18 people were out of the office ill. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but recall the company is 88 people. That’s like 20%! Glad, I missed out on the virus exchange.