PyCon 2008 – Day 3
Sorry I’m a little late with this last post of the PyCon 08 series but yesterday was a hell of a travel day for me.
On day 3 of PyCon I found myself sitting in on 3 talks, ‘Consuming HTML’, ‘Nose: Testing for the Lazy Coder’ , and ‘Introducing Agile Testing Practices to the OLPC Project’. The lack of sessions on day 3 definitely left a lot to be desired. Am I mistaken or was there more content on Day 3 last year???
Consuming HTML
This presentation by Ian Bicking was informative, but didn’t really tell me much new about dealing with HTML with Python. Ian used his time to express how parsing HTML and dealing with HTML in general with Python now is just as efficient as dealing with XML. The big difference between the two is HTML is for humans, whereas XML is for machines. He went into different HTML and XML packages, such as BeautifulSoup and lxml.html and gave figures as to how each performed in comparision to similar packages. Ian also spoke of packages that don’t hold much weight anymore, such as minidom. It would have been nice to demonstrate why these packages ’suck’ and what we should be using in their place. This talk could have held my attention much longer with more code examples or real world practices. All in all it wasn’t the worst talk, but I was expecting a bit more when I walked into the ballroom.
Nose: Testing for the Lazy Coder
In this presentation, Jason Pellerin demonstrated the benifits of using nose as opposed to unittest, py.test and other similar packages. One thing I LOVE about nose is the lack of boilerplate code. Just write your tests and run. It was pointed out however by another audience member that the boilerplate code could easily be copied and pasted between tests, but come on – this is for the LAZY coder! 
Jason did a great job demonstrating nose and even touching upon TDD. I especially liked seeing how nose tied into other packages, like coverage. I will be playing around with nose in the near future.
OVERALL CONFERENCE SUMMARY
As this was my second PyCon, I went into the conference with high expectations. For the most part this conference met my expectations. The majority of talks I attended gave me at least something to take back with me, and I feel that I learned a significant amount from attending the keynotes and sessions. Saturday (Day 2) was definitely for me the meat of the conference. The abundance of testing topics covered along with the cool game demonstrations kept me not only interested all day, but provided me with a ton of insight. All in all I would say the quality of content presented in the talks I attended this year was around the same values as those from last year.
A few issues/suggestions
- This years conference was much more commercial, and that really took a lot away from it
I completely understand having sponsors to help defer the cost of attendees, but what I don’t understand is taking away so many Lightning Talk slots from the community. The Lightning Talks this year seemed more or less to be a long drawn out commercial. By the time the sponsors were done pitching their products or recruiting prospective employees my head felt like it was going to explode! What happened to letting the community talk about what they want to work on, what they need help with, and how they found a cool new use for Python? The banners, handouts and expo center were plenty of exposure for the sponsors. Give us back the Lightning Talks!
- Speakers should have some sort of speaking experience, or at least be understandable
Without pointing anyone out or getting two specific there was one talk in particular that I had been looking forward to once I saw it on the conference schedule. Unfortunately I was greatly let down by this talk due to the presentation and verbal skills of the presenter. It was bad enough that the demo in this presentation took a long time to run, but what upset me the most is it was very very difficult to understand what the presenter was saying. As the conference gets bigger and bigger, expectations grow more and more. The presentations and presenters need to meet this high expectations. Some sort of experience is needed by presenters in order to ensure they are able to convey their message clearly, and this should be a requirement for all proposals.
- Was it me or was the food this year awful compared to last year?
A pre-packaged lunch??? A fruit basket and soda for a snack??? I seem to recall last year having much better quality food, even for the snacks.
