First off, I have to say that for those of you who don’t know, PyCon is a community organized event, and amazingly well done. I was impressed by the design of the conference, the way they had four talks going on at once and they tried to keep them in a similar interest track. Every talk I attended was at least “good”, and many were “great”. You could really feel a community vibe, and for a conference that had 800+ attendees in the middle of a major recession they had every right to be excited.

There were two major themes content wise that really impressed me, the first was an amazing amount of web framework focus. Django obviously being the twinkle in the eye of the community, but there were smaller communities for each of the other projects, Pylons-Turbo Gears, web2py and lots of tools built on top of them. One that struck me with some major promise is the Pinax Project. Their goal is to make it so that I don’t ever have to deal with building user registration and in site messaging… and all the other features expected for any site that has social network functionality.

The other major theme was a mini testing conference going on within PyCon, that I was very comfortable hanging around with. We had a hugely successful Birds Of a Feather, as well as a surprisingly active Open Space talk for Windmill.

The “Using Windmill” talk turns out to be pretty successful in every aspect that I really care about. I do wish that I had been able to get a little more sleep the night before, and I have to admit the size of the venue was a bit overwhelming. I now realize watching the footage that I used the word “UM” way too much, and the demo videos must have been hard to watch from the very back of the room. But barring those two things, I am quite happy (I shall learn and practice for the next round of shameless PR at OSCON 2009).

The “Functional Testing Tools in Python” panel was very successful, and a lot of fun. I always enjoy the friendly banter between the different project owners. Everyone has a different opinion on what they care about, focus on and feel they do the best. Obviously since the only two projects represented that focused on Web Testing were Windmill and Selenium, we got a lot of attention.

Watching that panel footage I definitely think that the introductions were too long, but I still think our Journey themed – mind blowing – Windmill demo video was a great intro. At the very least, the audience had a little entertainment before the geek droning began

Slide had an awesome presence this year, a fun booth, huge banners everywhere and 6 attendees. It was fun to see all of the great responses I received about Slide from people out there in Python land.

Here are links to the videos:

• Using Windmill: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947236/
• Functional Testing Tools in Python Panel: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947342/

And some pictures:

If you are interested in seeing the new and improved version of the “Using Windmill” talk, please make it out to OSCON 2009, “Scheduled for 16:30 on 22 Jul 2009.” in San Jose, CA.

We are waiting to hear back from both Open Source Bridge and the AJAX Experience as to whether we will be participating in those conferences (fingers crossed)!

A few things come to mind when I think about the conference as a whole. First off, who gave OSCON a Ruby adrenaline shot? The Ruby track was pretty extensive, and I would say more prominent even than the Python track this year. I felt like many of the talks were very introductory with very few actual visual demo’s of things “working”. I know that OSCON brings a very diverse crowd.. but please, please come up with some way to show us if things are advanced, or not. I really get absolutely nothing out of introductory level JavaScript sessions, but a title like “Digging into the guts of JavaScript” could pretty much mean anything under the sun.

Some of the most interesting talks I attended last year had to do with open mapping and location services, I know you want us to also attend the “Where” conference, but these things are part of Open Source and should be represented at OSCON!

I really enjoyed the talk about CouchDB, I hadn’t heard about it and really enjoyed how it opened my mind up to some new concepts about how your application should interact with a database. I would advise everyone to check it out at http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/.

Another was the “Django Tricks” talk, this was great because he just ran through a bunch of really cool examples — one of which was introspecting a sqlite db to build models from the schema. Pretty cool stuff! Additionally, I think Ted Leung nailed his talk about “Open Source Community Antipatterns”. A lot of the ideas and concepts weren’t new to me, but it always helps to get a more detailed overview from someone who has seen these patterns repeated over the last 10 years.

The best quote I heard was that the “Second OSCON starts at 6pm each night.” I completely agree with this, the social aspect of the conference is invaluable, but be careful about all those free booze — they sneak up on you if you aren’t careful.

I do feel as if I should have done a Windmill talk this year, I didn’t see anything from Selenium or Watir and if we had been a little farther a long with the next iteration on Windmill it would have been a great venue to get some serious exposure. I may attend some other conferences this year, or wait till OSCON next year for Windmill to make it’s big splash.

At this point in my career my focus is on Web Development, Test Automation (specifically for the web & browsers), and social networking. Obviously on a moment by moment basis your interests are pulled in varying directions, but that sums up the bulk of my attention.

If you are interested in the full schedule grid, it can be seen here: Oscon 08 Schedule Grid.

Wednesday

• 8:45 AM: Welcome
• 9:30 AM: Keynote
• 10:45 AM: “An Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks” (It’s going to be tough to convince me to move away from Django)“Changing Education… Open Content, Open Hardware, Open Curricula” looks more interesting today.
• 11:35 AM: This one is tough, either “Web Graphics and Animations without Flash”, “Beautiful Concurrency with Erlang”, or “Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub”, “CouchDB from 10,000 ft” apparently thats the thing see, or “What Has Ruby Done for You Lately?
• 12:20 PM: Really important, LUNCH!
• 1:45 PM: Probably “Thunderbird 3″, maybe “The Open-Source Identity Revolution”
• 2:35 PM: “Caching and Performance Lessons from Facebook”, never know when this one might come in handy working for Slide inc.
• 4:30 PM: “Open Source Community Antipatterns”, I’m really looking forward to hearing Ted Leung explain how to NOT run an Open Source Project…
• 5:30 PM: Probably “Give your Site a Boost with memcached”, or “Shell Scripting Craftmanship”