Episode 008: PyCon/CodeMash Double Feature (Doctor X will Code a Feature)
What do you mean it’s not February any more? Seriously?! Sigh. We know, we know, we broke our promise again. Life happened–to all of us. We’ll do better next time (Chris has a plan, you see.)
Luckily, the wait is over–we’re back, and with a whopper! Clocking in at a mighty 106 minutes, this jumbo deluxe ultra fun-size epic includes our reflections on recent conferences we’ve attended–January’s now-distant CodeMash and March’s just-complete PyCon. Your hosts for this excursion down conference memory lane, in counterclockwise order, are Chris Miller, Mike Pirnat, Ben Smith, and Mike Crute.
But first–NEWS! We get up to speed on the current haps in Blogofile, the upcoming PyWeek, PEP land, and the Python version control migration (from Subversion to Mercurial).
Our CodeMash recap describes the conference, highlights memorable presentations, and gives a little flavor of the night life (jam sessions and pool parties and craziness, oh my!). The short version is that CodeMash is awesome, and you should go. Seriously–it’s a polyglot conference! At an indoor water park! In January! It is made of win.
But HOLY COW OMG PYCON!! Having just returned from our glorious adventures, we are positively effervescent about what was probably the best PyCon ever. Mike Pirnat is goaded gently into discussing his speaking experiences–giving his official talk, Exhibition of Atrocity, mortally offending Titus Brown at the Testing in Python Birds of a Feather (aka the TiP BoF), and announcing his side project, How Old Is My Kid?, at the lightning talks.
While at PyCon, we joined up with Rick Harding of Lococast, Anthony Scopatz of scientific computing podcast inSCIght, testing goatherder and PyCon programming committee guru Terry Peppers, and an atypically quiet David Stanek to form a veritable Voltron of voices, recording a live round table during the Sunday morning open spaces. We rofl our way through the previous night’s TiP BoF exploits, and Terry gets Mike Pirnat to talk about talking. Apologies for any duplication of content in here–it’s all due to accidents with the time machine we’re working on to try to absorb all of the excellent PyCon talks. (Please also forgive Mike Pirnat for hammering on his laptop while recording–he’s very sorry and promises not to do it again.) We rave about how well the Convore-driven backchannel worked out, get some insights into the “Extreme” track and programming PyCon talks, and recall our favorites presentations. We send mad, mad shout-outs of joy to the A/V team, who had much of the conference video online before the conference even ended; their work is a fabulous benefit to the Python community. Matt Gibberman and Eric Floehr join us for a few minutes to discuss Eric’s talk on genetic programming.
In a special bonus segment, Rick and Mike Pirnat sit down with the intrepid John DeRosa, whose epic cross-country bus ride from Seattle to Atlanta with play-by-play Twitter commentary so captivated us. We talk about the why and how of his journey and chat about memorable moments and human drama he encountered along the way. Then we bring things into a full-circle, swirling time loop vortex of doom and throw some love to CodeMash and encourage all willing Pythonistas to help represent by submitting talks for next January’s CodeMash.
We then pop back up the stack to wrap up the episode and bring it on home with Chris Miller’s promises of a new episode in early April, by hook or by crook (or perhaps by five-point plan).
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We want to add that it was thoroughly awesome to meet up with fans and listeners while we were at PyCon. Your passion and excitement for this podcast really inspired us to hurry up and get this thing out there so that we can get back on track. THANK YOU. YOU ROCK.
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But wait–there’s more! Behold the miscellaneous links of wonderment and joy:
- Awesome PyWeek game: A Murder of Crows
- The home of CodeMash: Kalahari Resort
- Git Immersion (which Mike maybe remembered to mention and maybe didn’t)
- Python for microcontrollers: PyMite
- The MoSync SDK
- Thoroughly awesome band at CodeMash: The Womack Family Band
- Matt “Snowdog” Gibberman rocks the hell out of “Back in the USSR” at the CodeMash jam session
- The PyCon videos are giant piles of gold-plated win
- Video of Mike Pirnat’s PyCon talk: Exhibition of Atrocity
- Video of David Beazley’s talk: Using Python 3 to Build a Cloud Computing Service for my Superboard II
- Video of “Dude, Where’s My RAM?”
- Video of Hilary Mason’s inspirational keynote
- Video of Running Ultra-Large Telescopes in Python
- Video of Chris McAvoy’s Threadless keynote
- Courtesy of Alfredo Deza, a lovely reminder to press on in spite of the haters, who are, in fact, gonna hate
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Thanks for listening, and thanks so much for being patient with our intermittent release schedule. Once Chris shows us his elaborate Powerpoint, we’ll get it figured out.
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Well done! Keep the podcasts coming!
I’m new to Python and am enjoying it. I’ve learned a ton from listening to your podcasts on the way into work. Here are a couple of random comments:
* Remember that there are probably some new/novice Python users that are listening, so try to spell out any project names when you first mention them in an episode. I remember hearing about whiskey, and it took me a little bit to google and find out they were referring to WSGI. Hopefully these end up in the show notes as well.
* That last episode was very long. You could easily break that up into a couple of episodes and keep the masses clamoring for more frequent episodes happy.
* I love that everyone is so well spoken and opinionated.
* You guys could use a favicon on this site. I’m looking at a really sad default icon right now mixed in with other site’s great favicons.
Keep up the great work.
Hi, Brian–thanks for the love and the constructive feedback!
The new/novice listener thing is an issue that I am conscious of but have been lazy about lately. I’ll make it more of a priority as we go forward.
The double-length episode was an unfortunate side-effect of having recorded a full show just on CodeMash and some related topics only to discover we hadn’t actually pushed the record button. Then suddenly it was PyCon… :-/ Hopefully this will be less of an issue going forward as we try to find a reasonable recording and release cadence that works for our schedules.
As for favicons… Patches welcome?
I’ve never been able to make one that I’m satisfied with.
The whole site, frankly, will probably undergo some redesign work “real soon now” (so expect it for mid 2012 at the rate things are going for me). Hopefully a favicon can be part of that.