The Pycon Program Committee and my PyCon Talk

Last year I presented at a conference for the first time in my life at PyCon, I moderated a panel on ORMs and I enjoyed it a ton (and based on the feedback I've gotten at least a few people enjoyed attending it). Above and beyond that the two PyCons I've attended have both been amazing conferences, tons of awesome talks, great people to hang out with, and an awesome environment for maximizing both. For both of the last two years I've hung around the PyCon organizers mailing list since the conference was in Chicago and I lived there, however this year I really wanted to increase my contributions to such a great conference. Therefore, I joined the Pycon program committee. This committee is responsible for reviewing all talk submissions and selecting the talks that will ultimately appear at PyCon.

This year the PyCon programming committee had a really gargantuan task. There were more talks submitted then ever before, more than 170 of them, for only 90 or so slots. Unfortunately this meant that we had to reject some really good talks, which always sucks. There's been a fair bit of discussion about the process this year and what can be done to improve it. As a reviewer the one thing I wish I'd known going in was that the votes left on talks were just a first round, and ultimately didn't count for a huge amount. Had I known this I would have been less tepid in giving positive reviews to talks which merely looked interesting.

Another hot topic in the aftermath is whether or not the speaker's identity should factor into a reviewer's decision. My position is that it should wherein the speaker has a reputation, be it good or bad. If I know a speaker is awesome I'm way more likely to give them the +1, likewise if I see a speaker has a history of poor talks I'm more likely to give them a -1. That being said I don't think new speakers, or slightly inexperienced ones should be penalized for that, I was a brand new speaker last time and I'm grateful I was given the chance to present.

To give an example of this one of the talks I'm really looking forward to is Mark Ramm's, "To relate or not to relate, that is the question". Mark and I spoke about this topic for quite a while at PyOhio, and every talk from Mark I've ever seen has been excellent. Therefore I was more than willing to +1 it. However, had I not known the speaker it would still have been a good proposal, and an interesting topic, I just would not have gotten immediately excited about going to see the talk.

As an attendee one of the things I've always found is that speakers who are very passionate about their topics almost always give talks I really enjoy. Thinking back to my first PyCon Maciej Fijalkowski managed to get me excited and interested in PyPy in just 30 minutes, because he was so passionate in speaking about the topic.

All that being said I wanted to share a short list of the talks I'm excited about this year, before I dive into what my own talk will be about:

• Optimizations And Micro-Optimizations In CPython
• Unladen Swallow: fewer coconuts, faster Python
• Managing the world's oldest Django project
• Understanding the Python GIL
• The speed of PyPy
• Teaching compilers with python
• To relate or not to relate, that is the question
• Modern version control: Mercurial internals
• Eventlet: Asynchronous I/O with a synchronous interface
• Hg and Git : Can't we all just get along?
• Mastering Team Play: Four powerful examples of composing Python tools

It's a bit of a long list, but compared to the size of the list of accepted talks I'm sure there are quite a few gems I've missed.

The talk I'm going to be giving this year is about the real time web, also known as HTTP push, Comet, or reverse Ajax. All of those are basically synonyms for the server being able to push data to the browser, rather than having the browser constantly poll the server for data. Specifically I'm going to be looking at my experience building three different things, LeafyChat, DjangoDose's DjangoCon stream, and Hurricane.

Leafychat is an IRC client built for the DjangoDash by myself, Leah Culver, and Chris Wanstrath. The DjangoDose DjangoCon stream was a live stream of all the Twitter items about DjangoCon that Eric Florenzano and I built in the week leading up to DjangoCon. Finally, Hurricane is the library Eric Florenzano and I have been working on in order to abstract the lessons learned from our experience building "real time" applications in Python.

In the talk I'm going to try to zero in on what we did for each of these projects, what worked, what didn't, and what I'm taking away from the experience. Finally, Eric Florenzano and I are working to put together a new updated, better version of the DjangoCon stream for PyCon. I'm going to discuss what we do with that project, and why we do it that way in light of the lessons of previous projects.

I'm hoping both my talk, and all of them will be awesome. One thing's for sure, I'm already looking forward to PyCon 2010. Tomorrow I'm going to be writing about my thoughts on a more ideal template tag definition syntax for Django, and hopefully sharing some code if I have time to start working on it. See you then (and in Atlanta ;))!

ORM Panel Recap

Having now completed what I thought was a quite successful panel I thought it would be nice to do a review of some of the decisions I made, that some people had been asking about. For those who missed it you can find a live blog of the event by James Bennett at his blog, and a video should hopefully be going up sometime soon.

Why Google App Engine

As Guido pointed out App Engine does not have an ORM, as App Engine doesn't have a relational datastore. However, it does have something that looks and acts quite a lot like other ORMs, and it does fundamentally try to serve the same purpose, offering a persistence layer. Therefore I decided it was at least in the same class of items I wanted to add. Further, with the rise of non-relational DBs that all fundamentally deal with the same issues as App Engine, and the relationship between ORMs and these new persistence layers I thought it would be advantageous to have one of these, Guido is a knowledgeable and interesting person, and that's how the cookie crumbled.

Why Not ZODB/Storm/A Talking Pony

Time. I would have loved to have as many different ORMs/things like them as exist in the Python eco-sphere, but there just wasn't time. We had 55 minutes to present and as it is that wasn't enough. I ultimately had time to ask 3 questions(one of which was just background), plus 5 shorter audience questions. I was forced to cut out several questions I wanted to ask, but didn't have time to, for those who are interested the major questions I would have liked to ask
were:

• What most often requested feature won't you add to your ORM?
• What is the connection between an ORM and a schema migration tool. Should they both be part of the same project, should they be tied together, or are they totally orthogonal?
• What's your support for geographic data? Is this(or other complex data types like it) in scope for the core of an ORM?

Despite these difficulties I thought the panel turned out very well. If there are any other questions about why things were the way they were just ask in the comments and I'll try to post a response.

PyCon Wrapup

With PyCon now over for me(and the sprints just begining for those still there) I figured I'd recap it for those who couldn't be there, and compare notes for those who were. I'll be doing a separate post to cover my panel, since I have quite a brain dump there.

Day One

We start off the morning with lightning talks, much better than last year due to the removal of so many sponsor talks(thanks Jacob), by now I've already met up with quite a few Django people. Next I move on to the "Python for CS1" talk, this was particularly interesting for me since they moved away from C++, which is exactly what my school uses. Next, on to "Introduction to CherryPy" with a few other Djangonauts. CherryPy looks interesting as a minimalist framework, however a lot of the callback/plugin architecture was confusing me, so I feel like I'd be ignoring it and just being very close to the metal, which isn't always a bad thing, something to explore in the future. For there I'm off to "How Python is Developed", it's very clear that Django's development model is based of Python's, and that seems to work for both parties.

Now we head to lunch, which was fantastic, thanks to whoever put it together. From there I go to "Panel: Python VMs", this was very informative, though I didn't have a chance to ask my question, "Eveyone on the panel has mentioned that performance is likely to improve greatly in the future as a potential reason to use their alternate VM, should Unladen Swallow succeed in their goal, how does that affect you?". After that I went to the "Twisted, AMQP, and Thrift" talk, it was fairly good, though this feels like a space I have to look at more, or have a real world use case for, to totally understand.

A quick break, and then we're on to Jesse Noller's mutliprocessing talk. Jesse really is the expert in this, and having used the multiprocessing library before it's clear to me there's still tons of cool stuff to explore. Lastly we had the "Behind the scenes of Everyblock.com" from Adrian, it's very cool to see their architecture and it's getting me excited for their going open source in June. I also got a bit out a shoutout here when Adrian was asked about future scalability and he mentioned sharding across multiple databases. We had lightning talks and that was the end of the official conference for the day.

In the evening a big group of us(officially a Pinax meetup, but I think we had more than that) went to a restaurant, as the evening progressed our group shrunk, until they finally kicked us out at closing time. A good time was had by all I think.

Day two

After staying out exceptionally late the night before I ended up sleeping on the floor with friends rather than heading home(thanks!) so, retrospectively, day two should have been tiring, but it was as high energy as could be. I began the morning with lightning talks followed by Guido's keynote, which was a little odd and jumped around a lot, but I found I really enjoyed it. After that I got to sit in one room for 3 talks in a row, "The State of Django", "Pinax", and "State of TurboGears", which I can say, without qualifications, were all great(I received another shoutout during the Django talk, I guess I really need to deliver, assuming the GSOC project is accepted). From there it was off to lunch.

After lunch it was time to take the stage for my "ORM Panel". I'm saving all the details for another blog post, but I think it went well. After this we had a Django Birds of a Feather session, which was very fun. We got to see Honza Kraal show off the cool features of the Ella admin. The highlight had to be having Jacob Kalpan-Moss rotate us around the room to get Djangonauts to meet each other.

After this I heard Jesse Noller's second concurrency talk, and then Ian Bicking's talk on ... stuff, both talks were great, but Ian's is probably in a "you had to be there" category.

After that it was time for lightning talks, followed by what was supposed to be dinner for people interested in Oebfare(Django blog application) to make some design decisions. In the end quite a few more people were there and I got to meet some really cool people like Mark Pilgrim. After dinner it was back to the Hyatt for about an hour of hacking on Django before I called it a night.

Day Three

The final day of the conference. Once again I began my day with some lightning talks. After this was the keynote, by the reddit.com creators. They gave a short, but interesting keynote and answered a lot of questions. I have to say that some of their technical answers were less than satisfying. After this I went to an open space on podcasting where I learned that I'm probably the only person who doesn't mind podcasts that are over an hour long.

After this I went to the Eve Online talk, but I ended up leaving for the testing tools panel. This panel was interesting, but I can't help but feel that the Python community would be best served by getting the testing tools that everyone agrees about into the unittest module in the Python standard library. For my last talk of the conference I saw Jacob Kaplan-Moss's talk on "Django's design decisions", thankfully this didn't step on the toes of the ORM design decision panel, and it was very interesting. From there it was off to lunch, and a final round of lightning talks, capped off my Guido running away with the Django Pony(I hope someone caught this on video), and my conference was done.

This was a really great conference for me, hopefully everyone else enjoyed it as much as I did. I'll be doing a follow up post where I answer some of the questions I've seen about the ORM panel, as well as put the rest of my thoughts on paper(hard disk). And now if you'll excuse me, I have a virtual sprint to attend.