Back from PyCon PL’09
Last weekend we went to attend the PyCon PL’09 conference. This year it was located in Ustroń. The most positive change was comparing to last year was to accommodate everybody in one place, as it made it easier to integrate with the python folk, and talk/have a beer after/between the talks. There were a few interesting talks. I liked Wesley Chun’s “Python References and Memory Model”, although I knew most of the material. “Pair programming & TDD in practice” by
Konrad Deląg & Krzysztof Goj was also cool because it involved workshops (nevertheless nothing new to me there). Marcin Mierzejewski’s “Python and Orange – how to predict the future” about data mining using python was very interesting. I was actually surprised that there is no market for this stuff in Poland. The talks were OK, but not revolutionary. In my opinion the crowd (well perhaps excluding the two physicists there) and the talks were dominated by web development (Django). I would very much like to see more non web related talks.
This year’s pros and cons.
Pros:
- common accommodation
- good food
- international speakers
- better organization
- lots of lightning talks
Cons:
- problems with the power for computers
- really bad WiFi
- too little non web related talks
Since most of the cons can be worked on, I’m really looking forward to the next year’s edition.
I can’t agree with your suggestion that there were to many talks about web development. Of course there was many lighten talks about it, but main topics were mostly about python practical usage, for example data mining, game programming, physics, and Wesley’s talks about python themselves. I see there just four presentation about web development.
About lighting talks you have right, but IMHO the reason was there were many people who want share their experience and ideas related with their job, and probably the market of web services is the biggest one in our industry.
Nearly half of the presentations were web framework related. In my opinion that’s too much. Especially given that those presentations were aimed at beginners. I think it could be improved in the future, however I realize that PyConPL is a community based conference, and most of the community (I suppose) works in the web department.
Nice conference but maybye in this year will be better.