Conference Frenzy

If I thought that the students being on holiday would mean I was less busy, boy was I wrong.

On Tuesday I went to Cardiff for a seminar hosted by the Welsh e-Science Centre (caution: website gratuitously resizes browser windows) on Grid Computing. It was fairly interesting, but a little geared towards corporate types rather than being technically deep. It was enough to whet my appetite, I guess.

But Wednesday… Wednesday was something else altogether. I got up at 04:30, drove for four hours, attended the Python UK Conference 2003 from 09:00 until 19:30, then drove home, getting into bed about 11:30. A long, full, and highly enjoyable day.

For one thing, it was so cool to be surrounded by people who are as into Python (or more so!) than me - others who “understood”. :-) And yes, I did talk to Guido (heh - top hit when you google for “Guido”), and was pleased to put some faces to some names I know from the mailing list.

It was also somewhat frustrating in that respect - this time last year I was a regular on the mailing list, asking and answering questions, and starting to feel I was part of the community. Then I had less and less time for that, and of course I started this new job and haven’t had time for anything other than writing notes and teaching. So although I knew who Alex Martelli, Andy Robinson, Chris Withers, and Laura Creighton were (for instance), I really didn’t think they’d know me and I was shy of approaching them. Having said that, I did collar Chris and talk about rock-climbing briefly, but it wasn’t a pythonic conversation. :-)

But it wasn’t just a Python fanboy event: the content was excellent. Guido opened with his keynote on the history and background of Python, after which I basically stuck with the first “track” of the conference: Chris Withers on Extreme Programming, Duncan Booth on Design Patterns and Python, then a somewhat improvised panel discussion involving the great and the good. In each of these cases, it was the questions and answers that got really interesting - really mentally stimulating stuff.

The main reason I’d actually made it to the conference was because of a discussion at the end of the day, “Programming For Virgins”, on the subject of teaching programming to, well, people who’ve never programmed before. My colleague Chris Whyley was particularly interested in this, and since he was going and he knew I was into Python, invited me. The discussion was really interesting, not to mention inspirational - one of the prime movers was Russel Winder, formerly head of the Computer Science department at King’s College, London. We came away from that with lots of ideas and opinions.

Oh yeah - the other thing that was really cool was that I met (without realising it at the time), PyTex developer and Knuth lookalike (I hope he won’t mind me saying that), Jonathan Fine. Which was nice, given that I was raving about PyTex just last week.

I’d like to write more, and maybe even try to write something more interesting than the above, but I just don’t have time. So that’s your lot. I firmly resolve, however, that next year I’m going for both days of the Python conference, and staying over. :-) See you there?