Friday, November 20, 2009

Pycon 2010 pre-favorites - the Carl T. edition

Catherine Devlin posted the talks she'd like to attend at Pycon.  It was fun reading her picks - she has a great sense of humor, although I'm bummed that everyone now knows about the submarine robot talk, and I'll have to fight for room in the lecture hall to get a spot.

These are my picks (not in order - the truth is I could spend all day talking about a lot of these talks - they are all good - too short a life - too many good talks):

1) Ha, go to the depths of the sea to your Octopus' Garden with your submarine robot, Catherine.  I'm heading skyward with robots in space.

 2) Jython in the Military, is near and dear to me.  Besides, bossman is giving the talk - never hurts to show up and support the team.

3) While we're on the subject of Jython, Extending Java Applications with Jython by Wierzbicki is one that has potential to make me less ignorant.


4) My posts on this blog have all been about Python 3.x - Chun's talk, Python 3:  The Next Generation and Smith's talk about Python 3.x string formatting are two I could seriously benefit from.  When Anthony Baxter gave a tutorial on Python 3 at OSCON a couple years back, I just about died when he said he wasn't going to cover new string formatting.  He gave me this look like, "Wow, who are you, are you nuts?"  And I gave him this look like, "A total Python nobody, and . . . as a matter of fact, yeah."  Anyway, the string formatting one is pretty important to me.


5) Changes to Unittest and Intro to Unittest - yeah, four years after being exposed to testing, I'm still taking baby steps - sue me.


6) The Diversity Suite - one diversity talk and two technical ones - talks Diversity as a Dependency, Infrastructure Construction in Africa, Hackerlab.  
Anna R. is giving the diversity one - I attended her women in computing one a few years back and learned a bit, plus she was cool enough to let me dink around with her brand new minicomputer - a novelty at the time.
There is so little about Africa out there on the web relative to Europe and the Far East - I want to see what's going on.
Hackerlab (actually Think Globally, Hack Locally - Teaching Python in Your Community) is Leigh's talk.  Leigh is a smart security person.  In addition she's upbeat and happy.  I, by contrast, am morose and depressive.  I am hoping to get smarter and more upbeat through the process of osmosis.

7) The Python Language Suite - The Mighty Dictionary, Deconstruction of an Object, Decorators, The Command Line.  I'm not as strong on some of the basics as I'd like to be.  No shortage of places to learn and get up to speed.


8) Dealing with unsightly data in the real world.  Wow, the story of my life - "Singing my life with his words, Killing me softly with his talk . . ."


There's a zillion other talks I'd like to attend; actually, I probably will end up attending only half of these.  I'm not a web programmer - there's a ton of talks on that end of things.  Check it out.

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