[TriZPUG] PyOhio FTW

[Chris Calloway]

PyOhio was a mind expanding experience. Highly recommended.

Somehow I won the grand door prize, a full multi-OS, single user, Wing 
Pro license. I already have a full Wing Pro license. So at the next 
TriZPUG meeting, some lucky person is going to win this as a door prize. 
It's worth $245. I would save it for PyCarolinas, but the download code 
expires on Sept 15, so I gotta give it away sooner. Chris Fox is 
reserving us a room for our August meeting at NCSU now. So save the date 
Thur Aug 23 at 7pm for your chance to win.

PyOhio also shares their love by donating their large cache of name tags 
ribbons (the ones that say "speaker," "sponsor," "volunteer," etc.) to 
PyCarolinas. Calvin, I will hand them over to you the next time I see 
you. The tags were given to PyOhio by PyCon US, so the gift keeps on giving.

The PyOhio board met on Sunday and tapped PyCamp to provide a week of 
Python instruction leading up to PyOhio 2013. PyCamp will be July 22-26, 
2013 and PyOhio will be July 27-28, both at the shiney new Ohio State Union.

The sprints were excellent. Catherine Devlin concentrated the sprints on 
minting as many new Python cor devs as possible. Her help was fantastic 
and somehow I managed to submit a patch for filecmp.

The best part wasn't even surprising. The best part was, of course, the 
lightning talks. Chad Whitacre is not only a Python rockstar, he's got 
to be the funniest person to ever give a lightning talk (OK, maybe 
second to Ian Bicking's old ZDjangoGears talk). Anyway, you should 
support Chad's https://www.gittip.com/ .

I'd like to report to you on Chad's talk on Aspen, his super-duper WSGI 
server. But I was session-chairing a different track while it was going 
on. There were four (!) simultaneous tracks at PyOhio.

There were some lightning talk glitches with laptop projectors and 
laptops, as usual of course, so we didn't get to see the Caktus 
lightning talk. The main ballroom projector seemed to freeze on anything 
with video. But it was great to see Caktus there as a sponsor. I think 
the organizers were pretty happy with all the NC/TriZPUG presence and 
support.

The best talk was Kenneth Reitz's "Python for Humans" which was about 
Python barriers to entry. I never knew there were so many. I mean, from 
teaching Python, I thought I knew most of them. But there are a lot more 
than I knew. But Kenneth didn't just complain. He has answers, like his 
requests module (pypi.python.org/pypi/requests) which compensates for 
all the warts in Python standard libraries dealing with http, and like 
his "Hitchhikers Guide to Python" (http://python-guide.org). Anyway, 
Kenneth works for Heroku in Virginia and wants to give the same talk at 
PyCarolinas.

The PyOhio video should be up soon at http://pyvideo.org . You might 
want to go look there now, because the PyData talks are up.

My second favorite talk wasn't a talk at all. It was also by a Ruby guy, 
Greg Malcolm, who ported the Ruby Koans to Python. And they're 
wonderful. So the talk was just download the koans are start doing them, 
each attendee on his own in silence. Go here:

https://github.com/gregmalcolm/python_koans/downloads

Download and expand the koans, cd into either the Python 2 or 3 
directory, and python contemplate_koans.py . The script will tell you 
which test case you need to fix next on your path to enlightenment.

My talk turned out OK (in my mind, that is) because it timed out 
perfectly to the time allotted for my talk, which was completely 
accidental, I assure you. A couple of people told me it was the best 
talk they saw. Clearly they were crazy, so I avoided them for the rest 
of the conference. You can find my presentation and code samples on my 
page at:

http://trizpug.org/Members/cbc/pytestfund.pdf and
http://trizpug.org/Members/cbc/pyohio.zip or
http://trizpug.org/Members/cbc/pyohio.tgz

There was a great party Saturday night thrown by the mysterious 
Cargowebco firm at the Kobo night club with the Tatoheads food truck 
standing by. Chorizo fries, local beer, two bands, and lots of Python 
people. Good times! The official PyOhio on-campus hotel, The Blackwell, 
was also over the top. There were lots of Python people staying there 
and hanging out late in the lounge. There were no dull moments.

A highlight for me was having lunch with Brandon Rhodes who always gives 
the best talks at PyCon (he had four talks at PyCon 2012!). Brandon used 
to organize PyAtl before moving to Ohio, where things were already quite 
well organized, Pythonically speaking. I always get a lot out of 
listening to Brandon's opinions on all things Python and, well, anything 
else (this time it was trends in climate change-inspired science fiction).

And opinions, there were a lot of them. About every other speaker 
delivered some form of these statements:

"If you aren't doing X, you're doing it wrong," or
"If you're doing Y, you're doing it wrong," or
"The war is over. Z has won. Sorry,"

where all those statements are perfectly debatable and reasonable people 
do either, according to what fits them. Bandwagon-ism used to amuse me 
in a "look at the kiddies on their children's crusade" kind of way. Now 
it's just starting to get annoying. This is a trend we should not 
contribute to. I was appreciative of speakers who presented their 
findings with some modesty, because in five years we'll all be doing 
something else some other way.

PyOhio was a as great as I'd been told and I'm looking forward to it 
next year.

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway http://nccoos.org/Members/cbc
office: 3313 Venable Hall   phone: (919) 599-3530
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599