Lacking Credibility

PyCon is about the people

My first trip to PyCon was 2005. It was the last year the conference was held in Washington, DC at the George Washington University. I flew out with my girlfriend and stayed in a youth hostel a couple of miles from the conference center.

I had an absolute blast. It was the first time I’d met Glyph Lefkowitz, JP Calderone, Chris Armstrong, Allen Short, Moshe Zadka and the rest of Twisted Matrix Labs. I’ve been using and working on Twisted in various capacities since about the spring of 2001. However leading up to PyCon 2005 I found myself in a bit of a coding slump. I had gone a couple of years without having a reasonable computing device. Keeping myself busy hacking 16-bit x86 assembly on an old 486 IBM Thinkpad. My network connections were sporadic, and my participation in Twisted had lulled. Eventually I was able to scrape together enough money to build a shiny new Athlon desktop.

For the next couple of years it gradually got easier to work on Twisted. Even while working a significant amount at a local movie theater and going to school full time. However I quickly became fed up with programming. It’s not that I didn’t want to write code I simply couldn’t. New concepts had been introduced to Twisted and I was having trouble wrapping my head around them. I had a real problem with Deferred’s for a while and even then the state of web twisted web programming had become … scattered. All these elements created a feedback loop of frustration. I became little more than a late night lurker in #twisted, enjoying conversation with “friends” whom I’d never met.

The thing that really kept me in #twisted and keeps bringing me back to working on Twisted is the people. I have to quote Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” here to really explain what it is about these people that makes them so special to me.

If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.

I’ve surrounded myself with the smartest people I could find. PyCon is about people. I enjoyed PyCon 2008 as much as I had enjoyed PyCon 2005 (if not more) and I can’t wait for next year.

The Highlights

A lot of awesome has come up of PyCon 2008, so here are some of the things that are important to me.

The Twisted Software Foundation

Twisted has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy, an umbrella organization that helps fund open source projects. I spent a lot of the conference with Duncan MacGreggor and Glyph Lefkowitz listening to them scheming to get various sponsors and coming through with some big names. This is a big step for Twisted, and I hope that we can use the funds to really improve this thing which is a labor of love for all of us.

Twisted-8.0.0pre1

Chris came through amazingly getting out the first release of Twisted in over a year, on the first day of the sprints. I helped out by writing the sub projects NEWS files for subprojects and working with JP to fix some pydoctor defects, but it was the efforts of Chris, who spent days working on the final tarball generation code that made a release possible. Chris then went on to spend a good 5 hours writing the NEWS file for core. Take a look at it, it’s big.

You might notice that 8.0 is a significantly larger number than 2.5. Twisted has moved to a year based major version scheme. The minor and patches are simply incremented which I think is less confusing than Ubuntu’s year.month versioning scheme. This is part of the goal to switch to time based releases, hopefully one every two months. I’m looking forward to helping out with this in any way I can.

The People

Last but certainly not least, the people. I’ve already said that this is what PyCon is about, so here are a bunch of pictures of these people who mean so much to me. You can find all of these and more in my PyCon 2008 flickr set.

Above is the slightly incomplete but still awesome group photo.

Here we have moshez and zooko, this was just before an awkward incident involving John Draper. Moshez may never recover.

Our fearless leader glyph is about to get out the bear.

foom maintains an encyclopedic knowledge of all things HTTP so that I don’t have to.

radix giving an awesome talk about using Twisted with PyGame. It almost makes me want to write a game.

fzZzy and warner

radix again, this time with exarkun (standing) and fijal (one of those crazy PyPy guys.)

PenguinOfDoom finally finished iocpreactor. If you meet him, buy him pie.

oubiwann

spiv, his distributed version control system can beat up your distributed version control system.

wsanchez and amberite

And of course, our new friends, rotund and chewy.

If I left you out, I apologize profusely, everyone at PyCon was awesome. Just go look at all the pictures. Everyone’s photos tagged pycon2008

Technorati Tags: pycon, python

Tags: pycon, python

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 5:57 pm and is filed under twisted-planet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.