DjangoCon has come and go. It was most fun I have had in a very long time! It was great to meet so many new people and reconnect with those I have shared several IRC conversations with over the past several months. I am very happy that the first DjangoCon went off without a hitch. I want to personally thank Robert Lofthouse on his absolutely awesome job getting this conference put together in such short notice.
My talk
I gave a talk on Saturday morning titled, "What's new in newforms-admin". This was my first talk I have ever given at a conference and really my first public speaking gig since high school. I think it went well for what it was worth. There will be always be room for improvement and I am glad I took the opportunity to learn more about doing this type of thing. I really enjoyed it.
I will be putting my slides on soon.
Other talks
I was glad my talk was first thing on Saturday. It relieved me from worrying too much about it so that I can enjoy the other talks I attended. Here is a quick run down on talks I found important.
Satchmo
Chris Moffitt and Bruce Kroeze presented an excellent talk on Satchmo. I am using Satchmo at work, but my version is forked from somewhere around revision 100 and looks nothing like it. I am very impressed where these guys are heading. I am looking forward to seeing the great things on the road head.
Inside the ORM
Malcolm Tredinnick nailed this. I was extremely surprised that he could fit this in less than hour leaving time for Q/A. It was really nice to hear about how he thought through some decisions made and the internals of the ORM that we all love about Django.
This talk was parallel with James Bennett's talk on Resusable Apps which I also wanted to see. I am looking forward to it once it is available online.
Pinax
James Tauber worked his magic. He delivered an excellent talk about the history, present and future of Pinax. He did this in such an elegant way interweaving reasoning behind certain things along with historical facts. This man is a genius and I look forward working alongside him with Pinax.
As a super special treat he launched Cloud27 at the end of his talk and it is simply awesome! I want to give some major props to Greg Newman on basically foregoing life for a week to get this ready.
Why I Hate Django
Cal Henderson, lead enginner at Flickr, delivered a keynote on why he hates Django. This keynote was my highlight of DjangoCon. He did this in such way to make fun of many things and provide constructive critism on things he thinks we should do to not only make us better, but down right bad-ass.
Panel: Django in Journalism
This panel was very interesting. While I am not involved in using Django in any journalism environment I found what each panelist said to be valuable information. Django was born out of journalism so it was interesting to hear what they have to say about where Django is headed is still able to work well in their world.
Django on Jython
This talk by Jim Baker and Leo Soto was interesting to hear because I am interested in seeing what Django can benefit from the Java world. It is good to see that Jython has be revived and now Django works on it with the excellent support from Leo Soto. They demoed running Pinax on Jython with the help of myself and Eric Florenzano. That felt real good. We even found a bug in Jython in the process.
Panel: Schema Evolution
Another great panel battling out schema evolution in Django. There wasn't much battling, but more of we really need to focus on something that shares features from each since they all accomplish the same thing, but in slightly different ways. I am tending to prefer Simon Willison's dmigrations over South and django-evolution. I have been dealing with raw SQL myself and seeing a very thin Python layer around making it easier to deal with amongst other people is exactly what I want. It looks like no support for PostgreSQL, but I wouldn't imagine it would be too difficult since it is just raw SQL. Need to look into a little bit more.
TWiD Live
I finished my speaking gigs with TWiD Live. We normally record on Sundays so this was a natural fit. Only difference is the audience is right in front of you so don't mess up. No pressure. I thought it went really well. We asked the audience who listens to TWiD and everyone raised their hands from the looks of it on stage. I about died with happiness. That is truely awesome! We drew huge lines in the Q/A part since we gave away t-shirts. You can still buy them if you didn't get a free one. I am still unsure on how distribution of the show will work. Google did record video of it and may just as well be released when the rest of the talks go online.
Earlier in the week we launched our new TWiD website. We consider the announcement at DjangoCon as the real official announcement. There will be lots to come with that in the near future.
While in California we were able to interview the Pownce team. Thanks Leah Culver and Mike Malone for that opportunity! Expect to see it in a future episode of TWiD.
Much more to come
DjangoCon was a nice stepping stone for the future of so many great things to be coming from the Django community in the future. Many ideas, thoughts and code was shared and it is sparking new ideas, thoughts and code from others and I am thrilled in seeing where we go! I am looking forward to future DjangoCons no matter the location.