late pycon wrapup
I meant to do this a little closer to the event itself, but first I decided I needed to have a site that wasn’t entirely embarrassing. I thought about trying to build myself something, but I eventually threw in the towel and just installed WordPress. It’s easy, it does what I want, I build enough websites, I’d rather spend my time on other things.
ANYWAY.
I’m not really sure what to say about PyCon, actually. It was my first one, and while I gather there was some discontent over the level of commercialization, I had a really great time. I think the best part for me was meeting people: I met a TON of awesome people, some of whom I’ve been secretly fangirling for ages (well, okay, lurking in their blogs) and some of whom I’d never heard of. I went to dinners and parties and happy hours and it was all way more fun than I was expecting it to be. (Although: I’m sorry, no, I don’t know why there are not more women in open source. I’m afraid that I am not plugged into any sort of female programmer zeitgeist.)
Outside of the socialization aspect, I thought it was… I don’t know, okay? I went to Titus & Grig’s testing tutorial on Thursday and acquired some hints I’d like to try out. I went to a few talks, but I don’t know if I just wasn’t going to the right ones or what. They were either too low-level or too high-level for me, and while I tried to go to intermediate talks, I apparently failed spectacularly.
The talks I think I got the most out of were given by my illustrious coworkers: Kumar’s unicode talk (I write a lot of scripts in the futile attempt to bend del.icio.us to my will, and unicode is my arch-nemesis in this regard) and JP’s nose talk. I also quite enjoyed Ian Bicking’s talk on consuming html, despite the heckling, and Titus’ talk about OLPC testing. The py.test talk was something of an eye-opener, actually, which I realized was kind of dumb once I stopped to think about it. See, the way I have learned about python is that I got this job doing testing and was told, “okay, we write tests in python using twill and nose!” And that was kind of it; it didn’t really occur to me that nose is a test framework and that obviously there are others. Like I said, dumb once I thought about it; I just hadn’t really thought about it. I’m too invested in nose to switch at this point, plus the team I work on has standardized on twill+nose, but py.test does have some nice features that I’d love to see somehow turned into nose plugins.
The one bit of coding I got done at the conference was a nose plugin of the very smallest sort; it allows me to do this:
>>> nosetests --with-env=qa
And just pass in an environment variable. I had been either setting it in my .bash_profile or putting it into a settings file, but I’d much prefer to pass it through the command line. That is what I did during the nose mini-sprint, while JP did actual nose things. My python abilities are very narrowly focused, but I’m working on it. Watch this space!
And, if I met you at Pycon, drop me a line and say hi. I almost certainly thought you were awesome and would like to talk again.
Tags: pycon, python
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