Pycon experience

Pycon 2007 is now officially over. It was very nice to be able to associate faces to so many familiar names from the Python community and get the opportunity to talk with a few of them.

My talk didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. When I practiced it, it seemed to always take too long. So, when I had to do it in front of a fairly large crowd, I rushed through it a bit too quickly. Still, Crunchy did seem to generate a fair bit of interest and, in addition to the demo in my talk, I got the opportunity to demonstrate it "one-on-one" to about a dozen people who all seemed to be very keen.

Also, the idea of creating a special Python logo ("web badge") for identifying Crunchy-ready tutorials, which I had alluded to in a previous post, will likely be given the ok by the PSF. As soon as it is confirmed, I'll make an announcement here.

Since my last post, the PEP I wrote for keeping raw_input()'s functionality in Python 3000 [but renaming it "input()"] had been accepted. On Monday, I took part briefly in a Python 3000 sprint where I got to implement the required "raw_input(...) -> input(...)" and "input(...) -> eval(input(...))" conversion tool for the general tool that will be available to convert Python 2.x programs so that they work with Python 3k. I also implemented the corresponding simple unit tests as well a few missing tests for the "xrange() -> range" conversion. I would not have been able to do this if Guido van Rossum had not taken the time to explain a few things to me about the conversion framework. In the end, Guido checked in my changes himself. I get the feeling that he could have done the entire thing in about the same time it took him to explain to me the tricky bits. Nonetheless, I do get the satisfaction of having, with the PEP and the conversion tool, given back a bit to the Python community. Hopefully, with Crunchy, I (and Johannes, of course) will give back even more.