Initial thoughts for PyCon 2009

Posted on March 28, 2009

I'm at PyCon 2009 in Chicago. So much awesome stuff has already been discussed and we're only a few hours in. Much of it very relevant for my employer (which is nice since they're paying).

Some random thoughts so far:

• Windmill (the web testing framework) looks incredibly promising. If you're doing web apps and you're a Python shop you should be using this. The Python shell integration rocks.
• Cassandra is worth exploring. It's a large-scale, distributed DB that's used (and hacked on) by Facebook with good Python bindings.
• Twitter has added a facinating new dimension to the conference. Everyone is tweeting using the #pycon tag. There's all sorts of interesting discussion going on in real-time as talks happen. Twitterfall is a great way to watch the action.

The conference seems really well run and the space at the hotel is great. The only problem I (and many others) have noticed so far is that the wifi can be a tad unreliable. Not suprising given the huge number of wireless devices around.