Boldly Talking Python in Boulder

On Saturday, October 10, the Front Range Pythoneers had a Python "unconference" at the Google facilities in Boulder, Colorado, USA. An "Unconference" is a conference organized around the principles ofopen space technologies, which tries to provide many of the benefits of traditional conferences without the associated ceremony. We still got to enjoy some delicious pizza, though.

Introducing the Pycon Boulder Attendees to Principles of Open Space

Photo Credit: Matt Boersma

It was unseasonably snowy and cold Saturday morning, but in spite of the weather, almost everybody that signed up in advance was there, along with a few last-minute registrants. We had nearly 40 attendees join us for 15+ sessions, plus the always loved "hallway track." Many thanks to the three Googlers who came out to shepherd our group and facilitate the meeting.

You can find more information about the event and sessions on our wiki, Tweets about the event and this great post-conference write up. You can also check out some more photos of the participants and our scheduling process. We discussed the following topics, among others:

• Intro to Python
• ctypes tips & tricks
• Python extensions
• matplotlib
• Web development frameworks, including Django
• Database access
• Concurrency & pre-emptive multithreading
• Event-based/actor development (e.g., Twisted & Kamaelia)
• Cooperative multithreading (stackless/greenlets)
• pyprocessing
• Game development with Pyglet/OpenGL
• Jython
• RPC using Twisted/Foolscap
• Desktop Application Development (PyQT/QT, wxWidgets, GTK)
• IPython
• Google's office decoration contest, "Pimp My Cube"

The best surprise of the event? Bruce Eckel, the author of Thinking in Java, was among the participants. Thanks again to Google for hosting the unconference; it worked really well for our purposes. The Google Boulder facility is gorgeous.

By Greg Holling, Front Range Pythoneers