Mathieu Fenniak’s Weblog

I just returned to Calgary from the Vancouver Python Workshop. Cecil and I drove out there last week (Thursday evening/Friday morning). Catsy flew out from Toronto. We all stayed at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Vancouver, where much fun was had watching the Back to The Future trilogy, and making up entertaining stories about elves.

The workshop was reasonably well organized, had a nice venue, and was well attended. The talks varied in quality from okay to excellent - all the speakers were well informed folk with interesting topics, but very few programmers are excellent public speakers. That being said, I have a few specific suggestions for the workshop itself:

• Some talks could have benefited from the presence of a strict moderator. On a scale from polite to rude, the following things happened:

  • A speaker deferring a question to Guido. This is appropriate, as it is the prerogative of the speaker to defer during his own presentation, and Guido may be an excellent resource for an answer.
  • Guido interjecting a comment like "It’s not happening." while an attendee asks a question (referencing a PEP) is more questionable, but ultimately "polite enough" in the company of geeks.
  • Getting into an audience debate about wxWidgets during a PyObjC talk is not very polite.
  • Nitpicking the usefulness of a contrived optimization example is rude, pointless, and time consuming.

• An entire track on the second day ended up being dedicated to Plone. I think Plone is cool, but these talks unfortunately ended up being about Plone from the point of view of a user rather than a Python developer. I believe that the workshop did not have quite as many speaker submissions as they wanted, so these Plone talks weighed in based upon how many people were willing to do them. They were good, but badly targeted and abundant.

  I would suggest that the conference organizers be willing to say "no" to speakers if they have an abundance of talks on one such subject. I realize getting submissions for talks must be a difficult process, and the fear of having not enough content at a conference must be pretty big as an organizer.

I enjoyed the workshop greatly. I should have flown out rather than drive 12 hours, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I picked up a lot of good ideas, started in writing some interesting PyObjC code (a game of interracial life, oooh), enjoyed using SubEthaEdit in public for the first time, and ate a lot of good food. Catsy seems to have had her own kind of fun, too.