Back from PyCon 2009...a week ago.

I came back about a week ago from PyCon 2009...and went straight into getting our house ready to offer for sale, and then performing Anima Mundi by Mark Scearce in Raleigh, NC with my wife, Karyn, and some old and new friends. Good stuff, but exhausting.

I have quite a few notes from PyCon. My first mission there was to announce some of Launchpad's recent open-source work, in particular lazr.restful. I am excited about that, and have things to say, but I'm going to wait to blog on that just a bit longer. The docs need some work, at the least.

While, of course, the Django contingent at PyCon was very large, I was pleasantly surprised that the Zope/Plone community had a good showing. There were a few talks from the community, and BoFs included "I'm not ashamed to be a Zope programmer," "I love Zope," "I hate Zope" (the same crowd attended both the love and hate variants, I'm told), and a generic "Zope" BoF. The sprinting was enthusiastic and lively, and some cross pollination with some of the other non-Django frameworks also added some excitement and interest. The huge international Plone community using and sharing generic Zope libraries also has increased energy behind the Zope libraries.

Perhaps the most interesting generic Zope conversation I had was an attempt to identify what unifies the "Zope" projects. Thanks to efforts to bring Zope 3 libraries to Zope 2 and Plone, there is arguably more of a common theme across projects than in the past. There was some consensus that the following two ideas unify Zope projects.

• Zope provides an unusual degree of low-level pluggability and interchangeability thanks to a contract-based component system.
• Zope usually used a graph traversal approach to converting URLs to code, which has an advantage in that it is arguably easier to convert code back to URLs (walk back up the graph) than other approaches that do not have a natural reciprocal.

(For thoughts on the second point, see my old blog post.)

I have several specific PyCon reports that I'll post separately. All in all, I very much enjoyed the conference, though much more for the conversations and the sprints than the talks.