UTOSC Presentation
Well, I'm presenting at the Utah Open Source Conference this coming September. My topic is Using Django to Drive Internal Development and Tools. I'll be starting off with the Django basics, giving a good tutorial on how things work. From there we'll dive into running your existing tools and code from a web interface with Django. Finally I'll discuss some tips for integrating with your existing environment. It should be pretty fun, and I'm looking forward to the presentation.
OSCON 2007
Well I'm in Portland, looking forward to starting OSCON tomorrow. You can expect a major increase in blogging over the next few days as I report on things I'm learning and other cool happenings.
OSCON Inspired Hacking -- Comments Go!
Well I've got a lot of notes to write up about OSCON, but first I'd like to announce the latest in website features: comments. I finally finished up the work I've been slowly doing for the past few months, and got comments turned on.
- I'm doing akismet spam checking, and
- am stripping all HTML tags.
- I am allowing markdown for comments.
- Comments close ten days after the post.
I've developed the framework to allow easy expansion, and probably will post this code in the near future.
Django Master Class
This was an excelllent presentation. Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Simon Wilson and Jeremy Dunck presented on Django, covering a number of very useful topics. A couple of these things were areas I really needed to get my head around, so this helped a lot. My highlights:
- Unit Testing - An excellent overview of the testing available testing methods and how to use them.
- Middleware == Rails Filters (not Java/Enterprise Middleware)
- Forms with AJAX how-to. jQuery looks like a nice AJAX library.
- Custom Model Fields - actually telling you how to do this.
Jacob has posted the slides and notes online, read them and take advantage of this cool stuff and more.
Python 3000
Guido gave his yearly Python 3000 talk here at OSCON. Most of the things he discussed are in the PEP's. He started by going over the migration path for Python 3.0 from 2.6. Additionally there were a few key features that I was pretty happy to see.
- Set Comprehensions
- Dictionary Comprehensions ("We're adding sets, and have list; we might as well have them all.")
-
super()instead ofsuper(Class, instance) - Unicode source code
Managing Technical Debt
Andy Lester gave a very fun and enjoyable presentation on Managing Technical Debt. Technical debt is all of the TODO statements in your code-Things you know are broken, but never get around to fixing. Andy gave 5 points to getting out of debt and staying out.
- Identify debt
- Determine costs of each item
- Fix the most profitable.
- Stop getting new debt.
- Remain vigilant.
There was a lot of detail in the presentation about how to succeed at each stage. Perhaps the hardest is steps 4 and 5, since both of those often require the understanding of management. Management needs to know why it needs to spend money in better, not faster, solutions.
I really liked how he said for step three you need to work at each item one at a time, rather than tackle it all at once.
The Myths of Innovation
Scott Berkun gave a presentation which drew ideas from his book The Myths of Innovation. He discussed how we all know those classic moments of innovation: when the apple fell on newton, when Archimedes shouted "Eureka", etc. The funny thing is most of these moments aren't even accurate. In reality innovation doesn't just happen in one quick flash. We often picture innovation as an outside force, an the innovator "just happened" to be in the right place.
Real innovation takes a lot of effort. Real innovation is like exploration: risky and with a high chance of failure. Even when true innovation has occurred, it can be dismissed by society or others. Scott went into a lot of detail on these points, and I'll definitely be picking up a copy of his book for myself. It's good to look at how innovation actually occurs and how it ...
A Lexicon of Open Source
"r0ml" (Robert Lefkowitz) gave an amusing and interesting look at words, code, and rhetoric. He started by saying that software, code, is the rhetoric of the 21st century and open source is the trivium of code.
If those words are too much, you should stop reading now.
He talked about how we need to stop using acronyms, and rather starting having words. But no words really capture programming terms, so we can steal them from the middle ages (since no one else is using them). He then commenced showing us what great words we should be using for things; I'll highlight a few.
- Bug - depending on type it may be a: amphiboly, aporia, or a catachresis.
- Version Control - stemma
- SaaS (Software as a Service) - Pecia system
- Open Source - chrysography
- Closed Source - decretal (it just sounds worse)
- Reuse - palimpsest
- Architect - rubricator
He closed his talk discussing a pet peeve of ...
OSCON 2007 Wrap-Up
Well, OSCON is over, and I'm back in Menlo Park. I've just spamned the poor Utah Open Source Planet with my inundation of summaries. Looking at the two years I've gone I have to say that it can be hard to get everything possible out of the convention. Some topics sound good, but aren't and vice-versa. In any case, here's some of my impressions.
- You learn a lot about where the dynamic languages are headed. Larry Wall and Guido Van Rossum both have yearly sessions talking about where Perl and Python (respectively) are headed. It's good to be in the known with upcoming technologies.
- Big companies make big open source announcements. Intel's releasing of its Threading Building Blocks is a big deal for the community as we find multi-core systems become ubiquitous.
- Swag: I only got ten shirts this year, I wasn't ...
OSCON Keynotes—Nat Torkington and Steve Yegge
O'Reilly has put up more OSCON keynotes. So go over to the presentations page and watch some. I especially recommend Steve Yegge's take on branding(video) and Nat Torkington's Open Source Therapy(video).
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