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DjangoCon 2009 Day 1

The first day of DjangoCon has come and gone. Just like DjangoCon 2008, this conference is a big highlight for me. Not only is everything in this conference directly related since I use Django full-time, but the chance to meet people that I only know as a Twitter or IRC handle is exciting as well. For this conference I decided to avoid having my laptop open in front of me (as much as possible) to avoid the constant distraction of e-mail, IRC, Twitter, etc. I have a little notebook that I'm jotting down notes or thoughts and try to stay focused on the speaker.

The following are some quick notes I took throughout the day...

Day 0

The previous day I met @arthurk and @mitsuhiko and went to dinner with them plus @cscotta, @dodeja, and @mtrichardson at Deschutes Brewery. We had a fun discussion about Python, Solace, WSGI and its problems, and Disqus.

Day 1

Starting the first day of DjangoCon...

I met @binarydud while in line getting coffee. Matt is someone I was hoping I'd bump into and has helped me a lot on the Django Debug Toolbar. His current work on a branch includes working on a profiling panel with nice graphical display of time spent in each function down the call stack. I'm excited at the progress and look forward to merging that sometime soon.

I met @jezdez who has played a big role in my Python endeavors. He has helped answer my questions on IRC so often I feel I owe him lots and lots of beers. He's the king of all things related to virtualenv and pip, as well as distutils and setuptools and packaging and Sphinx documentation, as well as many other areas I haven't yet explored. It was great to meet Jannis in person.

Keynote

The keynote by @avibryant was thought provoking. The message I got from it was that the current state of web development may be short lived, if not already dead, and frameworks need to consider other approaches. As things like non-relational databases or key/value stores are gaining popularity and find their place, and web apps become more Javascript driven (e.g. Gmail), the traditional data driven dynamic website fall by the wayside.

I met @alex_gaynor, another person who has helped me many, many times in IRC and seems on the verge of getting binary OR'd the Django commit bit. I appreciate his sharing of knowledge and code.

UR DOIN IT WRONG by James Bennett

The key things I got out of this were: RTFM, RTFM, RTFM; take time to learn Python, and some good thoughts on what makes a good 3rd party Django application. Things like having a setup.py, INSTALL, README, and LICENSE files, having tests and proper docs, etc.

Token Testing Talk by Eric Holscher

This talk was on testing tokens... no wait, it was the token testing talk, the only talk about testing at DjangoCon. I got a lot out of this talk as I'm horrible at testing. This talk covered doc tests vs unit tests, showed good examples of tests from both Python and Django source, and highlighted some great things in his project, django-test-utils. Plus some great work on testing tools that were worked on during the Google Summer of Code and other tools. Great stuff! Slides

I met @ericholscher afterwards and it was great talking to him. I hope he doesn't mind my barrage of questions once I start incorporating testing into my workflow.

Git: The Lean Mean Distributed Machine by Chris Wanstrath

I viewed @defunkt's talk on Git, but only half of it. I'm pretty familiar with Git already but Chris' talks are always funny and fast paced. The parts I did see were excellent. But I hurried away to see a debugging Django talk that had a special interest to me. Slides

Debugging Django by Andy McKay

I viewed @clearwind's talk on Debugging Django, which had a lot of good tips on logging, pdb, the Werkzeug debugger, my own Django Debug Toolbar, Arecibo which looks like a nice central logging solution, and django-sql-profiler which aims to fill the use case of letting someone use your Django site for awhile and going back to review the requests and queries generated from that user's visit. This is also an idea I was toying with when I created the Django Debug Logger, which takes the same framework that the Django Debug Toolbar has but logs information to a database for later review rather than showing it in the request. I think there is a lot of potential for both ideas to exist and possibly concurrently in the same code base since they are very similar functionally. I'd like to play in this space a bit more.

I met Andy afterwards and we had a small discussion about this and I hope to have the chance to talk to him about some ideas further.

Deploying Django by Brian Rosner

@brosner's talk had many good tidbits that I had to discover on my own when I first started out. Things like using relative paths in your settings file, separating the media paths for site content vs uploaded content, using tagged deploys, using virtualenv for isolated Python environments, using pip for installing a predetermined list of packages and bundling packages, using Fabric. There's also a super secret project called tolkien that will hopefully be released soon that takes many of these ideas and makes a deployment tool. Really looking forward to seeing more on this front. Slides

As a side note, I was curious if the Django developers might (re)consider packaging Django to write out the initial settings.py file to include relative paths since everyone seems to do it and it's generally "the right thing" as it helps during deployment. It might also be nice to drop out a settings.py file that can work without edits for quick starting your project with things like a default SQLite database defined, relative paths, etc. so an end user gets the "It Worked!" page with very few steps.

The final talk by Simon Willison and the technical design panel were great as well but I failed to take notes as I was pretty beat from concentrating so hard all day. :)

After the conference was over we visited @baileystaproom for a couple beers before heading off to the @pdxpython user group meeting. This meeting included a talk on Python's ConfigParser, a talk about Solace by Armin Ronacher, and a talk on Python's distutils by @schmichael. It was a great Python meeting.

To end the night we (@percyperez, @arthurk, @jjdelc, @olaechea) decided to head off to Henry's Tavern and see how many of their 100 beers on tap we could sample. After about 5 pints between us and an excellent dinner we were too tired to attempt the other 95 so we headed back to the hotel. There's always next time.

To round out the day I met @pydanny and saw him do a 1-handed cartwheel, and @ericflo follow up with one of his own.

Updated: To point to Alex Gaynor's awesome new site.