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DjangoCon 2009 Day 3

Notes from Day 3 at DjangoCon 2009...

Keynote by Ted Leung

Ted gave a great, thought provoking keynote. Here's a few interesting bits I jotted down:

• Django jobs increased 692%. What time period that covers I don't know but the point is there's a lot more Django jobs around, which I've noticed personally.
• Good things about Django: reusable apps, GeoDjango, the community.
• Web apps are changing: rich user interfaces, geolocation.
• APIs are important to enable richer user interfaces on various platforms.
• A review of other frameworks and some problems they are solving (e.g. Rails and deployment, Lift and real-time web, Webmachine and REST, Nitrogen and Comet, CouchApps).
• The Javascript space is enabling major advancements.
• Misc: Asynchronous, Comet, REST, Deployment, Monitoring, Analytics, Stacks, VMs.

Slides

Scaling Django by Mike Malone

A great talk by Mike Malone about ways to scale Django. I like how a lot of this came from personal experience while working on Pownce. Also, he was encouraging not doing optimization until you need it and it sounded like many things can be done easily that will take you a long way. The slides are very readable, explain many of the concepts, and have lots of code samples -- I encourage you to check them out.

Slides

Fighting Malnutrition with SMS and Django by Andy McKay

Andy gave a talk that was completely different than the rest and it was about how they are using Django to fight malnutrition in some parts of the world. The nifty idea here is a case worker will measure kids, send those measurements via SMS, they end up getting piped into a server running Django, Django processed them and sends back an SMS on the diagnosis and actions the case worker should perform. A very interesting use of technology to solve real world problems. I couldn't find the slides, but you can check out Andy's code on GitHub.

Google Summer of Code panel

In this talk 4 of the GSoC students presented their projects.

• Zain Memon gave a demo of this Admin UI improvements which look great.
• Alex Gaynor talked about his work to allow Django to connect to multiple databases.
• Honza Kral talked about his work on model validation.
• Marc Garcia presented his updates to the internationalization framework in Django.

Based on the e-mail just this morning from Jacob, it looks like many of these will be merged into Django.

No! Bad Pony! by Russell Keith-Magee

Russ gave a great talk about Django's philosophy and that pony == feature request, how there are some good ponies and bad ponies, and what defines a bad pony. Bad ponies include things things that are wrong factually, impractical ideas, presents a design mismatch with Django, ignore the Django philosophy, or take Django in a wrong direction. I always like getting an insight into how Django core developers make decisions on the project. I especially like with core developers share specific tickets or problems that are currently in their list of things to look at. I, personally, have wanted to get more involved with Django development for some time so these insights truly help knowing how to go about doing that.

Slides

Lightning Talks

I'm not going to do these justice since they were fast and difficult to always know or hear who everyone was. My apologies to those I missed but here are a rundown of most of the talks:

• Solace, Armin Ronacher's project to create a Stack Overflow clone
• Dig Deeper, some areas of code in Django that are great reads, by SeanOC
• About the Python Software Foundation by James Tauber
• About Gearman by Chris Heisel
• How to pronounce "Django" by James Tauber
• X-Sendfile
• Django without Django by Armin Ronacher
• Managing Django settings
• Django in government in Ireland
• Challenges of auth.User by Ben Slavin
• HTML5 and CSS3
• Banana, a cucumber-like testing tool but written in Python. See cukes.info for more.
• Continuous integration tools by Peter Baumgartner
• Open Source by Daniel Greenfeld
• User profiles
• Cassandra Project by Eric Florenzano

That's a wrap

Thanks to everyone for another great DjangoCon... it's still the best conference I've attended. Thanks to everyone I've met and spent time with... it was great meeting you all in real life. I look forward to next year.