A EuroPython impression, part III

On Tuesday, after the Zope Page Templates talk (18:30) we went to the Wellington pub having a beer with the guys from Netsight and Laurence Rowe. Birmingham is actually pretty nice in the evening as there are a lot of nice pubs and restaurants in the city centre.

Wednesday morning started with a talk from Bruce Eckel about programming language development and how Python was evolved compared to the other languages. Once again, check Reinout's weblog for details of this talk.

Reinout is writing everything down what is happening at the talks.

"We need to fail and we need to fail quickly". This was a talk about agile development. Bea Düring started talking about the two most widely used agile development methods : Scrum and Extreme programming. At their company, Open End, they developed a hybrid agile development method themselves. Important things like feature driven development and short iterations are featured in this hybrid method, including automatic testsuites. Interesting was the javascript testsuite they developed, you can find that one on PyPI.

"Tapping into the web of data" was a talk about semantic web data and RDF and what you can do with SuRF, a python library for RDF. Reinout, our hard working blogger, has posted a report about this.

Dr Sue Black of the University of Westminster was talking about the impact of Bletchley Park (Station X) on the world. On Bletchley Park the famous Enigma was cracked, the Colossus computer was invented, and a lot of other important code breaks as well. It is now a museum about code breaking, being an important museum in the UK.

People got really enthusiastic when showing a real Enigma.

We tried to have another conference call with Guido van Rossum again, but just like the day before it failed, so no Q&A with Guido this time. After the lightning talks, where Roel unfortunately couldn't talk about Plone as there were too many lightning talks, there was the excellent conference dinner.

More than 400 people at the conference dinner.

Right now Martijn Faassen is having a nice talk which probably will be reported on Reinout's blog. For so far the report from EuroPython 2009!