DjangoCon 2011 Follow-Up

I'm not even going to try and do a full overview - maybe if I'd been taking notes nonstop, but otherwise there were too many smart people, too many great discussions, and too many exciting times to cover it all. To sum up, most of the buzz this year was around two key topics: 'community' and 'documentation'.

And with that I'm just going to give you links to the slides from my favorite talks.**

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

• Keynote, David Eaves - "The Science of Community Management"
  
  David does not appear to have posted slides from his inspirational keynote, which is a shame because it really got everyone excited and talking about the value of community. I recommend taking a look at his blog and Twitter feed.
  
  Here are some awesome contribution stats that were posted on the heels of the talk, and something you might have forgotten existed: the Django Development Dashboard.

• Monkeying Around with Python at New Relic (Graham Dumpleton)
  
  Graham has not posted slides yet either, but keep an eye on this page. For some information on the product he gave us a peek into, check here.

• Django Hosting Panel : The companies represented:
  • Dot Cloud
    
  • ep.io
    
  • Lumentica (AppHosted)
    
  • DjangoZoom
    
  • Gondor
    

• The story and tech of Read the Docs (Eric Holscher)
  Slides : http://www.slideshare.net/ericholscher/the-story-and-tech-of-read-the-docs

• Testing: The Developer Strikes Back (Sandy Strong)
  Slides : https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0AVthC0Z3iw8DZGRrdnFzeGdfN2c5bWJ6d2Y1&hl=en_US&pli=1

• Secrets of PostgreSQL Performance (Frank Wiles)
  Slides : http://t.co/UtlGwuf (Dropbox)

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

• RESTful APIs: Promises and Lies (Tareque Hossain)
  Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/tarequeh/restful-apis-promises-lies

• Real world Django deployment using Chef (Noah Kantrowitz)
  Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/coderanger/real-world-django-deployment-using-chef

• Building APIs in Django with Tastypie (Issac Kelly)
  Slides : http://loupe.ep.io/site_media/static/slides/

• Why the Django Documentation Sucks (Steve Holden)
  No slides posted, but you can shame him publicly at @holdenweb

• Safely Deploying on the Cutting Edge (Eric Holscher)
  Slides : http://www.slideshare.net/ericholscher/deploying-on-the-cutting-edge

• Benevolent Designer For Life's Keynote - Designers Make It Go to Eleven! (Idan Gazit) Slides : http://www.slideshare.net/idangazit/dc2011-keynote
  
  And another talk he recommends, his own from DjangoCon EU 2010:
  Design for developers: Making your Frontend Suck Less

Thursday, September 8, 2011

• Advanced security topics (Paul McMillan)
  No slides, but some interesting links:
  • The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws
  • django-secure

• RTFM -- wRite The Friendly Manual (James Bennett)
  Slides : http://t.co/E8VkaJM (Dropbox)

• Web Scraping With Our Favorite Python Libraries (Katharine Jarmul)
  Slides : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19508576/djangocon_slides/src/scraper_talk.html

• Making interactive maps for the web (Zain Memon)
  Slides: https://github.com/zain/djangocon2011/blob/master/talk-slides.pdf

**IMHO, these links should all be on the DjangoCon web site. This happens so often - sometimes it's hard to follow a presentation or take notes fast enough, so the slides should be available afterwards for further review. I thought that was a given. But year after year and conference after conference, the only way to find them is to go searching - if you're lucky, the presenter will put them up in some public location and then tweet the URL. And if you don't happen to follow the presenter, or don't happen to be looking at your stream at the right time, maybe someone else will retweet it later. Some of this year's DjangoCon slide links are on Lanyrd, but not all.

It's so much busywork to track down all this information. How has this problem not been solved by now? My proposed solution would be to give presenters permissions to edit their presentation-specific pages in the schedule (e.g., http://djangocon.us/schedule/presentations/52/), to add the link to presentation slides after the talk has been given. Likewise, when (if) videos of the talks are ready, they should appear here as well.