My super-lame DjangoCon 2008 wrap-up

Django    DjangoCon    2008-09-09

So many other people have so much more to say about DjangoCon than I will, I'm afraid. While everyone else was busy liveblogging the thing, I was actually present, paying attention, being 'in the now'. So I didn't take notes for later, but I do have a lot of standout memories. I'm glad that this first conference was so small - I know it will continue to grow each year, so I'll never have the chance again that I did this weekend, to meet and talk with the core developers. Through the scheduled sessions, panels, and particularly the lightning talks on the second day, I got a lot of exposure to projects being built with and for Django, services that might get into the framework in the future, apps that people are building using Django, new testing tools, migration tools that are being developed as we speak. There was a lot of buzz about Pinax, Satchmo (a Django-based ecommerce framework), and of course GeoDjango. One of the smaller projects I was glad to see is Eric Holscher's testmaker. Check out the screencast. It's not going to replace my existing unit tests (at least not yet), but it'll definitely make my life easier.

    Some of the other highlights:
  • There were a significant number of women there (and by 'significant' I mean around 20 - that's an impressive ratio for any kind of tech conference). Still, we got to enjoy one of the few perks of being a woman in engineering: lines for the men's room, no waiting for the women's.
  • Cal Henderson's talk, "Why I Hate Django" - hopefully it will be on YouTube soon. In the meantime, you can check out his slides. It was all very tongue-in-cheek, meant to be constructive criticism as it pointed out some of the current problems with Django. And he made fun of Rails developers, and that's always a good time.
  • We wound up giving Michael Trier (host of 'This Week in Django') a ride to the 1.0 release party on Saturday night. At the restaurant, I finally met Rob Lofthouse, Russell Keith-McGee, James Bennett (whose presentation on reusable apps was also one of the highlights of the conference), Jacob Kaplan-Moss, and Eric Holscher. All of those guys are super-nice (well, except Russ ... he's only mostly nice).
  • Sadly, I did NOT get to meet Adrian Holovaty personally. Which is a shame, because he's mad hot.
  • I've joined Cloud27.
  • Simon really does remind me of Harry Potter.
  • The music legacy of Django Reinhardt definitely bears investigating.
Here's some more DjangoCon 2008 coverage: