Day two is done, and I’m trying to do better at this. I definitely have better notes than yesterday. I have slightly fewer of them too, since the South session was absolutely worthless to me, and I blew off Tilting at Windmills to go up to the room with a stomach ache and a customer who needed help.
Here’s the recap of day two:
By the schedule, there were 90 minutes of lightning talks happening in the morning. I guess when 9:00AM rolled around, there were only three submitted so they postponed the start time. This gave me enough impetus to put together my own, on using Prezi for presentations. Here it is. (This is my first time embedding media in this blog. It may look crappy until I spend more time formatting. If so, please excuse the visual disruption; I will try to make it better soon.)
Laid-back, easy-going guy who receives a lot of emails. Of course, he’s written some pretty important open source software, like memcached1, and an Android app that runs on a server in his garage scanning for his phone’s SSID so that when he rides up on his motorcycle it can open the garage door automatically2.
Tareque Hossain gave an excellent, easy-to-follow introductory presentation on Django REST APIs, with illustrations from PBS children’s shows. Really - his opening slide had Elmo on it, which was only the start of visuals borrowed from his employer. His technical examples also came from PBS, of course.
One cool takeaway: JSONP3 for sharing APIs across multiple domains.
I really tried to get something out of this session. I can totally see how useful South could be, despite my initial misimpression that it was useful only in the largest, most drawn out installations. Unfortunately, Brian Luft did much of the presentation live at the terminal and it wasn’t working, so I have no clue which parts were South and which parts were Brian’s attempts to get it working. It was like I was the customer showing up for training, looking over the lead developer’s shoulder. Which is something I’m sure I’ve done with customers before. Many times.
Isaac Kelly did in fact convince me I could build an API with TastyPie. Someday I’ll have to prove that, right?
I hadn’t known about json.tool for pretty printing JSON from the command line, but that looks useful too:
$ echo '{"json":"obj"}' | python -mjson.tool
{
"json": "obj"
{
By the end of the JSON session I was already fielding voicemail, email, and text messages from a customer back home. One of us had managed to break his brand new Box.net uploader library.5 I spent the Stop Tilting at Windmills session tilting at windmills.
This session was very cool. Best parts included:
a good branching model for git6
a vocabulary of deployment verbs implemented in scripts (pull, build, tag, sync, install, rollback, start, stop, restart, reload)
a reminder that the startup processes (init.d, upstart, etc) are just processes written by other developers, and sometimes it makes sense to roll your own
The session next door, “Best Practices for Front-End Django Developers”, was clearly very popular as well. Roughly half the conference attendees were in the same session I was. Next door, it sounded like they had about one-and-a-half times as many people clapping.
Idan is cool, an excellent choice. I’m guessing that, just as design implements the physical interface between human and machine - where the skin meets metal - Idan may do the same for the Django community.
Note: This is part one of four on DjangoCon 2011 in Portland, Oregon, September 6 - 10, 2011. Read all four parts:
memcached gives developers a place to store key-value pairs where they can be quickly retrieved, more quickly than the database or by calculation. ↩
No, really. Not kidding. A garage door opener. ↩
Here’s the Wikipedia article on JSONP. ↩
It’s part of the Python json library, readily accessible. See json docs here. ↩
My multiup jQuery plugin was part of that project. I did not blog on building a Box.net API library for PHP, although I did do exactly that, the night before delivery, when I found out that the published PHP library Box.net offered wasn’t just poor quality, it was incomplete. For example, the upload functionality was not implemented at all. ↩
Eric gave a link to “A Successful Git Branching Model” post at nvie.com as an example similar, but more complicated, than their model. ↩
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