Five Pycon 2010 Talks I Need to See (original) (raw)

Following the example of Catherine Devlin and Carl Trachte, I thought I'd put together a list of the five Pycon talks I need to see in 2010. But I couldn't--I struggled to get below a dozen. So here are the top five I need to see, plus the ones I'll probably kick myself for not seeing because they're undoubtedly going to be scheduled in the same slots as the top five:

1. Import this, that, and the other thing: custom importers (Brett Cannon)
This is an easy choice, because I'm about to be implementing one of these for work. Would have been be nicer if Pycon 2010 had been scheduled for September 2009, but I'll take what I can get.

2. Understanding the Python GIL (David Beazley)
Another easy choice. After reading lots of code and debugging thread issues in our embedded Python interpreter at work, I think have a decent grasp of the GIL implementation. Given David's mindbending generators tutorial last year and his GIL presentation from ChiPy, I expect this talk to be rich in things I will be disturbed to have learned.

3. Powerful Pythonic Patterns (Alex Martelli)
Alex's talk last year, Abstractions as Leverage, was curiously satisfying. He didn't present any facts I hadn't already heard or read, but his presentation made some new connections for me (in a "My God, it's full of stars!" way).

4. Threading is Not a Model (Joe Gregorio)
In the last few years, I've begun to see pervasive threading as a placebo more than a solution. To paraphrase JWZ, some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll spin up a new thread." Now they have two problems. In reality, they've usually created an unknown number of problems, bounded only at the lower end by the number two. I'm really interested in seeing what Joe brings to the discussion beyond the usual "threads, select(), or fork()" question.

5. Turtles All The Way Down: Demystifying Deferreds, Decorators, and Declarations (Glyf Lefkowitz)
I have a long history of utter contempt for the practice of using syntactic sugar to "re-define the language in order to provide a more concise, natural style" for a given purpose. Glyf says he "will try to convince you that all of this wonderful magic isn't all that weird". Sounds like a challenge. If you're not continually questioning your own biases, you're heading for a mental rut, so I'm going to try to attend this with an open mind (and probably leave with a thoroughly-bitten tongue).

These are the ones I will move heaven, earth, and lunch plans to see. The others I really want to attend are:

I wasn't terribly impressed by the tutorial list (other than the compiled Python one), so I'll probably pass on them, but the talks look even better than last year. See you in Atlanta!