How To Consider Chicago in February

Brett Cannon is considering an import tutorial for PyCon '08, focusing on his new work in the area. I've caught word here and there about talks people are working on, and even had a suggestion to make a talk proposal myself, which is silly. I haven't a clue what I would be able to talk about. I sure would love to listen, and watch, and chat with everyone else. I'm really wondering how likely it is that I could make PyCon '08 the one I am finally able to attend.

For Work This Means...

I have a pretty flexable schedule at work and the boss is a great guy. (No, Van, I am not just saying that because I know you read my blog.) Still, I have no idea what prospects I would have for taking the time to attend PyCon, but I'll deal with that when I decide for sure that I want to try to go. Well, I know I want to go, but I have to make sure that I personally can go, before I figure out if I can professionally go.

For Family This Means...

Either Heather will want to come along with me to the cold of Chicago in February or she has to stay home and take care of Caelan all by herself for a few days. Of course, he'll be almost two by then and gets easier to take care of every day. I wouldn't mind them coming along, but what would they do with all the time that I'm at the convention? I suspect they would find something to occupy those days for them aside, like visiting one of her friends or something else that would take them away from the house while I'm gone.

Comments

Doug Napoleone said…

You might be a bit early for the tutorial :-)

The tutorial day is Thursday March 13.

PyCon 2008

8:28 PM

Art said…

With the recent weather in Chicago, February might not be all that bad.

Then again, considering our track record, you might want to bring a coat and hat.

10:11 AM

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer. One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...

Using a React Context as a Dispatch Replacement

React Contexts are the pretty little bows of the React world. Here's a really quick example of the kind of messy code you can cleanup by using contexts, without dragging in a larger dependency like Redux or even Flux. Starting backwards with a diff showing lines of code I was able to remove: All the properties I was able to remove were just pass-through. The Carousel component didn't care about any of them, but it had to pass through these callbacks so the multiple TaskList components inside the carousel could invoke actions. They were removed from the Component class itself, too, since it no longer needed to pass them through. Where did they all go? My ActionContext removed all the need for these passthroughs by providing a single simple helper method, action(), that components rendered under it can access. I really enjoy the pattern of passing a single callback through a context and removing what used to be lots of callback properties. Of course, I cou...

Developing Upwards

Search This Blog