2 talks stick out in my mind.

First the “Decorators Are Fun” discussion by Matthew Wilson was easily the most enjoyable discussion for me. Obviously, he demonstrated python decorators, which allow you to dynamically modify functions without actually changing the function. Decorators are not totally unlike AOP or java annotations and it was interesting to see python examples. If there was a downside, it was that his presentation was a little too fast, when you start nesting functions and talking about functions that modify other functions, it gets a little hairy especially if you are new to the concept. But it also makes a ton of sense once you get the hang of it.

The second talk I really enjoyed was Gary Bernhardt’s Talking to the Web with Python. During the talk Gary demonstrated 2 python modules, Beautiful Soup and Universal Feed Parser, for parsing html & xml. I enjoyed this because he provided some very practical examples (eg: parse a webpage for links) of things you may want to do with parsing web pages or syndication feeds. He even showed a simple web crawler in about 8 lines of code, using these modules. Plus Gary had the first talk of the day, which is tough, but he brought a lot of energy to the discussion and kept me focused on his talk, which was good since I was up until 4:30 the night before and the red bull hadn’t kicked in yet.

All in all it was a good day and I am glad I went, I don’t know that I have ever been so excited to learn a new programming language, there is something about python that just clicks in my head, it makes a ton of sense to me. Back in college the president of ACM tried to get me to learn it, but I didn’t listen, not sure why it has taken me 7 years to dig in.