Here's brief report on the first day of PyCon.

Almost none of the usual notetaking suspects made it to PyCon this year, and even if they had, the hotel's network appears to be Bonjour unfriendly. This means that unlike previous years, there aren't any detailed session notes to post.

The Django and Turbogears projects are doing pretty well on the marketing front as well as the technology front. The Turbogears people showed some very nice browser based UI building stuff. I've been looking for a web framework to do some poking around, and I've been looking a lot at Ruby on Rails via our study group on Bainbridge Island. I've been waiting till PyCon to check out the happenings with Django and Turbogears.

The first two OSAF presentations were prettty well received. Actually, there was more interest than I expected, so that was gratifying. A few people asked me why there was no Chandler talk this year. It was fun to watch their faces when I replied that actually there were 3 talks this year. I am glad that people are starting to see that we are contributing stuff back into the Python community.

I was really interested in the presentation on bzr. It was interesting to see some of the work that Canonical has done, not only on bzr, but tools around it, such as the patch queue manager and launchpad.net. I hope that people continue to work on bzr support for trac. Martin Pool rightly pointed out that people who are afraid of decentralized version control systems are afraid of a bunch of bad community things that can happen using these systems. He also rightly pointed out that these are inherently social problems, and I think that he is right. Just because you have a centralized system doesn't mean people are going to work together in a good way.