I hope that you are enjoying reading the conference notes as much as we are producing them. This was my first experience with using SubEthaEdit to take conference notes. It worked amazingly well for Mitch's keynote, but less well for some of the technical talks. The more technical and code oriented the talk, the harder it is to take good notes, sharing or not. Still, when it works, its a wonder to behold. There were about 10 people editing the keynote notes. Some people were inserting content, others were cleaning up text and filling in details that had been missed. Others were Googling stuff that Mitch was mentioning and adding the URLs. Still others seemed to take responsibility for grabbing good quotes. if you contrast the keynote notes with the Nevow notes (which for some reason I only took myself), you'll see the difference between solo development and community development. There's now a core of about 4 or 5 people that are doing the bulk of the note taking work, and the notes being posted go beyond the talks that I'm going to to cover many of the talks from the other track (there are "only" two tracks). I can't and won't take the credit for the notes -- a lot of other people are working hard to bring you the notes. I just instigated the use of SubEthaEdit and am providing a place to host the resulting documents, but the real work is being done by a bunch of folks, not me. For the curious, the workflow is to open a text document in SubEthaEdit, let people edit the document, close the document and scp the file up to the web server. No editing is being done after the talks. It's been a fun experience to (once again) work collaboratively with people that I've never met in person. At the end of the day I suggested that the notetakers meet in real life, and we ended up going out to dinner, meeting each other and getting excited about SubEthaEdit. More on that in another post.

The talks that I enjoyed the most today were Anthony Baxter's talk on shtoom (VOIP) and the much anticipated talk on Starkiller. Anthony's talk hit all the important points and convinced me of the points that he was trying to illustrate related to VOIP and Python. I want to try out shtoom when I get home, and I want to think a bit more about how VOIP relates to Chandler. I met Michael Salib briefly before the Starkiller talk, and got a slight preview of what he covered. He's branched out from just writing a type inferencer (which was already cool) to actually writing a full native code compiler for Python. His work extends Ole Agesen's work for Self, which gives me more confidence that his approach will work. Unfortunately, the code isn't available, and won't be until May, because "I need to graduate". I hope that Michael is able to find a job that would help him to keep working on Starkiller. Of course, as soon as the source is available, people will probably help as well. The PyPy folks showed a demonstration of pypy, which helped to convince the skeptical. I am really happy to see the amount of effort going into Python implementation and I hope that the various projects will learn from and if possible help each other.

The talk that I wished I had gone to was Glyph Lefkowitz's talk on ATOP, which was a lot more related to Chandler than I had thought from the title. Actually, it is a bit of a problem that the titles are hard to connect to the actual subject matter of the talks. I had this problem with Andrew Koenig's talk. In his case, fame (Andrew) lost out to subject matter (I had dinner with Donovan Preston). The content has generally been very good, and via the magic of SubEthaEdit, I can see what's going on in the other track just by looking at their notes as they are being written.

In Chandler related news, Mitch's keynote seemed to be well received. I learned a bit more about his motivations for doing OSAF and Chandler, which was helpful to me personally. There certainly were a bunch of people who wanted to talk to him afterwards, and I saw him engaged in hallway conversations throughout the day. We also had a large turnout for this evening's Chandler BOF. Several estimates put the attendance at around 40, so that makes more than 10% of PyCon that showed up. It was encouraging to see that there's still so much interest in Chandler. The session ran from 9pm to 11pm and would have run longer but we had to bow out. That's enthusiasm. People had a lot of questions and feedback for us.

The most important talks for me tomorrow (today) are the Pyrex talks, because every time I say performance to a knowledgeable Pythonista, the answer I get is "Pyrex".