First day: Saturday, 14.4.2007

Jumped on the night-train to Poznan at 21.18 h in Cologne on Friday evening. Slept for 2 hours max, arrived at Posznan at around 6 o'clock. Was at the hotel at around 6.30 h, had a shower and breakfast. After that, Adam Parchimowicz from the conference comittee called at my room phone to ask me whether I could do my talk at ten, instead of the afternoon, because some other speakers couldn't come. I agreed.

Got to the conference venue at the mathematics and informatics factulty of the Adam Mickiewicz University with a bus shuttle provided by the comittee along with some of the other speakers. We left at 8.15 h and were there at about 8.45 h. Some hanging around waiting for our conference badges. Finally, at around 9.30 h, the conferencce was started with a short addres by Jakub Piotr Nowak, followed by some boring, but very short talks by sponsors and a representative from the uni rectorate.

Then 15 minutes break before my call, during which I experienced a minor technical problem, because I discovered that Polish power sockets have an extra pin sticking out and the plug from my laptop's power adapter didn't fit in and my laptop had only power for about 1 hour left. Luckily, there was another HP laptop and I, somewhat adventurous, tried it's power adaptor and it worked!

My talk went fairly well, I started at about 10.05 h and finished with my slides at about 11:10 h, so there was still a fair bit of time for questions. People seemd to get drowsy about 50 minutes into my talk. Note to self: do something in next talk to rekindle interest after 45 minutes. General impression was that people liked the talk, questions were mostly targeted at features and tools of TurboGears and Python in general (ipython, nose, bicycle repair man, etc.)

I wanted to listen to the talk about "Ruby tools that help" but it was postponed, so I listened to "Python in the enterprise" instead, held by some employees of grono.net, a big Polish community website. Lots of administration and system architecture stuff and bad English but interesting to hear that their Python based web sites scales well to the high traffic they get. Left a bit early to enjoy the sun for a few minutes.

Then heard that the "tools" talk had already started now since 10 minutes, so quietly grabbed a seat. The speaker, Clove Carneiro Jr., is a guy from Brasil but lives and works in Dubai where he runs a Ruby-on-Rails consultancy and development shop. He spoke very fast and introduced some tools from the toolchain he uses for development with RoR. Lots of the tools he showed have very similar equivalents in the Pyton world, for example:

• gem / easy_install
• autotest / nosy.py
• rake / scons
• rcov / cheesecake

Was very drowsy and not unhappy when talk was finished. Afterwards lunch, typical mensa style but good, feeling very refreshed afterwards.

After lunch quickly peeked into "Python in numerical programming", but it was way over my head so I slipped into the talk about building gems for Ruby instead. This was by Olle Jonsson, a swedish guy, who lives in Kopenhagen. Gems are very similar in concept to Python eggs and the tools arounds it achieve the same things as distutils / setuptools. Some aspects of packaging are not handled satisfactorily yet, e.g. there is no version numbering schema for gems for different versions of ruby or for different architectures and AFAICS there is no package signing mechanism that integrates with a central, secure key database. After the talk there was an interesting discussion about the integration of gem / setup.py with make and other build tools.

After that talk the first day of the conference was over and we went back with the bus shuttle to the hotel. I went for a little stroll in the streets near the hotel looking for a electronis retailer, to buy a polish power plug, but couldn't find one. Bought a bottle of beer instead and returned to the hotel for a quick nap.

Then met with the others at 18.45 h in the hotel lobby from whence we went into the old town of Poznan to a pub called "Propaganda", full of communist era memorabilia. Very funny evening, lots of talking with the Polish about Poland and Polish People, Germany-Poland relationship, Polish people in Ireland and so on (and some geek talk too, of course). Went back to the hotel as one of the last at about 1.30 am.

Second day: Sunday, 15.4.2007

Next morning decided to sleep a little longer and got up at around 9.30 am, had a shower, left the backback at the hotel and took a taxi to the conference venue (~30 Zloty). Accordingly missed the first talk and the first 10 minutes or so of Michael Foord's talk about Windows Forms and Iron Python. It was held together with Andrzej Krzywda. I already had read parts of the slides for the talk because it was given in similar form at PyCon 2007, but it was still interesting, though I personally have no use for software that only works well under Windows. I liked the live implementation of a Drag and Drop feature by Andrzej using test driven development, though the presentation could have been a little shorter as a whole.

In the coffee break had a very welcome cup of tea and a piece of cake as breakfast.

The PyPy talk up next had some jaw-dropping feature and concept presentations and demos, though the tempo of the talk was a bit fast, so I couldn't really follow all of it. It seems that PyPy is already fairly advanced now through the funding by the EU, which has just ended recently, though. The speaker said that is passes about 98 % of the core tests of the CPython test suite and about half of the non-core test cases. You can use all pure Python modules from the standard library and most of the standard library C extensions that are written in portable C. Lots of other cool things you can do with PyPy, need to take a closer look at it. The Javascript backend seems especially interesting.

Last talk in the Python session was "Python in development for Public administration" by Giuseppe Romagnoli from Brasil (with Italian ancestry).

• very nice photos from Brasil
• general info Brasil and SERPRO, a big governmental ITC company, that provides services to many brasilian governmental organizations and ministries.
• They use Zope and Plone a lot (PZP = Python/Zope/Plone)
• Desktop applications with local CherryPy server and browser interface, for which they have developed their own web dev framework.
• Hilarious slide with comparison of programming language personalities where Giuseppe presented the progression in his relationships with Fortran Girl, Cobol Girl, Java Girl, etc. to Python Girl (represented by a photo of Giselle Buendchen of course ;-)).

Last talk of the day and the conference was about embedding Lisp in Ruby. Speaker admits homself, that there isn't currently a real application for this but it certainly brings him lots of karma points on the geekiness scale ;-)

Lots of handshaking and good-byes, back to the hotel with the shuttle and more good-byes and then went with the three brasilians, Clove, Giuseppe and his son to the old-town, where we had a very pleasent evening, sitting in the sun on the terrace of one of the pubs on the central town-hall square and drinking beer and talking about this and that. We also had some nice mexican-style food and then I had to say good-bye and head to the hotel and then to the train-station to fetch the night-train back to Cologne at ten to ten. While I'm writing this at 6.45 h in the morning, the train is approaching Cologne and I will be back home in about 30 minutes and probably get a couple more hours of badly-needed sleep.