Lonely Lion

They made the announcement last night at the closing session. Great work ChiPy! Ted Pollari and Carl Karsten were the big players behind the bid, they did a great job, and clearly put together a great proposal. Chicago!

The SQLAlchemy talk at Pycon just made a few things click for me. I didn’t really understand SQLAlchemy before, as evidenced by this previous post. The reason it didn’t click for me right away is because it’s not implementing the same pattern as most ORM’s I’ve used. Fowler’s active record pattern is what ORM’s like ActiveRecord, SQLObject and the Django ORM implement. SQLAlchemy implements the data mapper. Projects like elixir put an Active Record pattern on top of the data mapper.

So, a few pattern links and it all starts to make sense to me. Good presentation.

My first day at Pycon was a good one. I attended a couple of good talks, I18N, Parsing, Stackless, WSGI, Web Frameworks, Teaching and Pyweek. All really good talks. But the standout, and the one I want to write about, was the keynote. Ivan Krstic was the speaker, he’s the Director of Security Architecture for the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

From an engineering standpoint, the program is amazing. Engineers like Ivan saw their constraints, like price, size, ruggedness, usability, as benefits, not roadblocks. Like other engineering efforts with strict constraints, they innovated, not for the sake of innovation, but for the sake of success. The laptop itself is adorable, the concept (Python is the filesystem!) is great, the team working on it is tremendously capable. It was an inspiring talk about what’s capable if you have the right people, the right attitude, and a problem worth solving. This problem, the education of the kids of the world, is absolutely worth solving. The best part is, we can help.