Daniel Davies

Community conferences are an important aspect of any industry, and that is certainly true within the programming community. Languages such as Python are developed by keen enthusiasts who seek to make their lives and work easier by advancing computer programming. A conference is a chance for people of all skill levels and involvement within a subject to come together and share ideas and knowledge with each other.

This year Birmingham is no doubt proud to be hosting Europython 2009. The Birmingham Python community hosted Pycon UK last year, and this year's conference isn't that far from a carbon copy in terms of setup so far. Its the same location, and on the whole its the same team helping out. The major difference of course being the size of the conference. There's the usual expectations met, Google have their stand setup, O'Reilly are selling cheap books and ...

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The Zen of the Web

by Ville Säävuori (@uninen)

The first talk of the conference, promising to take us through the basics of publishing to the web. Whilst primarily aimed at a novice, its always a good idea to re-cover the basics, and catch-up on the most basic principles which are all too often forgotten.

The talk introduced web standards, and most of all, the complete mess they are in. There are so many bodies, organisations and open-standards it can be difficult to keep up with it all. WAI, WCAG, W3C, RFC, etc etc. Lots for developers to keep up with, to make things accessible.

I liked a very good justification for APIs. The web is highly unpredictable, an API should help this by making more things possible, not restrict them.

Also learnt to use Atom, rather than RSS as default for feeds, not entriely sure why yet - feel ...

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Keynote Speech

by Cory Doctorow

Great talk about the dangers of DRM and the traditional media on the average hacker. Used example of a student who maintained software to index all the files on a shared network; he was brought down because like everyone he had some copyright infringing material on his computer. It was a very broad talk, but essentially the main ways to protect the rights of a hacker is to join groups such as the Open Rights Group, or to provide better support for crypography. Help develop encryption implementations, encourage our friends and family to encrypt their communications.

Twittering with Python

by Andreas Schreiber

With a lot of our work focusing around Twitter at the moment, this talk should give a good outline of what can and cannot be done using Python and Twitter.

Further evidence to support that Twitter is not a website, its a database ...

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Wednesday morning's keynote, about language architecture, was given by Bruce Eckel. The talk was proceeded by a brief overview of open spaces. These are beginning to seriously catch-on in Birmingham, and as a developer, I'm even more excited because they firmly have their roots set in the development community. Unfortunately, no one is quite doing them right around here. And because of that, they are devalued, and generally lead to the same things being said by the same people over and over.

The first point about an open space is that any participant is free to run a panel. There is a white board, with a grid of times and rooms, and people use post-it notes to write what their talk is about. This allows good flexibility; if two people are talking about similar things at similar times their panels can be combined to give more scope and ...

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