gistfile1.txt

Chris McDonough  -  4:49 AM  -  Limited

It's hard not to notice that the Python Web-SIG is very low-traffic;
surprising given how much Python is used in the web world. It may be that no
one likes to participate unless there's a contentious issue, or it might be
due to balkanization in the Python web community.

Communicating over the web is pretty impersonal and just kind of hard in
general; it's much easier to stick with what you know than to try new things
and become a member of a different community.

PyCon is great, but it tends to be so large that folks tend to clump into
their own brand-oriented packs without taking the opportunity to talk much
with people from the other packs. Rounding the wagons is also usually kind of
necessary, because for some, PyCon acts as a summit where communities sort of
get together once a year anyway, and there's often not enough bandwidth for
folks to really talk to people they don't already know pretty well.

What'd be really cool is to have a little miniconference of just the folks
who produce Web-oriented Python software (frameworks, applications,
libraries). An attendance of fewer than maybe 50 would be great, with good
representation from members of the major web frameworks, apps, and libraries.

In particular, at such a minconference, I think it would be really fun and
useful to get together and do the following things:

- Present your worst software design decision, and its impact. How would you
  do it differently today?

- Present your best software design decisions, and their impacts.

- Present your findings while building an application in a system
  that you generally don't use "in anger".

- Present a talk on some obscure corner of your system that you find
  really cool, but that you can't talk about in polite company.

- State-of/future-of sorts of talks about particular frameworks,
  applications, libraries.  - Participate in a panel about a topic
  (e.g. "reusable applications", "deployment").

- Find common things to sprint on (Python packaging, deployment,
  documentation tools).

That'd be really cool.
 
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+7 - Alfredo Deza, Lennart Regebro, Rick Harding, Laurence Rowe, David
     Blewett and 2 more

4 comments

Doug Hellmann - The python-dev team holds language summits on the days when
the tutorials are given at PyCon. Why not have this summit on one of those
days, too?

10:15 AM   

Chris McDonough - That'd be interesting although I suspect there might be
some overlap in desired attendance.

11:27 AM  -  Edit   

Doug Hellmann - PyCon is all about tough choices. :-) Seriously, I don't
remember many web-dev type folks at the language summit last year, but I
could be wrong. You could also hold it during one of the sprint periods. But
either way, I think you should definitely set it up. Let me know if we can
help publicize it on the PSF blog.  4:01 PM

Chris McDonough - It's a good idea, let me chew on it a bit. Thanks for the
suggestion Doug!

7:30 PM  -  Edit