Summary
The slides and audio from my presentation at the 2005 Python conference are now available.

If you download the slides and listen to the audio it's fairly obvious where the slide changes occur. Here's the link.

I think this was the first year they tried to capture things on sound, video or both, so there are occasional sound dropouts, but in general it's tolerable. I think it's great that the conference presentations can be captured this way, and I suspect that it will cause more, rather than less, people to want to come to the conference. A great deal of the conference is much more than the presentations -- the OpenSpaces are a big part of it, and just hanging out and talking to people is something you don't get on the web. On the other hand, even for the people that come to the conference it's nice to know that you can see the presentations you might have missed.

I see that the lighning talks from Thursday were also captured, but it appears that it was only audio so it's hard to tell how much you'll get from these without seeing what the speakers were showing and doing. Lightning talks tended to be one of the most popular events in the conference, since they are 5 minute presentations about something that interests the presenter. For whatever reason, this seems to bring out incredibly interesting topics, and you can never get bored since they are only 5 minutes long.

I believe the most popular talk at the conference was Michelle Levesque's PyWebOff: Mapping the python web application frameworks. This addressed the problem of proliferation of Python web frameworks, and how Rails is (or should be) forcing the community to stop experimenting and get their act together to focus on a small number of frameworks (ideally, only one framework for each "region of use"). Sometime after the conference, Django rather coincidentally burst on the scene and so far that's at the top of my list to investigate.

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About the Blogger

Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) provides development assistance in Python with user interfaces in Flex. He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2005), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences.