(By the way, the time tense of this is really weird, it took a very long time to get online to get this posted...)

Alright, well, I have a few minutes before the keynotes start, so might as well jot some stuff down about PyCon.

Of course, first I had to get to Chicago. I flew out of Charlotte slightly late, although we ended up landing landed a half-hour early. It was the first time I've flown in a while, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is. It was uneventful - left slightly late, arrived somewhat early.

New Testing Tools: Twill, Scotch

In the practical applications of testing tutorial, Titus Brown gave a presentation that really showed me how to use twill effectively. The problem that twill helps to address is that testing code tends to be extremely procedural when state is involved - each method is repetitive and verbose, and that's before factoring the testing framework cruft - which, with things like unittest, can be considerable. Twill allows you to put all of that into a separate file, outside of your actual testing setup, and importantly:

  1. Not indented by eight lines, like tests in unittest are,
  2. Not even really bound by Python syntax, but instead is written in its own DSL.

So once I figure out a good entry point for that with Django, that's definitely going to be added to my test suite. Fortunately, with the TEST_RUNNER setting in Django, adding on twill functional tests should be quite possible; it's just a matter of writing the code.

Wireless Woes

The wireless is slow slow slow. I'm having isues getting online to post this now, an the thought of actually, say, uploading my photos to Flickr is quite laughable. Until I find my USB cable for my camera (or buy a new one, or borrow someone else's), that's really a moot point anyway.

Keynotes

Well, the keynotes were good, and I finally figures out how to make my campera take short exposures without flash, so once I get them on y computer and lightene dup a bit I'll get them onto Flickr. There should be a Flickr photostream for PyCon, and apparently there's a PyCon Twitter account too.