Francesco Pierfederici did a "python success story" industry talk on using a mix of Python and Fortran-77 (via the "ctypes" module) to eat terabytes of telescope image data in real-ish time - the requirements include picking out all new asteroids from the thousands of known moving objects during the 60 second window before the next 3giga-pixel image arrives. Approximating thousands of N-Body problems in limited time is a challenge, and that's Francesco's job.
Ned Batchelder gave his talk "Go Easier on Yourself: You don't test enough and the reason you don't test enough is because you don't write easily testable code." With good examples. No, great examples. Ned is an invited speaker this year because he is concise. His talk from last year covered the same topic I have talked on before and I kept thinking "He didn't mention X" followed by "I should have omitted that too."
My talk on "Python's Dusty Corners" earned it's more accurate original twitter title "Strange Python Shit." I scrapped my originally planned "overview of everything" and 1000-slide opus that covered comparisons, descriptors, namespace lookups, and context managers. I had to because that morning I tried to put all my well researched and thoroughly unit-tested examples into power point and it came out at .. I stopped kidding myself at 40 slides and gave up. Instead I threw up the bullet point slides on what I had and just tried to talk extemporaneously; The result was about 10 minutes of speaking and 30 minutes of Q & A. This suits me just fine - as I said about Vilnius (host of EuroPython 2008) "I love this town, it is unkempt but not ruinously so."
Most questions boiled down to asking for what purpose this "strange python shit" existed and why the stuff didn't seem more useful in the generic:
Guy: what good is [protocol X] other than that it makes it easy to implement [core python feature Y]?
The answer was usually "none" which is a compelling story by itself.
Based on feedback my final talk will include more graphics (arrow pointing at the dot in "foo.bar") and include a description of why magic can happen (and why it rarely does!) at the dot. My original code examples that implement the various features like instance lookup in pure python will end up on a blog or wiki once I get them formatted. They were way too long to fit on a slide but about right for a web tutorial.
