Encuentro Linux 2009

Last week I went to Encuentro Linux, the biggest OSS-related conference done regularly in Chile. As last year I enjoyed it a lot. This year was different thought, since all my Continuumcoworkers also attended (in sharp contrast with last year when my old employer only gave me the green light to attend a few days before the conference took place). Moreover, we (as a company) invited Obie and Desi (from Hashrocket) to the event.

Attending to a conference in group is cool. You don't get the stress associated with going lonely in search of people to hang with, and going out with your friends is always warranted to be fun.

On the other hand, I realized that I had slightly less freedom than when I went to conferences by myself, since you tend to stick with the group. I met less new people than usual too and missed what I described above as a little stressful but which is also fun: looking randomly for interesting people to hang and talk with.

I guess there is a middle ground here and I'll try to make a better balance on the next conference I go with a group (and I certainly look forward for the next conference in which everyone in Continuum can go!).

The talks varied around a lot of different subjects (from 3D modeling with Blender to reverse engineering a video format, including also the usual sysadmin and developer oriented talks). Most were interesting and with the exception of the one about Blender (don't ask why I ended up there!) I got useful information from all of them to which I attended. My favorite one touched a lot of topics related to GIS systems done by Carlos Roman and Richard Rossel (who write on this blog).

It's also a good thing that Lightning talks are here to stay. The past year there were only around five speakers for these talks and they weren't notoriously successful (evidence shows that my attempt at motivating Chilean students to participate on the Google Summer of Code didn't work too well). But this year everyone had a lot of fun on most lightning talks. And Obie gave a nice surprise (even to some of the members of the organization!) participating in the closing of the event with a lighting talk that was very well received.

Oh, by the way my talk went well too. It had more attendance than what I expected (but not as much as my Django talk last year) and it went better than my recent talk at the JRSL. It's the second system effect at work; I figured out what part to left out in order to make room for more and better demos: two Swing apps, two Django webapps, one doctest demo using HTMLUnit (wrapped by a webrat-inspired Python API) to make web integration testing and one quick demo of PyDev's console.

Jython: Python para la plataforma Java (EL2009)

View more presentations from leo.soto.

Last but not least, I want to thank the organizers of the Encuentro Linux. From the conferences I've been in, Encuentro Linux is the one in which they put more effort on making the speakers comfortable. They make a suberb job and work really hard to make the conference happen. This is my humble hat tip for them.

Slides and demos from the Jython talk at JRSL

I just sit down and uploaded the material used for my recent presentation at the JRSL 2009.

The source code for the demos is in this zipped file, with the exception of the full django project I ran on top of Jython which was taken verbatim from the Jython Book.

You can take a look at the slides below (via slideshare) or download the slides as a PDF document here.

Finally, if anyone from the audience is reading this post and is also going to attend to the Encuentro Linux in two weeks, I want to tell you that I don't plan to repeat this presentation verbatim, but to do a much more demo-focused presentation. I'd like to hear suggestions on what area you would like to see more comprehensive demos.

Jython: Python para la plataforma Java (JRSL 09)

View more presentations from leo.soto.

Speaking today at Jornadas Regionales del Software Libre

Hey, if you are on Santiago de Chile and haven't heard about the Jornadas Regionales del Software Libre, you are still on time to come and enjoy this unique opportunity to see a variety of talks of interesting subjects related to Open Source technologies (which in this times are not only relevant to a bunch of hippie hackers but to everyone involved on programming or managing computer systems). The Jornadas Regionales are a South American FLOSS event that moves from country to country every year, and this year we were lucky enough to have it on Chile.

Take a look at the schedule for today, which includes my own talk about Jython at 3pm. Those interested on this kind of stuff will also find interesting the JRuby on Rails talk by Jorge Rodriguez who works with me at Continuum (actually, he is the CEO, but when you pair program with people you tend to forget those kind of “details”). As you can see we are serious about dynamic languages on the Java Platform :)

See you here!

Constraints can be liberating

Just a anecdotal tale of my recent trip to Jacksonville:

In my way to the U.S, the coach contiguous to mine was empty. That's great: it means that the 9-10 hours flight can be more comfortable. But it wasn't. I barely slept sixty or ninety minutes total, after trying like ten different ways to lay myself on the couches.

Three weeks later in the plane back to Chile I wasn't as lucky and had a fellow passenger sitting at my side. I didn't spend time trying to find the perfect position to rest. Only one was possible. End result: I slept 6 hours, which is now my record of continuous sleep on a plane.

Constraints tend to have a negative connotation, but they can help, perhaps more often than we realize. I now see that it is the obvious flip side of the paradox of choice.

Some people argue that in software development constraints should be embraced as positive things too. I guess they may be right.