After PyCon, spring cleaning

Things were hectic in the run-up to PyCon, so I'm doing a little spring cleaning, pruning old projects and what not. Now, there's something beautiful about a directory: a simple listing can hide so much complexity.

$ ls
foo
$ rm -rf foo

Is this going to take a fraction of a second or, as in my case, is it going to take 20 minutes? Time for a blog post ...

PyCon was great. More subdued than last year, and not only because I spent both flights contemplating death. We had a good time on the testing tools panel, although with 10 guys and 45 minutes we didn't get very far. Ian and Ping and a guy from PyJUG gave some sweet lightening talks. I got to play with an OLPC laptop (apparently the hardware is finalized but the software needs work: the CPU monitor uses about 70% of the CPU!). Bob and I had a crew each night, although things never got too crazy, just a little crazy.

I organized an impromptu session on web deployment, billed as "the bottom 5% of the web stack." Unfortunately I should have checked my ulterior motives at the door. Then we'd have had more time to talk about the interesting stuff: Joe Tate and Jim Fulton each deploy to some pretty demanding environments, for example. Process monitoring (a la daemontools, monit, zdaemon) turns out to be a significant requirement. And TurboGears and Pylons are merging, for pete's sake! Now that is worth talking about. Sorry guys.

On the other hand, it was great to see Jim in action building consensus, and then landing the discussion with specific next steps. Do I care about performance? Not really. Am I excited about Paste Deploy? Decidedly not. But it's the disagreements and the compromises and, yes, the wackiness that make it remarkable when we actually do work together.

I find the tension between purity and community so fascinating, between agenda and relationship, selling and listening. Face time both heightens and resolves this tension, and I love it. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.