Cheryl will be teaching the first electro-sewing workshop in Tog, on October 21st! Have a look at the Tog post to learn more, including how to sign up. This will likely be followed by more electro-fashion workshops in the future, keep an eye out for them. I'm really looking forward to it, combining technology with artistic fields is bound to result in wonderful projects.

Come along and sign up to the workshop, learn how to use conductive thread and create a small circuit to make your very own LED flower :)

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Do you work on something cool, in open-source or open culture or general tech? Would you like to teach a workshop about it, give people a taste of why it is cool and interesting? Please get in touch!

Congratulations to Python Ireland and the PyCon Ireland committee for the successful 2nd edition of the conference! If you weren't there, you should feel sad. I would be.

Lots of interesting talks and just like last year, a whole bunch of very friendly and knowledgeable attendees to talk to and share a meal with (or a drink, for lucky people who won several raffles... :o)) (hehe) (I did!)

I sadly missed the first keynote, which I look forward to catching up on on video. I was busy helping out at the registration desk, and discovered I really enjoyed welcoming attendees to the conference. A new hobby!

I don't know how productive in general Sunday was, sprint-wise and code-output wise. The open space format seemed to work well on the other hand! I attended the RSI talk and the buildout tutorial (must look more into Buildout) and spent the rest of the day PRing for Tog, distributing Berocca and talking shop. On Sunday afternoon, together with a fellow Tog member we stealthily stole away a dozen attendees to go and visit the hackerspace, conveniently located right behind the venue. Delegates were returned to the conference unharmed and inspired (I hope!).

And because one cannot ever have enough Python, the usual monthly meetup is on this Wednesday!

PyCon Ireland 2011 starts tomorrow! If you haven't got your ticket yet, that's tough because we sold out a few days ago! Congratulations, organisers, for what promises to be a fantastic event.

I also seem to have inherited a yellow staff tee-shirt so... Feel free to find me and say hi if you're lost (or not!). I'll hand wave and do my best to be helpful. :)

I'm back for more enabling! (Mwahaha) Seeing there was some interest in LaTeX, the very awesome Triona kindly offered to teach an evening workshop on the topic on September 21st, in Tog. Whether you're interested in starting out with LaTeX, or would like a refresher, join us! The registration information is available on Tog's blog.

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Hello you! Do you know about something cool, relating to open-source or open culture or technology? Would you like to teach a workshop about it? Please get in touch!

Are you a programmer interested in picking up Python and Django?

Rory is running a crash course in Tog starting this Thursday. There'll be two 2-hours sessions -- the first one about Python, next week about Django.

It's short notice but if you've been meaning to learn Python, now's your chance!

More information, including how to register, over here.

I gave my presentation on "making your first open-source contribution" in Tog yesterday evening and I think it went down well; I enjoyed delivering the talk and received positive comments about it afterwards -- although I do need to speak louder. I'm enjoying lightning talks! Now, what to speak about next... :)

The slides are available on Slideshare (or PDF). I also gave a hand-out to give people a chance to check out the links afterwards.

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On another note I think an evening of lightning talks was generally well received, and there is some motivation to run another similar event in 2 months. I'd love to have this be a regular thing. We need to be more strict on time-keeping though; surprisingly it seems people tend to feel bad for not speaking long enough, so they start just talking about random stuff or opening web links of cool things to show off... and interesting or not it feels like it's dragging on, particularly when one knows there's 3 or 4 more talks to go after.

I also got feedback from first time visitors that starting late "because people will be late anyway" makes it very sucky for people who don't know anyone yet, and also less likely that there'll be time to stick around after the talks to chat with the speakers and other attendees. I think we should start right on time next time (and to be fair, the 2 or 3 people who arrived between 7:00pm (announced time) and 7:30pm (actual starting time) were members... Not worth waiting for!!). It'd be nice to start on time and then encourage people to stay with drinks and cookies, or otherwise we need to find a social butterfly that is good at integrating people. :-)

Writing this down now, so that I can remember it in 2 months. Any other comments on the evening from people who were there, or general suggestions and tips on organising lightning talks?

(Irish Hackerspaces Week isn't over yet! Check out our other events.)

This week is Irish Hackerspaces Week (the link is for the Dublin events). On Thursday we will have the first ever Lightning Talks night in the space and I hope it will be successful -- I think it would be awesome to have a few short talks every month where members and visitors show off their projects or something cool they've learnt.

This Thursday I'll be giving one of the talks (10 minutes!), on "making your first contribution to open-source." I've had conversations with people who weren't sure where to start, and with this talk I'd be delighted if I can help at least one give it a shot. :)

The Desktop Summit is finished for me, though it continues on with workshop and BoFs.

Berlin's weather is pretty much like Dublin's with regard to the sky colour and rain status; though maybe with a few more degrees :) I quite enjoyed the conference, very happy to meet again the friends I made last year as well as meeting up with new interesting people (btw, if you asked about my card, it was made at moo.com: get yours now!!). It was also great to meet a couple of cool people whose activities I follow online, though I'd like to find a way to introduce myself to someone I know who doesn't know me in a perhaps less creepy way :o) (Sorry people, it was still a pleasure!)

I found less elation in the technical talks this year than last, perhaps because it's difficult to beat the excitement of seeing Gnome 3 work for the first time, pre-release. The ones I attended were still interesting and hinted at all the solid work that is going on currently, and I really enjoyed the many discussions on outreach, collaboration between the projects and within projects, and all that goodness. The Gnome State of the Union talk was a hoot, and one of the highlights for me was when they showed a list of quotes from unhappy users, like "if they treat their users like idiots, they should expect idiots as users" (or something like this), etc., as we're seeing online at the moment. It turned out these quotes were about the Gnome 2.0 release, and this makes me hopeful once the dust settles down, people will look at Gnome 3 with less of a knee-jerk reaction (and might still decide it's not for them, of course).

I will try to put together my notes into a few posts, though I can guarantee I won't have the time to be as thorough (or long-winded, depending on the point of view!) as in my notes for EuroPython unless I get the flu or something.

Many thanks to the organisers for putting together the conference and parties, I had a great time -- s'y'all next year!

Tomorrow morning at ass o'clock, I fly to Berlin to attend the Desktop Summit \o/ The talk schedule looks fantastic and I'm really looking forward to it, and to meeting again the friendly people from last year as well as new friendly faces.

Woohoo! See you there!

Yesterday evening Google kindly hosted the GTUG meet-up, which I don't usually attend but considering some of my fellow hackerspace members were speaking on the panel I had to go and *cough*heckle*cough* support.

Google Storage and Predictions API

The first part of the evening was a talk by Martin Omander on 2 Google APIs:

• the Storage API

Figure out what you're good at so that you can focus on that (don't build your own telescope, use other people's tools). The Storage API is what Google use themselves, therefore they have people on pager to make sure it stays up so you don't have to. Libraries such as Boto work with it.

• the Predictions API

You feed it training data, over 3 steps: upload, train, predict. It can do categorisation (for e.g. language recognition), or return a number (e.g. real estate valuation). Input data can be text or numbers.

Hackerspaces and formal education

The juicy part of the evening was the panel, despite starting with a very biased intro from the moderator against education in favour of hackerspaces. Asking the panelists to choose a side might have also contributed to limit the discussion.

2 interesting topics straight from the panelists' introductions:

• To work around the lack of decent sysadmins around, John Looney from Google has created a short graduate program, where they train people for 5 months and then hire them.
• James Whelton is a startup founder that is currently working on "Coder Dojo", a project to bring programming and computing to kids. I had a quick chat with James after the panel and they are bringing this to Ireland, starting in Cork: it seems their process is to find mentors in a city, get the group started running events/workshops/classes on a Saturday afternoon and then they move on to the next city. I'm not quite sure it's a sustainable way to build a momentum but I will be following this very very closely, and perhaps mentor when they come to Dublin. Not entirely sure where to get the freshest source of info: Twitter account here, All Ireland (?) blog over there.

Someone mentioned Sugata Mitra's talk on learning without teachers again, I have to make the time to watch this.

A couple of interesting points:

• Hackerspaces as part of formal education, as a society, or part of the University -- someone brought up the problem of evaluation and how to grade work that would come out of such a setting; a panelist remarked that academia has been doing that for decades, with PhDs!
• If going the society way, be careful to build a community. It should help with getting momentum.

Although there was a nice flow when only the panel and moderator were speaking, I was disappointed with how the audience involvement and back and forth with the panel was handled. Some questions were completely ignored after being asked without giving a chance to the panel to answer, and people talking were encouraged to speak faster or less as we were running out of time. I would have preferred less questions explored more fully, rather than a rush of comments and unresolved question marks.

Everybody would agree there is much more to be discussed on the topic :) Thanks to the organisers for setting this up!

The origami workshop in Tog on Friday night was a success \o/

Turn-out was great despite a couple of late cancellations, another Tog member with strong origami powers stopped by to help out if needed, and everybody seemed to be having fun, and I think everybody learnt something new -- I certainly did, though I could bear to be told again how to do some of the shapes we built!

People came with varied levels of origami skills, and of maturity :-)

I need to start bringing a real camera to these event, my phone don't do them justice. I'm really enjoying these beginner friendly workshops on different topics. If you're around Dublin and have some interesting technological or artistic skills you'd like to share over an evening or week-end afternoon, please get in touch with me!

See also:

• Related post Tog's blog

The Squishy Circuits workshop organised in Tog yesterday was a success! Many thanks to awesome teacher Triona for showing us how to make a mess, I mean, have a lot of fun with conductive dough and learn a few basics of electricity and electronics :) Triona also shared tips on teaching the material, especially to kids.

Thanks a lot also to all our attendees for making the event such a success (and for helping clean up afterwards :-))! Notably this was a very kid-friendly event, and I hope we can have more of these in the hackerspace -- show first-hand the next generation of could-be scientists how fun and interesting science and technology are!

A tiny sample of the afternoon's creations:

(Update: You can see more pictures over at the Tog website)

Taking a break from writing up my notes into blog posts to share a few general thoughts about the conference.

General feeling: Woohooooo! This was a fantastic week, I learnt a ton and met an amazing amount of awesome people. If you're here because I gave you one of my cards, hi! o/ It was lovely to meet you. (If you asked about the card and forgot, these are MooCards from moo.com. Get yourself some! People fought over these at EuroPython, I'll have you know. They're that good!)

The conference was wonderfully well organised, including the evening events. I fondly recommend the bistecca alla Florentina from Zaza! Everyone was incredibly friendly, like at PyCon Ireland last year it was common to strike up interesting conversations with a random stranger besides you and impromptu dinner plans would be shared between groups.

I was humbled by how egoless most people I spoke with were. They seem to know that no one knows absolutely everything about Python (and there were funny anecdotes about this, such as famous names requesting new features that are already in the language!). I was incredibly surprised when one of the keynote speakers sat at my table during lunch on the first day -- I had assumed well-know people would have solid cliques and no time or desire to meet new faces. And of course they ended up being just as nice as everyone else.

Some things I grumbled over: the constant strikes in Italy, first at the airport when I landed then the trains when I (tried to) leave! I was disappointed to miss out on the training I was hoping to attend as well, the rooms were a bit small and filled up long before the training starting time. Lesson learnt for next year!

...And indeed I am much looking forward to going again next year. In the meantime I welcome all Pythonistas to PyCon Ireland in Dublin this October! :D

Interested in learning origami? I'm organising a free 2-hour origami workshop in Tog, on July 8th (a Friday) from 7pm to 9pm, kindly taught by Jamie O'Leary. Complete beginners and intermediate levels are very welcome, though if more advanced students would like to drop by and give a hand, they're welcome too!

For more information, including how to register, see the announcement.

Know some cool craft, involved in an interesting open-source project and would like to share the love and/or teach about it? Contact me at julie AT this domain (or see my about page) and let's have a chat! We'd love to see more of these workshops in Tog, if you're around Dublin.

Tomorrow I fly to Italy to make my way over to EuroPython 2011 in Florence. I am tremendously looking forward to it! With 5 days of talks and 2 days of sprints (though probably only one for me) this will be the longest conference I've ever attended, we'll see how I do :-)

The conference looks wonderfully organised, I've been really impressed with everything the all volunteers staff has already accomplished to make the event as enjoyable as possible for everyone (the scheduling with estimated attendance vs. room size, the data SIM, the cultural events...). Can't wait!

Some of the talks I look forward to are...

• many of the talks on scalability, since that's part of my job now (woohoo to Python development \o/) notably David Cramer's Building Scalable Web Apps and Simon Willison's Challenges in developing a large Django site
• some of the talks on intermediate/advanced Python concepts that I'm concerned I may have missed, like Python tips, tricks and idioms and maybe/hopefully Python 103 (this one's conflicting with the Pitfalls of Continuous Deployment talk, it's gonna be tough to choose only one to attend...)
• I cannot wait for Brian Fitzpatrick's Myth of the Genius Programmer keynote :D :D
• If I survive this far (one of the last talks of the last day!) I'm also really curious about the London Python Code dojo, what they're doing and whether that's something to try and replicate in Dublin

There are of course many-many-many more talks I highlighted on my schedule, I expect these to be my conference highlights. From past experience though I know I'll be amazed at plenty more!

Now of course, this may be compromised if I fail to hear my alarm clock at 3:45 tomorrow morning :O