The new shiny OSS Bar Camp website is up! University College Dublin, week-end of the 25th and 26th of September. Many awesome people already signed up. Register now!

The talks

I happily went along to the August meetup of Python Ireland last Wednesday, where as I expected the community talk was very interesting. Kevin showed us the results of the surveys he sent out after PyCon Ireland (survey says: 100% satisfaction!), and a second one to understand the Irish Python community better -- mostly, "who we are" since we don't really know! Some people show up at meetups, or events, many many more are on the mailing list. Vicky posted up her notes of the talk for an idea of what the survey touched on. I was interested in the results although they are to be taken with a grain of salt: not everyone filled out the survey, and perhaps some questions could have been phrased differently as I found myself realising a couple of times that I completely misunderstood the question as Kevin was explaining "we asked about blah blah blah". Oops! I'm sure the data is mostly valid still :o)

An important section of the survey and thus of the talk was about what we we could -- and wanted to -- do as a community to raise Python's profile and reach in Ireland. The survey had many cool ideas, asking non-anonymously what people would be willing to *actually* help out with. Likely subgroups of 5 people or so will be formed to follow up on some of these ideas, with people with not as much time welcome to chime in if they're interested.

The Redis presentation got cancelled, but Brian gave us a quick tour of the highlights of EuroPycon. I've never been, but from what I understand despite being quite good it was not as good as the previous years.

Pub topics

We headed out to the pub afterwards, where we promptly tried the concept of "topics" that Kevin had brought up in his talk. Basically you divide people/tables by topics and interested people can gather around and discuss and/or make progress on something. I'm not sure whether that kind of structure can really work in a pub context, it tends to be more ad-hoc. You start something along and then you call people over you know would be interested. It was a bit difficult to get started but based on the interesting conversations that ensued I'd be willing and curious to try it again.

If someone dangles a piece of paper with "Education" written on it there's no way I can *not* pay attention so I broke from my current conversation to sit at the table.

Education: Second level

We basically divided the group of people we could reach out to ("educate" I guess) into 4 groups: secondary level, third level, professionals and hobbyists, kinda merging the 2 latter as the discussion progressed. For some reason I just don't care about reaching out to professionals, or about certifications. Those topics are plain uninteresting to me. Ah well. Teaching high school students and somehow getting through to college students is a lot more interesting, and we agreed transition year students were really the best target for the secondary level cause. I want to look into this again once I'm done with my adult course.

There were suggestions of training secondary level teachers so they can teach how to program, which struck me first as a bit unfair. If there are interested teachers though, that's very very cool and I'm more than willing to help out! But I wonder how realistic that would be. The few teachers I met seemed either overwhelmed or stoically accepting of how much more knowledgeable and comfortable their students are with computers. On the other hand I was never asked any particularly complex questions by my teenage students during my short course, so it might very well be worthwhile to focus on teaching the basics of programming to teachers instead. They would certainly have a better reach.

Education: Third level

Third level outreach would be about giving more perspective and teach an additional language to students, who tend to be only exposed to Java through college years. That's the strange relationship between employers and Universities, employers want graduates they can put to work instantly, Universities would like to teach computer science, and students would like to learn something that will get them a job. So I understand why students might limit themselves to Java initially, but still if we present Python correctly, as an alternative it would be very worthwhile. There was the idea of helping students through their homework, using Python to solve the problems. I wonder if it would attract the right kind of students but it sounds worth a try. Outside of the meetup I had also talked about this with Cheryl who suggested I might try to teach an introduction to programming (using Python) to college students before their course begins. Particularly targeting women to help even the playing field a little (see this link about meritocracy & third level computing courses) though of course open to everyone.

Alan and Kevin should be posting their notes from the evening and the various "what we can do" for each target group. What I'm transcribing here is a mix of the actual conversation and my bubbling thoughts :)

I left as the group kind of disbanded to crash the "website / online presence" table topic, as this came up many times while we were talking: we should highlight what companies are using Python, and link to resources for people looking to get started with the language. From the response to my course, people in Ireland definitely have an interest in learning!

It's strange that I had to fly to the Netherlands and speak with some cool folks from Germany to learn about this, but the first MeeGo Conference is planned to occur in Dublin this November. Their call for papers includes talks targeting newcomers to the platform, and the event looks like it's going to be free... I wonder if I should take this as an invitation to give in and finally get myself a shiny, shiny N900.

EDIT (Aug 8th): Now with a shiny website!

What an awesome, awesome conference this has been.

Saturday

Many interesting talks and presentations on Saturday, mostly on different aspects of web development (saw 2 on measuring and improving UI performance), one on Clojure (I'm glad I know more about it though I still don't feel interested enough to want to give it a go yet) (Scheme is higher on the list!), a dynamic introduction to writing your own XMPP bot. There's a few talks like the Python puzzlers I want to catch on video when they're available. I saw lots of people with N900 around and oh, how I lust.

The venue could have used some air conditioning but besides that it was great, especially in the afternoon once there was more talks going on at the same time, so the rooms were less likely to be filled up. The corridors were not blocked but because the space was still, let's say cosy you would often end up besides someone and just strike random nerdy conversations. I really enjoyed that and met some very interesting people.

The evening was very well organised as well. Tasty dinner in the Radisson then live music, way too loud like Irish people tend to like (?), but after moving away a tiny bit further with a couple of attendees I met at the bar  we were able to talk about Tog and other topics. Lots of people asked me about the hackerspace over the week-end actually (I was proudly wearing my Tog tee-shirt on Saturday!), it's great to see people so curious and inspired by the idea.

And oh, the swag. Yay! Tee-shirts my size!

Sunday

I'd never been to a Python sprint before so I wasn't sure at all how it organises / self-organises. I felt very inspired by the XMPP talk from the day before (such simplicity, and yet, such power!) and I wanted to give a go at the sample bot the speaker, Victor Hugo, had published on GitHub before the talk. So I ended up with my name on a whiteboard besides XMPP, heh heh. At the beginning of the day one of the organisers asked us what we wanted to "lead a session on" and put the names, topics and rooms on a whiteboard. People were free to add up other topics as the day went along, or drop by on a session they were interested in.

Overall this felt like one of Tog's synchronous hackathon except more organised. I was delighted when someone showed up a bit later who was curious about XMPP too and sat besides me so we could work at figuring it out together. Having the speaker sitting nearby was handy too to answer questions on some aspects of XMPP communication through Python. After having the basic code running I decided to try to scrap my favourite dictionary website, wordreference.com to get basic English to French / French to English word translation. It took me longer to remember how to work with BeautifulSoup than adding the XMPP command but still, it works and was good fun. (The code is here!)

After the tasty lunch at Boticelli, I went to the "Python: building community" session, which touched on topics  like enabling newcomers to join the community and feel welcome, how the existence of a Python certification would help increase Python visibility and credibility with employers, and then one of my favourite topics, outreach to students and younger people. I got a lot of energy out of that last part and I'm motivated to set up my "introduction to programming using Python" workshop/course that has been postponed since June. More on that on this blog soon. We talked about organising quarterly events such as sprints, particularly aiming to involve university students which should be great fun too.

I'm delighted with my (quite exhausting!) week-end, and very thankful to the conference organisers for enabling us to have such an awesome time. Very energising, or as I should be saying: it was great craic.

PyCon Ireland begins tomorrow! There might be a few tickets left to be bought at the door, if you haven't gone one yet. I am looking forward to it immensely, and should probably head to bed soon if I want to make it in time for the early start :)

• An interesting project is brewing up in Camara to provide IT Support for Irish schools. I'm keenly looking forward to the first meetup to hear more about it.

• Another cool LWN article on Bringing open-source to schools that I'm only properly catching up on now. The projects linked to are worth following, like Máirín Duffy's 'Introduction to Inkscape' lessons plans and resources for K12 educators. LWN recaps on her experience teaching that specific course. Very energising and inspiring!

Currently learning and messing around with pyGTK. Pretty cool stuff! :)

Urgh, I've been desperately trying to get back on top of my inbox since studying for the exam. I think this week-end I might win the fight!

In the meantime, 2 interesting links on education & technology:

• Brian talks about Irish schools and ICT. This gives an interesting view of the current Irish school system, and there's a tiny mention of open-source too! Looking forward to further posts on the group's progress.
• Linux Journal gives a review of how Scratch works (found via LWN). If you haven't had time to check out the program yourself (available on all main platforms) this is a good description of how the program enables young kids to lean programming and build cool programs and animations using drag-and-drop blocks. Would love to introduce some kids to this!

I attended for a couple of hours the Synchronous Hackathon in Tog today. I had vague plans on making progress with the Moodle plug-in, probably related to the unit testing / refactoring of the data crunching methods... Didn't happen, but I did find a new bug, which I managed to fix 10 minutes before my battery went down. Wince-worthy, a couple of global variables (ouch) not being cleared properly in various places, but still -- progress! I'm happy with the day, it was good fun. Now, to see if I can hook Geany saving function to a shell script I have to execute manually each time...

Had an awesome time at OSS Bar Camp yesterday! I attended some awesome talks about healthcare in developing countries, automating documentation, open-source sustainability, SELinux, ZFS/BTRFS, UCD open-source lab... (which I hope to go visit for Irish coding day next week-end, after hearing some awesome things about their facilities.)

As usual, the talks are half the awesomeness of an event, I met (for the first time or again!) and chatted with a lot of very cool people. I guess the main thing that came out of these conversations for me, is that I will set up my course for teaching how to program using Python again next month, for a small group of adults this time. Hee!

Two main things to do before that: "process" the feedback I got from my students the last time and properly extract the 'lessons learnt' on teaching, and then adapt the outline for the new course. I still have to do some thinking about that, the only thing I'm quite sure of right now is that I don't want to do weekly 3-hours-long sessions. :) Quite looking forward to it, having committed to it to several people is quite motivating to get the gears moving.

I'm very glad I was able to attend Python Ireland's March talks meet-up last night, it's the first time (at last!) that I got to hear the Python chaps presenting, some very interesting stuff. Apparently they're doing a "return to the sources" with more introductory talks, after some time of in-depth technical talks that very few people were actually able to get. I think it worked well.

The first presentation was about Jython. Until then I hadn't thought much about it, besides "yeah, Python on the JVM. Why not." Turns out there's some really cool stuff going on there! The seamless Java <-> Python integration evokes a realm of possibilities I hadn't considered before (I thought it simply ran pure Python, I didn't know about it talking with Java and the use of java.lang.reflect.) Jython also integrates with a few Java containers, like JBoss and WebSphere and that's something I definitely want to look into and see how useful it could be in work to help script our build environment. Learning Python version 2.1 should prove interesting...!!

Jython doesn't use the GIL, enabling real multi-threading. Web frameworks can run on it too, some of them tested and confirmed like Django. The thought of Django running on a heavy weight "enterprise" Java container/server brings up a smile, for some reason. All in all a very informative talk, that not only made me want to try out Jython but also dig deeper into the Python language to find out more about some of the concepts that were mentioned.

The second talk was a summary of some sessions from PyCon 2010, quite interactive with the audience asking questions. Some interesting discussions about performance, the GIL (serious case of busy wait on multicore, fixing-in-progress), Unladden Swallow (aiming at 5x better performance and actually getting there, huh. Cool!), an interest in NoSQL databases (tending toward Cassandra and MongoDB rather than CouchDB, interesting), some packaging discussions (highlighting that it was often easier to install (using easy_install) than remove (manually :)). There must be something to learn from the way Linux distributions have been doing it for 15 years now. They're getting there.) Having "poster sessions" for people to present a project without doing an actual presentation is quite an interesting concept. I wonder if this would work for other local conferences, like OSS Bar Camp.

I went to Limerick this week-end to attend the SkyNet/Ubuntu talks. It was good fun, I enjoy so much walking around UL campus and corridors, basking in old memories of when I was just settling in Ireland and was learning so much, all the time :)

The first talk was mostly about selling up Microsoft cloud services, which felt a bit surreal for a mostly open-source audience. I suspect the organisers didn't highlight enough that this particular afternoon of talks was slanted toward Ubuntu and open-source in general, so we definitely weren't the best audience. It's very strange to hear that the cost of computing is coming down at last, then being told that no, it's impractical for businesses to try to switch to free alternatives like OpenOffice, while at the same time mentioning that there won't be any more compatibility issues between .doc and .docx since Microsoft is dropping support for Office 2003 and businesses are forced to upgrade to Office 2007. How does this match the necessity for companies to look at ways to reduce costs, or not being willing to look at compatible alternatives (since they already managed compatibility issues for .doc/.docx issues)?

The second talk was about Google Summer of Code, by the very dynamic Jimmy O'Regan. He insisted a lot on the importance and impact that having a designated mentor has on a new contributor. I'm struggling myself to get involved with open-source communities at the moment (as opposed to projects in themselves), so that's something that's very interesting to think about, and see if perhaps it could be adapted in a scalable way to lower the barrier to involvement for new contributors outside of GSoC.

Right before the lunch break, the folks from Tog had a talk on setting up your own hackerspace. I'm not sure at all we've ironed out all the issues with our own space in Dublin, but it'd certainly be very cool for other cities around Ireland to set up their own so we can all learn from each other's experience, within the Irish culture. I didn't know about the Hackerspaces design patterns, I definitely have some reading to do on that. The main point to take away from the talk IMO: "Try and work on the fun stuff." :)

Matt Zimmerman, CEO of Canonical, gave an interesting talk on the conflicts between managing a community and managing a company, where transparency sometimes is just not possible for legal reasons, and the lessons Canonical learnt and is learning along the way. They're still figuring out the best practices. I like the "anything that could be public, should be" policy, as opposed to the "anything that hasn't been explicitly okayed cannot be talked about" from most other companies. Canonical folks work to earn their commit rights like the rest of the community, they're not granted automatically. Canonical is not doing too bad for transparency because it's grown organically from people working from home so when they need to talk, they do it on Freenode publicly. That's interesting to me because I'm sure I read somewhere (can't remember where though) that one of the problems with the OLPC project was actually having offices, because whether or not you mean to you end up talking about projects, issues and decisions and it looks to the community as if you're working behind closed doors without involving them. 

Laura Cza talked about the Ubuntu community, all the ways to get involved and also everything that is going on in Ireland relating to Ubuntu and open-source events. I really look forward to the Free/Open/Global Jam in March! I was a bit spoiled for the talk as I had already read through the slides from the first version of the presentation a couple of weeks back :)

Finally the day ended with a talk on CouchDB, by a presenter who should win some sort of prize for very realistic impressions of heads exploding in the audience not only once but twice. I'm going to have to give a try to CouchDB soon. I probably need to hear a couple more talks about it before I really start getting my mind around the concepts and the "why and when should I use it" (till then I'm doing quite fine with my PostgreSQL adventures!).