Lots of people, fantastic atmosphere, lots of kudos to the Birmingham user group. "Msdn magazine" in the goodie bag sounds like MS really wants to invest in Python, that's probably why Sun decided to go on Ruby instead.
First talk on SQLALchemy by Paul Johnston, very very interesting, too bad it was a bit squeezed, another 15 minutes would have helped. Must investigate the reflection vs autoupdate stuff & migrate (django doesn't manage db changes very well at the moment).
Second talk: Mr. Voidspace (Michael Foorde) on Silverlight & IronPython -- lots of possibilities there, but still very very early. 1Mb of local space is very little for serious usage, there are accessibility issues (but possibly less than Flash) and limitations (1 Canvas only). But having an embedded mini-CLR/DLR in every browser (currently IE/FF/Safari, with Opera in the works) gives me a feeling of "ActiveX done right", something Java should have done 5 years ago.
Made contact with other Manchester pythonistas, it's really true that pythons hide under rocks! Looking forward to build a community in Manc when we go back, people really wants to invest serious time on Python apparently. Oh, and Resolver is hiring, but it's London-based and they do Xtreme (pair) programming, so no telecommuting, but if you are in the area and you fancy "coding the way Guido indented it" give it a go, they seem very nice guys.
Time for Django stuff with Simon Willison!
UPDATE: Simon rocks. Fast as lightning and to the point, lots of goodies for serious django usage, I hope the session was filmed because it was really worth it.
UPDATE: I met Phil Thompson, the creator of PyQt! Jeez, I probably sounded like a fanboy (that I am). And I also met a guy not just from around Manchester -- from Stockport! Astonishing, the world is so small these days. Am now on the PyQt tutorial from Mark Summerfield (who has a book finally coming out on PyQt! fantastic), Trolltech provided some very nice freebies. I feel in geek heaven.
UPDATE: Mark was great, but 2 hours straight are a bit much, so in the end the class was clearly a bit tired. Will definitely go back to his presentation very soon. Break now, then on to the lightning talks -- the list looks endless, might not do them all. Organizers expected about 100 people, got more than 200...
UPDATE: the first lightning talks: Open Spaces (weird, not sure I got it), a lovely chap trying to convert the Hansard (which is getting XML already) in RDF, Jeff Tupholme on putting javascript inside python (crazy) within LiveConnector.
UPDATE: pydoctor statically analyses code to generate docs and then uses a pseudo-wiki interface to correct typos and generate diffs (sounds nice); a lexer parsing thing which went over my head; a freakily-dressed guy from ACCU on how to pitch Python to C(++) shops (use "high-level"!); Software Freedom Day next week (eek! I'm in Oslo)!
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