"Friends with benefits", after the Pylons presentation at MP11
So this is the short story of my presentation at the Montreal Python user groups on january 25th 2010.
I’m preparing to give a talk on “Pylons, web development done right” (or something alike), at the Confoo conference in March. I wanted to test-drive my presentation, so I decided to jump in after seeing a couple of presentation over there - some of which were pretty so-so, thus pushing me to risk myself.
I wanted the presentation to be a performance (since this is my primary training, as a pianist), a lightning bolt filled with impressive demonstrations, speedy typing, cool technologies using a sweet programming language. I wanted to show off Pylons (http://www.pylonshq.com) and a bunch of WSGI sweetnesses (memento, WPHP, CleverCSS, Beaker, Routes, Mako, SQLAlchemy, SqlSoup, etc.)
So I packed my Karmic system with a Squid3 proxy server, to fake having an Internet connection (while everyone in the room was struggling with the bad/non-existant Wi-Fi connection). I wrote some Python scripts that would do all sorts of background mangling to accelerate the live demos* and organised the presentation in modules, so that I could dynamically add or remove pieces of the demonstration based on interests I sized in the audience.
Finally, the presentation was greatly appreciated if I believe the comments I have received. It was a very good experience for me and I received a gift, which is in fact the subject/object of this post: the book “Friends with benefits“.
