Hello from PyCon 2008

PyCon 2008 was huge this year. Over 1000 people attended -- a 70% increase from only a year ago. The OLPC presence is everywhere. Participants used them to browse the web and take notes at presentations.

This morning one of the Plenary talks was an OLPC Update by Ivan Krstic. He gave a keynote at PyCon last year, so it was an good opportunity to look back and see how far the project has come in the last year. Most exciting was seeing his pictures from Uruguay and Peru, where the first two XO deployments are taking place.

I attended a morning talk titled "Programming for the One Laptop Per Child laptop" by Charles Merriam. It was a good discussion of what to expect from developing software for the XO and helped prepare us for the coming sprint.

This evening we are starting the sprints. Matt Gallagher, James Hancock and I are at the Twisted with Games BOF (Birds of a Feather). James is eager to add networking support to gasp, and the twisted developers are talking with him about using twisted to do that.

In the "it's a small world" department, Mel Chua showed up at the start of our sprint. She is a student of Dr. Allen Downey, the original author of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. I've never met Allen face to face, but I've been working with him for several years on the book. Mel knew about gasp and is interested in sprinting with us.

That's all for now. I'll report back on the progress of the sprint in a day or two.