Richard Jones' Log: PyCon 2007 sprinting

Thu, 01 Mar 2007

It's the fourth and final day of sprinting here at PyCon. There's a general consensus that four days is too many - the strongest evidence being that there's very few of us actually left.

The "Game Sprint" has been about as disorganised as I'd expected. A few of us messed around writing games along the theme of "small" (with extremely loose interpretation ;). Mostly people used the exercise to learn pygame or PyOpenGL (or even in one case Python as well!) and write a game at the same time. Everyone seemed to have fun doing so, and there's now a few more people comfortable with the toolkits, which was the ultimate goal. A highlight was the Python newbie asking "who wrote pygame?" to which the response was pointing across the room to Pete Shinners "he's over there", and then "the guy who wrote PyOpenGL is over there, and the guy who wrote Python is over there" (Mike and Guido sprinting in the same room).

I spent some time tutoring, writing a little game for Abbey, rewriting the sprite engine in pyglet, talking through design issues with Pete and Phil Hassey and also chatting about the OLPC project with those sprinters.

The evenings tended to consist of game playing (galcon or board games) during and after which there was more discussion of various things. So many brains to pick and ideas to bounce around. I have a feeling I'll be revisiting that function inlining code...