Richard Jones' Log: Linux.Conf.Au 2010 is done

What a week. Unlike other week-long conferences I've been to this one had talks every day. Combined with the usual events every night I'm quite tired now :)

I gave two presentations: a State of Python talk which was a little rambling but otherwise well-received.

I did the haka. Much fun!

Even better-received was my tutorial Introduction to Game Programming which was attended by both programmers and non-programmers. Pia Waugh and Pamela Fox* both have good writeups. A couple of the attendees have come to me afterwards to say again how they enjoyed the tutorial and are continuing to develop their games. Quite a good outcome, I think!

On Wednesday night I got my solderin' on and put together a Pebble board for my Arduino. It's a neat invention of Luke Weston and the builds were made possible by the folk from the Melbourne Connected Community HackerSpace.

During the week I set up the PyCon Au website with the help of Benno Rice, Tim Ansell and Michael Kedzierski. It's running the PyCon-Tech code which Malcolm Tedinnick has offered to bring into the modern age of Django post-1.0 :)

Finally on Saturday I organised a Python booth at the Open Day in Wellington Town Hall. I had a lot of great chats with a diverse range of people including some younger boys and girls who were excited by the game programming aspect of Python. Following advice (I've lost a link to) I had a donated external monitor (thanks Nic) which made showing things off much easier. I had a nice 1.8m banner printed (thanks PSF) which looked cool and gave out about 250 stickers :)

* Google Wave account required