Richard Jones' Log: PyCon 2007 day 3

The final day was just as interesting as the other two. Unfortunately it started with me sleeping in and missing the start of what looked like a great keynote about language, linguistics and programming. r0ml had some interesting questions to pose to the audience, and also some biting observations (like the OLPC having a "view source" button which will display English source code to predominantly non-English-speaking children). The keynote will be available online eventually and I suspect will be quite popular and generate much discussion. Certainly like Adele he was still in the halls all day discussing with crowds.

I chaired a mixed-bag session which included some discussion on teching programming with Python and finished up with a cool web widgets library. I then had some more hallway BoF, practised my lightning talk and attended the women-in-IT talk. Anna had some really interesting things to day, as she's done a pretty good survey of the available literature on the subject. The main conclusion she came up with is "we don't know for sure" why the imbalance is there, but there's some really good theories. Top of the list is culture, both outside IT (women don't do programming) and inside IT (the geek/wizard culture).

The really fun part of the day was my lightning talk at the start of the final session. I tried to give a general impression of pyglet and where it's at (yes, Alex, I said "pre-alpha" at least three or four times :). I had a number of follow-up discussions afterwards which was good.

We finished up the day with a pool-side gathering to wind-down from the conference and also do a little sprint planning. The game sprinters got together after that and talked about the sprint and played some Galcon which was a lot of fun.

Today we're going to try to introduce some people to game programming through a little challenge - write a game on the theme "small" in ond day.