tpanzarella

Soliciting Community Feedback in Preparation for Philadelphia Red Snake 2012

Red Snake is a joint event between PhillyPUG and Philly.rb, where local programmers give alternating 10 minute lightning talks to a crowd of their peers. The event was originally conceived at BarcampPhilly 2010 and the first annual event was held at SunGard in February 2011. At this free event, over 75 local programmers showed up and 12 talks were given. Afterward, approximately 40 - 50 of the 75 attendees took over the Prohibition Taproom for an after-party to socialize and network. While the event had little to no advertising and a virtually $0 budget, it still came off as a great success. I should mention that a few local companies did sponsor the event by providing space, food, and corporate swag. Those firms included: SunGard, Monetate, MyYearbook.com, Mozilla, and Love Park Robotics. If there is a company that I have forgotten, please do let me know, and I will be sure to mention you in this list as your support is greatly appreciated.

The above being said, I would like to begin planning for Red Snake 2012 now. In this first phase of the planning process, I would like to solicit feedback from the community as to what you (the Philly Python and Ruby communities) would like to see happen at the 2012 event. Obviously, we can do the same thing we had done before, however, we could also make it better. I have already had a few unsolicited emails and ad hoc conversations with members of the community who have offered up suggestions for the event. A brief list of things that I can remember off the top of my head now follows (editorialized by me in square brackets):

1 - Video tape the talks and post them on Vimeo/YouTube/blip.tv/etc [not sure which is most appropriate]

2 - Official twitter hash tag: #phillyredsnake [or should it be #redsnakephilly — I like the former, but thought I’d see what others think]

3 - Make t-shirts, stickers, etc. [perhaps this could be funded by corporate sponsors?]

4 - Hold the event on a Saturday and make it a whole day mini-conference rather than a meetup

5 - Have an official website for the event [what is the ideal domain name? redsnakephilly.org? phillyredsnake.org? etc]

In support of a community-driven process and transparency in planning, I highly urge you to offer up your suggestions, requests, offerings to help, what you liked about Red Snake 2011, what you did not like about Red Snake 2011, comments on the above numbered suggestions, etc. in the Disqus comments below. I think this event could be a very good thing for the Philadelphia technical community. For example, at PyCon 2011 (a national conference), I had overheard a few conversations of non-Philly developers chatting and they had mentioned our Red Snake event. I have no idea how they even heard about it (Twitter?), however, I think it was impressive that we did receive some level of national recognition within the developer community. Oddly enough, we weren’t even on the radar of some local media outlets. Who knows what level of recognition we may receive if we do a little bit of self-promotion and marketing?

Beyond suggestions for the event itself, please feel free to let us know how you could help. For example, do you know someone who could design a t-shirt? Tape and edit reasonably high-fidelity videos for posting on-line? Would your company be interested in sponsoring the event? Would you like to give a talk at the event? Do you want to design the website? Are you good at viral marketing(that is a real term right? — not my area of expertise), etc.

I should also note that since the event in February, a new local PUG and a new local Ruby group has surfaced. Specifically, PUG-IP and Conshohocken.rb respectively. I fully expect that those groups will also be involved in the event.

Thanks for your time. I look forward to incorporating your suggestions into what I hope becomes a premier technical event in Philadelphia.

You can stay informed as things unfold by following one, some, or all of: @phillypug, @phillyrb,@pugip, @conshohockenrb

PEP 3146: Merge Unladen Swallow into CPython

There has been a lot of banter on python-dev about merging Unladen Swallow into the CPython trunk — the approach is formalized in PEP 3146. While Google’s LLVM-based JIT enhancements look nice, I think having CPython rely on C++ is a bad move (yeah, I know the PEP says a compile time option —without-llvm will exist, but I don’t think that is good enough - even in the initial implementation if you compile with that flag the python executable still links with libstdc++ … I’m sure Google will fix that). I think this will force packagers to provide both a /usr/bin/python and a /usr/bin/python-jit or something like that with the distribution. I think this will get ugly, as right now I have both /usr/bin/python and /usr/bin/python3 on my system which is ugly enough until the world moves to py3K. My biggest hesitation about having Python rely on C++ is the extra burden this will have on folks trying to either port CPython to embedded platforms or just keep pace with CPython for their own embedded Python virtual machines (i.e. Dean’s p14p). I’m -1 on merging Unladen Swallow into CPython. I guess web guys are used to adding bloat to their systems which probably explains why most folks are +1 on this. We’ll see, hopefully bytecode compatibility for alternate implementations won’t be too adversely affected by this.