Tuesday, 11 September 2007

PyCon UK - late review (part 1)

PyCon UK ended on Sunday. Unfortunately, I didn't have any machine on my during the conference. That's why my review is a bit late.

The first thing to say - it was awesome. Two days of extremely interesting talks and conversations with a bunch (200) of incredibly smart people. Some of the talks definitely need mentioning.

Resolver

I'll begin with lectures given by my colleagues. First one: The New Age of the Amateur by Giles Thomas was a presentation of Resolver - an advanced spreadsheet application we're working on. It is believed to solve many problems that excel power user have today. I have never had an opportunity to look at Resolver from potential user's point of view and, I must say, it was positively surprising experience.

Silverlight

Second event I attended was Michael's talk on Silverlight. Silverlight is Microsoft's "flash killer" product. What's interesting - very much in a manner C# was created, they managed to avoid mistakes made by their predecessors. I really like Silverlight's ability to be scripted in more than one language (including python, ruby and - I guess - any .net language). What's more, Silverlight apps should be able to run on Linux. Mono guys did an enormous feat implementing large part of Silverlight in Moonlight in a remarkable 21-day-long sprint. Moonlight is aiming to provide full implementation soon, but obviously it's not a matter of one month any more. The talk was very interesting. Michael did a great job playing with Silverlight before, and certainly knew what he was talking about. I'm very excited on his proof-of-concept Web IDE.

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