Monday I received a wonderful news: I’ve been invited as a guest blogger at the Better Software 2010 conference in Florence, the 5th and 6th of May.
Better Software is a national conference about the business of software, project management, development, agile, web 2.0. opensource and more. I’m really looking forward to attend. The conference program is rich and full of talks I’d like to listen to such as talks about iPhone development, OpenSpime, augmented reality, real world project development experiences, cloud computing, the business of startups in Italy, Balsamiq, user experience design and much more. I’ll have to multiply myself 
I’ll cover the conference here on this blog and hopefully in realtime on my Twitter account.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Lately I’ve been finding myself amazed about the social turn that programming has taken in quite a while.
I started growing as a software developer thanks to the Internet, it and the people on mailing lists/forums/irc have shaped my skills, career and made me discover a lot of great things. I owe the Internet a lot. As Tim Bray says in his After Branding essay:
You are whatever the Net says you are. Deal with it.
It is pointless to start talking about what good open source and version control tools have done to the social side of programming because it’s there to see for everybody. Websites like Sourceforge and Freshmat were everything we talked about in the old days.
Nowadays Distributed version control is taking over and the reasons why are clear: we need to be more and more social and what better way to exchange knowledge than to distribute code?
If I could I’d change name of those tools to “social version control”.
What I love about sites like GitHub and Bitbucket is that they are trying to build real social networks around source code, every developer’s currency. I love it. The what is not new but it’s the how (like how easy it is to contribute) that changes everything.
I look forward to social programming.
ps. on Twitter there is an amazing community of software developers exchanging small tips or links every day. You MUST be on Twitter, really. I am.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Pinder is my Python client for the 37 Signals’s Campfire online chat.
With the excuse of learning Git (by the way GitHub is awesome!) I rewrote it from scratch following the official Campfire API.
Needless to say that it took me very little time. Git is damn fast, Python development is already fast, JSON is basically a standard and the API is easy and clean. I bumped into a couple of problems but I am confident they’ll be fixed soon.
You can find Pinder on my GitHub page.
Next year I’ll try to present a case here at the company I work to switch from Subversion to either Git or Mercurial.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
I just finished reading Seth Godin’s “What Matters Now” free ebook and I loved it.
He put together people who think, who have something to say and he made them share something.
Do yourself a favour and download it, it maybe give you some inspiration for a new year’s endeavour.
This morning I gave my talk about Erlang to a room full of Pythonistas (even people standing!) and it went pretty well considering the fact that was my first talk ever. I already posted the slides online on SlideShare.
http://www.slideshare.net/rhymes/erlang-and-python
Tomorrow evening I’m leaving for a trip to London (yes, again!). Just vacation by the way.
I’ll be back on the 6th of May.
PyCon Tre is coming, in fact I’ll be in Florence from the 7th of May to the 10th to attend it. This year I’m going to speak for the first time. I submitted a talk about Erlang and Python but then I pretty soon realized that it should have been about Erlang and the outside world because there’s no direct connection between the two
Anyway, I know that few people of the non-italian community will be there (Guido, Fredrik, Raymond, Anna, and many more) so I’ll see you all in Florence on the 8th!
The third edition of the PyCon Italy is ready, we’ve finally published the schedule!
It will be held in Florence as last year, on the 8th, 9th and 10th of May!
We’ve received several talk proposal, we let the community vote to create a chart and we created the schedule including regular talks, sponsored ones and talks by invited guests. Talking about the invited guests: this year we have the pleasure to be joined by Guido Van Rossum (with two keynotes and a QA session), Alex Martelli (talking about software abstractions), Raymond Hettinger (AI with Python and descriptors), Fredrik Lundh (with the first talk ever about Unladen Swallow!) and Antonio Cangiano (talking about how to get rich with Python 
!
Remember that as last year all the talks will have simultaneous translation between english and italian and viceversa so you’ll be able to attend the conference and understand everything.
If you are interested in sponsoring, donating or any kind of help for the conference please contact me or write to the board of organizers at info at pycon.it
Hope to see you there!
Marco Beri, one of the organizers of PyCon Italy, published the first book in Italian about Django 1.0. It has been reviewed, among others, by Antonio Cangiano! This is great news for the chances of widespread adoption of Django in Italy!
FeedBurner has changed, so has my feed, please update: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ASongForTheLovers
The website of the Italian Python Conference, PyCon.it, has been launched. Apart from the schedule and new stuff (that I’ll talk about in another detailed post) the big, big news is that this year Guido van Rossum himself will be there to host a keynote.
I’m thrilled about this because it also means that PyCon Italy is really growing. Last year we had around 300 people and Alex Martelli, Brad Fitzpatrick and Raymond Hettinger among others. This year Guido agreed to come so I hope I’ll see at least all the Italian Python community there!
See you on the 8th, 9th and 10th of May, 2009.
