Moderate Realism

That was an interesting experience: I (re)started using Twitter a couple of weeks ago, for no particular reason except that it seemed to be an increasingly significant backchannel of information around Python, meaning that useful information passes through it which is then assumed or referred to in other forums [*] such as the Python mailing lists or people’s blog posts.

But by fortunate coincidence that meant that I was able to watch the #pycon Twitter stream and get a more immediate flavour of the conference than I would have by following later blog posts. Obviously it was quite fun watching people try to get their questions on the screen for Guido’s keynote speech (took me a while to realise what was going on…).

Throughout the conference you get a mixture of the very immediate (”Has anyone got a Mac VGA Adapter for Room C?”), the impending (”BoF Session for Ruby Enthusiasts in the downstairs toilets”), the infinitely retweeted (”Unladen Swallow….”), the humorously overheard (”OH: OK; Yak shaved”), the running-joke (”Bring goat food to the Testing Sprint”), the contentious (”We were more diverse…”), the you-had-to-be-there (”Looks like @djangopony was left unattended”), the gratitude (”Thanks to everyone…”) and of course the plain exhausted (”Back home now after #pycon”).

I obviously didn’t follow everything in real time, not least because of the time difference: I do have other things to do with my time :) But it was enjoyable watching other people enjoy themselves and feeling at least a spectator to an Occasion in the Python year. Now all I’ve got to do is find time to catch up with slides, video presentations, and A Little Bit of Python.

[*] Note to pedants: seems to me that “forum” has become an English word by adoption which means that you can justifiably form its plural by adding an “s”. If I were talking about meeting places of the Ancient World I might argue for the more classical “fora”.

My great-aunt Eileen died in November 2009 at the respectable age of nearly 87. Last night, a memorial Mass was held for her at the La Retraite school in Clapham, one of the several schools in London and in Somerset where she’d been involved for many years: as a teacher, as a deputy head or head, as clerk to the governors and as a Sister at the neighbouring La Retraite community.

She was one of those many, many women and men whose lives are lived in cheerful and unnoticed service to many others. In her case, it was in the field of education; she worked in La Retraite schools in London and Somerset all her adult life. (And, indeed, was a pupil at them when younger). I only knew her as a relative; it was wonderful last night and in November at her funeral to meet many of the people who’d known her as a friend, a colleague, and a staunch support of the schools she was involved in.

In this internet age we’re used to finding important or influential people as links on the web, pages in Wikipedia and so on. Just for the sake of it, I stuck Auntie Eileen’s name into Google and found only a reference to her funeral in a parish newsletter. Yet she — and I’m sure many others whom I don’t know — have been so very important in their small communities. When not in Clapham, she lived, worked, and finally died in Burnham-on-Sea, an insignificant seaside town on the Bristol Channel eclipsed by its slightly more famous neighbour Weston-super-Mare, where she started her work as a teacher. Her congregation set up and ran a primary school in Burnham for local children and a boarding school for girls. The boarding school closed 25 years ago and became the residential care home for the elderly in which she spent her final years. She was head of the primary school for some years and many people there will have known her and will remember the crisp precision of her speech and the warmth of her welcome.

She suffered a condition for much of her later life which made walking difficult and finally impossible. But her mind was active right up until the double stroke from which she never recovered. Until the last few years of her life she was indefatigable in her habitual help of the educational communities she served. She would drive (atrociously!) enormous distances to attend governors and policy meetings, and had an acute awareness of modern employment and education legislation which often surprised people who imagined that an elderly nun would have a somewhat backwards viewpoint!

The passing of anyone is a grief to their friends and relatives. As a Catholic myself I believe, as she did, that we will meet again in the next life. But it’s arguably as important to recognise the good which so many people do in their quiet way while they’re still with us: the children they educate; the advice they give; the stand they make in defence of something they hold dear. It was wonderful to meet all Auntie Eileen’s former colleagues at the schools she helped for so long and to hear their stories of how she’d affected so many lives.

Eileen Hewlett 1922 - 2009 RIP

My first Dojo of 2010 yesterday, as I missed the January one (which is a shame as it sounded like fun). This was a return to the conventional Dojo style with pair-programming at the front, the task being to merge the Adventure Game efforts from the previous month’s team-by-team effort. But first, a commercial break… Jonathan Hartley advertised the upcoming PyWeek competition and demonstrated his team’s previous effort as well as the amusingly literal Murder of Crows entry.

Meanwhile, back at the Dojo… Nicholas started off partly to set things up for people (like me, his co-pilot) who hadn’t been there the month before. As we moved through the programming pairs, we did manage to get a working codeset together by merging the location-parsing code from one team with the cmd-based loop from another. But it was clear that things were moving slowly and that the audience was somewhat disengaged…

So we finished off with a broad discussion of ways ahead, of what might work better, and of whether the artificial nature of the Dojo setting meant that people couldn’t “show off”, so to speak, their natural coding style — and ability. Michael G and others made a few cogent suggestions to the effect that smaller teams would work better but with some kind of DVCS (git seemed to be the front-runner) to assist the teams in collaborating. And it seemed that at least one team should be creatives, rather than coders.

I enjoyed it, as ever, but it _is_ difficult to keep 20+ people in a medium-sized room totally engaged. Even with the best will in the world, it’s hard to read code on a screen from some distance back. This was one of the reasons why a team-based approach met with broad approval. Also it is a little dispiriting when you’re doing your best up front but half your “audience” is otherwise engaged.

The point about how “natural” you should be in the Dojo was interesting. Everyone has a different way of coding, of approaching a problem, of looking for information and so on. Dave[*], the last pilot, mentioned that he’d normally take much longer sizing a problem up but that having a time limit forced him into action sooner. But you’re up there with a limit of 10 minutes, probably on someone else’s machine, maybe on an “alien” operating system. You’re fumbling with running up a command prompt; you’re not sure how to bring up the Python docs; the keyboard shortcuts which your fingers remember don’t work — or worse, do something else entirely! We did discuss each person bringing up his own laptop, although that has obvious drawbacks of getting the projector to switch smoothly and so on. It was out of this discussion that the move towards a team-based approach next time arose.

TJG

[*] Dave, incidentally, was the programmer of the BBC version of the Graphics Adventure Creator — did you know that?