PyCon05

I gave my talk at PyCon05 yesterday. I surprised myself by managing to stay within the 20 minutes allocated for the talk. I even got to show "live" demos of FitNesse and Selenium. The only 2 questions I had at the end were both Selenium-related. It's clear that this tool fills a need that many people have.

Today I gave a "Lightning Talk" presentation with only 5 minutes at my disposal. I showed again a FitNesse demo testing the PyGoogle module, and 2 Selenium demos, one testing a Plone suite with the TestRunner, and the other testing a Google search in "driven" mode, using the Twisted-based implementation. I like to think that I was able to show how testing should really be done at 2 levels:

• the business logic/API level -- represented in my demo by testing the PyGoogle code via FitNesse
• the GUI level -- represented in my demo by testing the Google Web site via Selenium
  

The Lightning Talk session was really fun. People had to stay within the 5 minutes, so they had to get to the essence of what they were trying to show. It looked to me like a martial arts competition, were everybody was trying to show their "kata" moves. Most of the time, people went to a command prompt and started to type away, showing pieces of code and functionality they had been working on.

Good thing I didn't know what a PyCon Lightning Talk is, otherwise I wouldn't have dared to mingle with the masters. It was an amazing and humbling experience for me, and I'm sure an exhilarating experience for the "competitors".