The TED Conference

Today I 'ave mainly been thinking about another conference... Quite by accident I have stumbled upon an amazing gathering of interesting people at TED Global 2009. I believe all talks are to be posted on the internet over the coming weeks and most look like they would be worth seeing.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

Life after EuroPython 2009?

Today I 'ave mainly been thinking about the best bits from EuroPython. Well done to the organisers for a great conference. These were the best bits for me (sadly I missed some talks that may have been as good as several talks were at the same time.)

• PyPy has gone from an experiment to reality in the last 3 years and is now on JIT v4 here.
• The 4 main Python platforms are all going strong: CPython , Jython, PyPy and IronPython in discussion here. The guys at this talk really know their stuff!
• Crowd sourcing at the Guardian here. Simon Willison one of the best presenters ever.
• Bruce Eckel Keynote here (I was alerted to Python several years ago, while reading Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel, thanks Bruce).
• Python is great but what is the best way to get this over to the folks who have not tried it. Harald has a good plan here.
• Turbo Grears 2. In particular the glowing references to SQLAlchemy here.
• Lightening Talks. There is a lot of stuff going on with Python. Also included a very entertaining Harald doing the fill in between talks.
• After the talk on the PSF by Steve Holden there was a suggestion that we could all become associate members of the PSF for 10 quid a year. Sounds good to me.