I was able to attend a conference this Friday organized by the Particul.es network concerning Scrum, Python & Django. Having worked quite a bit with Django a few years ago (4 or 5); having been a big fan of Python (the language and also the Montys since I had done my master’s thesis on the English gang, yes indeed…), and finally being today an ardent defender of agile methods and more particularly of Scrum, I immediately jumped at the opportunity.

The conference was organized as an alternation of “prez” 30min on one

domain, 30 min on the other for 4h, sprinkle in a 30min break.

Claude Aubry led the proceedings

concerning Scrum, and David Larlet took

charge of the Python things. As I told you, coming from both

worlds I felt “in my element”, but I wonder about the

people who came for only one domain. On one hand this

alternation gave rhythm but on the other it may have prevented us from

digging deep enough into a subject, or questioning a speaker precisely enough

not enough free “off” time with the speakers! A disappointment - I didn’t have time to talk rock’n roll with Claude Aubry among other things.

To summarize, it was very pleasant to dive back into the django/python bath, and it seems to be like riding a bike: you don’t forget. But I’m still dubious about the language’s breakthrough in companies if only because of the rarity of local skills. As for Scrum, nothing new on my side, but it was a pleasure to meet and hear this presentation by Claude Aubry (I need to buy myself a kitchen timer for my timeboxes). I’ll add: very beautiful slides from David Larlet: simple and evocative (creative commons images from flickr), a good idea that I’m going to borrow (but isn’t he a web developer?)

Finally, first meeting with the people from Particul.es. Nice! On this subject, these two conferences in one are the prelude to training/coaching around these two domains (Python/Django & Scrum). I encourage you to go to the site to learn more (http://particul.es).

[addition] Reflection in the bath this afternoon: the real common point between Scrum & Python is the fact that they are both compact. You can easily and effortlessly appropriate the rules, libraries, of these two tools. No need to go digging through documentation to consult point x-44-b (like Java for example which drowns under documentation, or CMMi…). The tooling is there, present, easy to grasp, at hand: it’s productive.