Łukasz Badura

Last weekend I visited Poznań for RuPy 2008 conference along with a good Code Sprinters representation & Piotrek Czajkowski.

The conference was held in UAM’s Collegium Mathematicum, which was pretty hard to get to. I really enjoyed the conference though, thanks to some interesting talks.

I really enjoyed Zed Shaw’s talk on getting statistical results while measuring web app performance. It was interesting & funny (in spite all of Zed’s Ruby & Rails negativity :-)). I also really liked Micheal Foord’s talk on IronPython & Silverlight 2 (not to mention his lightning talk about Resolver One) since I missed it on SFI conference held in Cracow. Adam’s talk on functional programming in Python also went really good, and gathered many people in the auditorium. Unfortunately I didn’t see the PyPy talks which were said to be excellent. Overall the talks were a load of fun.

There were some glitches though. First of all, in my opinion speaking in English shouldn’t be mandatory for speakers, as majority of the talks presented by Polish speakers was terrible to listen too. Because of the language barrier speakers couldn’t speak up their minds. So I think it would be best to let the speakers choose the language they speak in. There were some exceptions though for example the "A need for REST" talk by Łukasz Piestrzeniewicz. The second thing I didn’t like, was the lack of transportation from the place where the conference was held to the city centre (we had to use cab’s all the time) as the information on RuPy official site were a bit misleading.

Photos are available in the Code Sprinters Flickr Pool.