LCA Day 2 Sessions - Afternoon

I was back in the LinuxChix room for the next (two separate half) session. Jacinta Richardson gave a short, pragmatic and quite practical, primer on social networking. The material was solid if basic - although from looking around while she spoke it seemed to be perfectly targeted to the majority of the people in the room - much note taking was going on. Val Henson then presented on salary negotiation and how to close the pay gap. The sessions title was a little misleading (and unfairly limiting) as the talk itself was applicable to any one who gets paid and would like more. Although the material was well presented (I’m looking forward to her file system talk on Friday) almost none of it was new to me, but I did agree with most of it, so if you’ve not encountered it before then you should send her a present when you get that first bumped up cheque!

My last talk of the day was Pete Ryland, an Aussie that we’re lucky enough to have based in London most of the time. He covered a new PyGTK wrapper he’s working on (temporarily called EGG) that aims to make the more common tasks a lot easier (and concise in code). From inferring tooltips, about boxes and the contents of other related widgets from docstrings to making assumptions about the most sensible defaults (and letting you slip under to the raw PyGTK when you need it) it looks like it’ll make a lot of the common drudge for less complex applications vanish. If I was a Python guy it’d be on my shortlist of things to look at, for his meta-programming tricks if nothing else.

After this most of the conference headed over to the Google sponsored party. Which I’m not blogging about.