Fri, 27 Mar 2009
"Scrape the web" at PyCon: lots of fun!
Thursday morning at 9 am, I gave my scheduled tutorial at PyCon: Scrape the Web: Strategies for programming websites that don't expect it.
For those of you who attended, thank you! You made it loads of fun. The tutorial was supposedly full at 30 people, but in fact we had at least five more; at the halfway break, staff added another table to the room so that those of you standing in the back could sit down!
Because I was so behind on so many things from travel, I stayed up all night before the talk. This is actually fun for me, as we saw at Debconf last year. So I arrived at the talk energized and with my examples fleshed-out (for the most part).
There were a few ways I knew things were going well.
Early on in the talk, Nathan Yergler arrived and saw that we were scraping information from the CC lunch mainstay Mehfil Indian, nicknamed "Curry in a hurry." This caused a ricochet of smiles between me at the front and Nathan at the back; I hope that helped the mood for others, too!
Throughout the talk, the audience looked happy, and they felt comfortable enough to stop me and ask questions. Knowing that the audience feels comfortable participating is crucial for me. Participation and questioning are part of learning; they are also the best way for me to know how to tailor what topics I cover to the people in the room.
After the talk, some attendees handed in evaluation forms. One man asked me what he should do with his. "I've been putting them in this box face-down," I explained.
He suggested, "This one you ought to see face-up!"
About five people came up after the talk and asked me specific questions. One was a young lady who attended my preview talk at Baypiggies in January, which was great to see.
The same number came up to me at the end and thanked me for a good talk, which was very rewarding. One asked how often I give talks at conferences. I mentioned my OSCON talk with Nathan, and wondered to myself what other conference sessions I had led. He urged me, "You really ought to make speaking part of your career. You're a great speaker."
I followed a couple of attendees to lunch; one pointed out the room had been Twittering madly during the talk. A search of Twitter shows a lot of positive comments. (He also pointed out that someone else is "paulproteus" on Twitter.)
- pydanny: is happy with what he got out of Asheesh Laroia's Scrape the Web tutorial
- AceGopher: So much goodness in Scrape the Web!
- http://identi.ca/phrakture (on identi.ca): Referer is misspelled in the HTTP spec - hah
- sgbirch: Screen saving talk off to a great start. Asheesh Laroia is a good speaker, this is informative and fun.
- brianfive: enjoyed the "Scraping the Web" tutorial at #pycon. Why use an API, when you can just grab it off the page? :)
Basically, everybody loves me. Yay!
By the end of lunch, I was fading from the lack of sleep. I took a six-hour nap, and I woke up after all the official PyCon proceedings were over. I read an email from Greg Lindstrom, organizer of the Tutorials series of talks at PyCon. His email began:
It's Thursday night and I wanted to tell you how happy I am with the tutorials over the past two days. I haven't looked at the survey results yet -- give me a couple weeks on that; I'll share the results with you -- but the comments I heard were overwhelmingly positive. My favorite was overhearing someone ask "how did that kid in 'scrape the web' learn all of that?".
I giggled about this as I walked to dinner with Nathan.
What a great start to PyCon!
