[Edu-sig] Report from the field

[Kirby Urner]

So I went to Victoria, Canada this weekend to hang with some of the
Ploners, including Alan Runyaga, the principal Python coder behind
this intricate extrapolation of Zope and CMF (Limi is more responsible
for the pleasing look, thanks to his intimate knowledge of CSS (style
sheets for XHTML)).  I don't know what Vidar's role has been exactly
(the third name that appears at the bottom of the Plone Welcome page).

Andy McKay was there -- a major player in Zope world, creator of
the ZopeZen site, which is undergoing a major overhaul right now,
having been slain by a virus.

One thing that impressed me about Alan is that he's not a fanatic or
at all defensive about Plone, even though he works on it all the time.
He has distance and perspective, coming from a strong background in
computer science with plenty of C++ and Java and stuff like that.  At
one point over food he said "I hate programming for the web" (funny,
coming from a guy who does this full time) -- meaning it's always
bound to be broken in some way, like some web browser is going to
render a page differently or mess up in some way.

There was a lot of talk about Zope 3, as well as 2.7.  We had a big
TV at our hosts' home (Jim Roepcke and his wife Cheryl) and saw some
interesting demos, e.g. of staging in Plone (three synched versions,
letting developers move stuff to production in steps), and ZEO, a
Zope Corp utility allowing many real time clients to communicate
with the same ZODB on the back end.

This was billed as a 'Plone Sprint' meaning we were supposed to get
some work done, and given the level of sophistication among the attenders
(I was a relative newbie for sure), work really did get done.
Improvements to news syndication within Plone, a group folder,
debugging against CMF 1.4 beta, and improvements to the documentation,
were all accomplished, with some time left over for socializing and
multi-user Halo on Jim's Xbox (connected to that large TV).

Jonaugustine traveled the farthest to be there -- all the way from
Hawaii.  The state of Hawaii's intranet is moving to Plone these days.

I'm heading down to Powell's Technical today, realizing I need to own
a copy of The Zope Bible, which gets more technical than some of the
others, and shows how to interact directly with the ZODB (Zope object
database) from within the Python shell.  That's the kind of low level
stuff I need a better handle on.

Kirby