[Chicago] Lightning talks for the win

[Atul Varma]

Hey all,

Just wanted to mention that I enjoyed the meeting last night.
Someone's (er, sorry I didn't catch your name) record-breaking 5
minute talk on ICU and Athena was great, Andrew's talk on decorators
provoked lots of discussion, and it also segued nicely into Ian's
presentation on making Python look like Ruby, which was hilarious on a
variety of levels. And the other talks were good too.

I like this concept of competing to see who can give the shortest
presentation.  It seems like this group is really diverse--aside from
the n00b/l33t distinction, there's bound to be big differences between
the interests of web developers, sysadmins, and renegade structural
engineers who dislike VBA.  So I think that this idea of giving a
brief show-and-tell-style presentation along the lines of "hey, here's
this thing that I think is cool, here's the 5-minute gist of it, and
you can find out more by Googling" works really well.

Thanks to everyone who organized, presented, and attended, and also to
ThoughtWorks for hosting. Now I want all *my* walls to be whiteboards.

- Atul