This is the first time I attended FOSDEM. It wasn’t planned for, but when I found out that there was a talk on The Zope3 Component Architecture by Olivier Grisel, I just had to go. Meeting people and being exposed to the industry were the primary objectives.

Arrived early at the scene, met up with a friend, and attended a talk on Quality in Python by Bader Ladjemi. He has introduced to us the Zen of Python, dos and donts, and more importantly on useful tools for Python programmers. Among others, there are three python tools that I reckon are worth mentioning – pylint (or cheesecake) for code quality check, Epydoc on generating API documentation, and coverage.py for measuring code coverage during Python execution. Though I’m not a programmer, I can pretty much guess that these are very useful tools to make sure certain standards are met.

Next up was The Zope3 Component Architecture by Olivier Grisel. He gave us a ride on Jeff Shell’s Zope 3 example on Duck Typing. It was good. It wasn’t something new to me, so it was refreshing to listen to it. Unfortunately, he didn’t actually go through it all, as well as not creating a live demo and add bits to it to make it more interactive. It was clear that component-oriented design has many benefits for the programmers, but it comes from a new way of thinking. During Q&A, he did advise that Zope 3 isn’t for small- to medium-sized projects because of its sheer complexity and steep learning curve. Question is, where do we draw the line of a project size?

My interest in quality led me to talk with Frédéric Fleurial Monfils. He works at the Centre d’Excellence en Technologies de l’Informmation et de la Communication on the QUALity in Open Source Software, aka Qualoss. We had a very good chat on quality level of open source software to which Jean-Christophe Deprez, who is the project coordinator, joined us. Many areas were touched upon and knowledge was exchanged at various levels. It was enjoyable. When he knew that my intention for using Zope is strong, he introduced Xavier Heymans, who is the CEO of Zea Partners, to me. A busy man that I didn’t dare to keep for too long, but we will be seeing each other at the Sorrento Sprint this coming March, which will give us, hopefully, more time to chat.

The rest of the day at FOSDEM was filled with chatters and laughters with friends and new friends. It was fabulous to be with fellow hackers/programmers/enthusiasts even though I was left out in the scene of dressing code.