Top tips from #pyconau

Last weekend I was at PyCon-AU in Hobart. Plenty has been said, on twitter and else where about what a great conf it was, so I won't go into that too much.

I will mention that my biggest complaint is that there were too many talks that I wanted to see, so I missed about 2/3rds of them simply through being unable to be in more than one place at once. Fortunately all the talks that I missed are available on YouTube so I'll be gradually catching up on them as time permits.

I came away from the conference with, amongst other things, a new grab-bag of tools that I plan to be using shortly. Some of the most valuable are:

• Sikuli - Jython-based cross-platform IDE for scripting any GUI. From Python Lifesavers by Duncan MacNeil.
• fileinput - stdlib library for reading from multiple files passed as parameters *or* stdin. Handy for writing a script that acts as a filter. From Graeme Cross's How to write a well-behaved Python command line application talk.
• Play It Again, Sam, a terminal session record/playback system, for giving almost-live demos. From Ryan Kelly's lightning talk.
• Requests, from Kenneth Reitz's keynote.
• iPython notebook, an interactive web-based variant of iPython. Not sure where this came from, but lots of people mentioned it on twitter.

I'm already excited about next year. Terrifyingly, I've already started planning a couple of talks I'm going to propose.