PyCon 2009 was great! For the first time, there where two pre-conference days: one to specifically discuss VMs and another to discuss general Python language issues with implementers. It was great to listen to all of the VM implementers and users talk and to exchange ideas. The language day included the announcement of unladen swallow, a branch of CPython with the goal of a 5x speedup in one year. They plan to send as many changes as possible upstream to CPython, so expect it to get faster.

During the regular conference I was voted in as a member of the PSF. I received a commit bit to CPython in order to work on Lib and Lib/test to help better integrate Jython's corresponding code. In the future, the plan is to logically separate Lib from CPython so that all of the Python implementations become semi-equal partners in that part of the codebase. I say semi-equal because the release cycle would continue to be governed by CPython (no problem from me there :). There where too many great talks to cover, but everything was videoed, so anyone who couldn't make it should be able to see the talks.

The sprints are always my favorite part of the conference, though for some family reasons I was only able to stay for two days. So many people showed up to work on Jython that we needed a bigger room - at one point I counted 14. Thomas Enebo from JRuby worked with John Szakmeiste on ctypes for Jython, with Samuele Pedroni and Maciej Fijalkowski consulting from PyPy. Charlie Nutter from JRuby and Tobias Ivarrson discussed compiler optimizations. Philip Jenvey made amazing progress with Michael Bayer of SQLAlchemy and Glyph of Twisted to get those frameworks working on Jython. SQLAlchemy is quite close to supporting Posgresql and MySQL on Jython! Twisted is able to run its unit tests on Jython, and progress there is likely to accelerate now. I could go on, so much happens during the sprints...

I was also able to discuss moving Jython to the Python.org infrastructure with Martin v. Löwis. We are going to do just that, though it will probably take a while. I am already putting together a skeleton website. Jython 2.5 is going to need a facelift before release time.

Thanks to everyone that made PyCon possible, I had an amazing time!