Catching Up

I *want* to talk about Project Euler, but it's been a few weeks since I last blogged so I feel I obligated to mention a couple of things.

• Thing 1: I went to PyCon in Chicago. Good time, trip to Chicago aboard Amtrak was surprisingly pleasant, learned a lot, trip home aboard MegaBus was unpleasant (no need for a break 10 minutes from your destination, Ms. Bus Driver. Furthermore, it is important to train your drivers not punch cab drivers - it's apparently illegal).
• Thing 2: Disappointed in PyCon lightening talks since they were dominated by vendors. To all vendors out there: standing up and talking about the history of your company and how great you are does not get through to people who are expecting technical content. Instead, come prepared to talk about an interesting *technical* topic.
• Thing 3: If you are writing unit tests, but not doing Test Driven Development, then take a deep breath and just try to start writing your tests first. Yes, I have a lot more test code than production code, but debugging is so much easier and confidence in my code is so much higher. Do it and you'll never look back.
  
• Thing 4: The more I write Python, the more I love Python AND the more I appreciate C#. I've been doing a lot of Python posts lately, but I think I need to step back and do a bit of comparison between my two favorite languages.

That more or less covers the past few weeks. Now that I have that out of the way, my next post will not only cover the first Project Euler problem in Python.