Five minutes at PyCon change everything

I gave a five-minute Lightning Talk on sqlpython on Saturday. I hoped it would pique the interest of some people who sometimes use Oracle, and give them a neat example of yet another cool thing being done with Python. It certainly did that, and I got lots of gratifying feedback.

I knew people would ask when it would be available for non-Oracle databases, so I said, tongue-in-cheek, that this was my distant-future ambition for "sqlpython 3000". What I didn't expect was that several of the people buttonholing me over the next two days would ask to collaborate to get multi-RDBMS support in place. Help? Uh, yeah... I guess help would help... I honestly hadn't even been thinking about that...

Brian Dorsey in particular wanted to see the code face-to-face with me, so I put a card on the Open Space board, just in case anybody else wanted to show up, and twittered about it one bare hour in advance.

Nine people came, all of them eager to get going on writing code, bringing great ideas to get started. All this for a project that was basically personal 36 hours before.

Noooo, now other people are going to be exposed to my squiggly code! Now I know what embarrassment-driven development really is.

If I'd had $1 million of startup funding to hire a staff to work on sqlpython, I couldn't have gotten a team that large or that talented. I figure that gives me better than a 1000-to-1 return on my PyCon investment. :)

So anyway, I'm setting up a mailing list for cooperation on sqlpython, and it looks like the far-future dream of multi-RDBMS sqlpython has suddenly become imminent. Stay tuned!