Penguicon wrap-up

Thanks to the wonderful audience at my Ren'Py talk. Your patience and your questions got us through the painful time of waiting for the projector to work... bless you all! I hope you have fun with Ren'Py. I've posted my slides and sample game in the Ren'Py forum * here *.

Oh, and I saw a flashbulb during the talk... if you're reading this, could you send me a copy of the photo? I don't have a good recent photo of myself presenting. Unless it sucks, that is. :)

Some of Penguicon's other highlights, from my POV:

Adrian Crenshaw's talk on Mutillidae was delightful. I am so tempted to quit my job and become a security researcher; they have all the fun. He tipped us off to some Firefox extensions for conveniently testing websites for some common vulnerabilities, too.

Matt Arnold's talk on Inform7, which showed me wonderful tools the Inform IDE comes with. It's amazing to see how much work has gone into a language that has such a specialty purpose. I hope I'll find time to put some more work into Inform7 games. I loved this exchange:

Attendee: Is there a limit to how many [options] there can be?
Matt: No! The limit is your sanity!

The dance. I love dancing with nerds. It's so much more fun when the cool kids aren't there. I miss the good old days, though, when we danced to songs, instead of to interminable dance beats. Ah well.

During Mark Ramm's talk about implementing Sourceforge's new TurboGears/MongoDB infrastructure, a questioner invited him to complain about strict schedules for completing a job. Instead, he said that he likes demanding, inflexible deadlines; having flexibility on a project's scope is how you get things done. I thought that was a wondefully wise point of view. A flexible timetable can be an excuse for not triaging a project's scope; a firm deadline helps you make those necessary decisions and actually get something done.