Montreal Tech Watch

Yesterday, over 30 people attended MontrealPython’s first meetup at standoutjobs‘s offices. Having all these Python developers gathered was a good surprise, as many thought previously that there weren’t that many people using the programming language in Montreal. Arach Tchoupani, and to a certain extent Akoha, launched the event nonetheless, and it was undeniably a success.

We had one presentation by David Goodger, who invited developers to come to Pycon 2008 in Chicago. He then followed to present his deep interests in polyforms puzzling, which is more or less fitting geometric pieces into a predefined geometric complex shape. He showed how he was able to find solution thanks to a paper by Donald Knuth.

This presentation was quite intriguing and esoteric for me. There is some irony on trying to find solutions on problems you have configured yourself, instead of say, solving mathematical problems that can be found in Nature.

At the end, I also presented Blitzweekend, and invited people to register for the event. I believed that went well. We should have more than our fair share of python wranglers at the weekend and the 5 à 7.

Arach Tchoupani said at the end that they should have a meetup every 6 weeks, and should have presentations on Django.

More pictures at flickr (ok forgot to use the flash – but still interesting pictures)