I'm at PyconUK 2015 and took a few notes from the first day. Here they are.

PyconUK lives up to its reputation for being very friendly and very inclusive. There's a great diversity of people and topics present.

The most informative talk was Larry Hastings giving a very cogent explanation of how the GIL works by animating assembly code of incr and decr operations.

The most inspiring talk was from Daniele Procida, "All I really want is power", in which he talked about the nature of power in open source communities. Power is being and feeling useful. In open source you experience being useful by serving the project and the community. It's hard to capture the gist of this talk but suffice to say it was extremely moving and inspiring about how everyone has the capacity and opportunity to do good and exert influence. It helped to agitate some latent thoughts I've been having about politics in the OpenStack environment that I hope to write down here (update: I started).

I gave my talk on Gabbi and it seemed to go pretty well. There were some excellent questions, several enthusiastic nods, a couple of "I'm going to use that" comments, and a nice tweet.

I asked people to vote between the two candidate ways for expressing request method and URL. The original mode is:

tests:
    - name: a test
      url: /article/one
      method: GET
      status: 200

The proposed mode is:

tests:
    - name: a test
      GET: /article/one
      status: 200

Fred will be happy to know that people preferred the proposed mode as it is more readable, despite agreement that it mildly violated the grammar of the rest of the test.

A good day; lots of diverse input for the brain.