Twisted.AU 2005.1

The Australian Twisted sprint rocked. Mary Gardiner, Andrew Bennetts, Andy Gayton, and Mike Dewhirst showed up from the mainland, and met up with Timothy Stebbing, Jonathan Lange and I in Tassie. Unfortunately Anthony Baxter and Richard Jones couldn't make it, but I hope to see them soon (no actual plans, just hoping ;).

The biggest project in terms of developers was a VFS layer, to be used with SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, a web-interface, and similar interfaces. WebDAV and FTP have at least barely-working interfaces while SFTP and the Nevow web interface are already pretty good. Andrew, Andy Gayton, Tim and I worked primarily on it. Andy and I did a lot of the core defining of interfaces as well as implementing backends and the SFTP interface. Tim worked on the WebDAV interface and Andrew spent a lot of time cleaning up the really horrible FTP server in Twisted, starting with the similarly horrible unit tests for it.

Fortunately Andy already had a bunch of code that really only needed to be massaged into this generic VFS thing. We got reasonably far because we had a decent place to start. Currently we're trying to clean up the way reading and writing is done probably by using something that can conform to the Producer interface. Watch the Twisted mailing list for an announcement of the project soon and a reference to the SVN repo.

Andy and I also talked about video games and stock market analysis and drank a lot of beer together.

Mary worked a bunch of unit tests and documentation, which is totally awesome. I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to pair with her on some of that stuff, as I've really wanted to for a long time, but maybe next sprint.

Johno wrote a thing for his church to help administer their SVN server, which they use as kind of a simple document management system. He did it with Nevow.

I'm really happy about the sprint and I think it was very successful. The Twisted community really knows how to pull off stuff like that well, thanks to how tight-knit we are.

Speaking of tight-knit, Hobart is looking to become the Twisted capital of Australia, with the three Twisted contributers/users here already (me, Johno, and Tim), and the others who are moving here pretty soon. Eric Mangold is moving down very shortly, to work with me at Nunatak, and Andy Gayton is planning to move down in January. I just found out about the latter and I'm really excited and wish he was coming down sooner; I'll have to get him on IRC in the meantime ;). We're certainly close to being second only to Boston in Twisted-community population, if we aren't already. Yay!

I'm really looking forward to the next time I get together with other Twisted hackers - let's hear it for Sydney, eh? :)

Oh right. Photos!