My Python table at the Atlanta Linux Fest. You can also watch a short video of me demonstrating a depth-first search to some students who dropped by the table. (Thanks, Richard Davies, for the video!)

Running the Python table at the Atlanta Linux Fest this past weekend was a really incredible experience.

First, there was the great feeling that the pillars of the Python community were standing behind me as I stepped forward to represent my favorite programming language. It was Andrew Kuchling who noticed that exhibitor tables at the Fest were free for non-profits like the Python Software Foundation, and Steve Holden who forwarded me a heads-up since I live in Atlanta (the Fest had not yet made it on to my radar). The inimitable Aahz personally shipped me the promotional kit, including a huge “Python” banner and stacks of brochures, that he himself had just used at OSCON 2009. And, completing the loop, it was Andrew who followed up to ask if there were any last things that I needed, and sent me a pile of over one hundred Python stickers that wound up being very popular at the Fest. (I returned home with exactly one, which is sitting next to me on my desk as I type this!)

Here are some lessons that I learned from the experience:

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I would like some advice from Zope and Plone folks about how to create forms that are not only easy for other developers to specialize, but which allow several specializations to be composed together. While I have used zope.formlib and z3c.form before for simple tasks, I have not yet been able to tell whether they support these more advanced kinds of operations.

Some background: I am doing some work on GetPaid for Plone with the generous funding of Derek Richardson who, if his dreams had not carried him away from grad school at the end of the Spring semester, would have tackled this same work as part of the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

The current mechanisms that GetPaid provides for customizing its checkout process are very primitive, and my task is to improve them. That is why I have been thinking about customizing forms.

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