Python in the Clouds

Consegi 2010 is over. It was a great meeting! I was happily suprised to realize how far the adoption of free software has come in the last few years. Congratulations to the Free Software community for such a successful lobby!

Big thanks are due to Giuseppe (@gsromag) , Luiz Guilherme (@aldabalde) and their colleagues from SERPRO, who where responsible for the or ganization of this amazing meeting.

Python was also a big winner in this event. A large number of talks and workshops either focused or used python directly. I personally gave a workshop and a talk on Google App Engine in auditoriums filled to capacity with people with the most varied backgrounds, from students to government IT people.

Another interesting trend (sentiment?) that I could pick up in the event was a certain disconfort around JAVA, mainly due the its legal liabilities as illustrated by the recent legal action unleashed by Oracle against the usage of Java in the Android platform.

I was also glad to learn about the Free Cloud alliance, and some interesting free-software, cloud related tools such as NiftyName and Neopodd.

My big thanks to the organizers for inviting me, and for such a great event.

Consegi 2010

I have been invited to give a talk on the 3rd International Congress on Free Software and E-Government -- Consegi, taking place in Brasilia on 18-20 of august. It is a massive event bringing together Leading professionals from all over the world. Last year's event had 6000 participants from 19 countries!

This year's theme is cloud computing and I'll bee talking about Google AppEngine (GAE). Since I am not a Google employee, I plan to make an unbiased presentation of the the plaform's potential in the context of the growing ecosystem of similar cloud computing platforms. I also plan to talk about GAE integration with other Google services such as Gadgets, Wave API, and OpenSocial but I hope to be able to also discuss the use of GAE as a front-end to other cloud-based systems which may require heavier computing and data storage features which are not offered by GAE. By this I mean scientific computing and data analysis platforms, which are subjects which I am deeply involved with.

The topics above are naturally of great importance to E-gov projects but I am afraid I wont have time to go into this subject, Hopefully in the q&a after my talk some one will give me an opportunity to talk about this.

I'd appreciate to hear any suggestions of other topics which might fit in such a talk.