Well, it's over a month since my last update, so I might as well describe what I've been working on for the past month or so!

As pointed out, I'm now back in Athens, doing freelance contracting. I've hinted at the project I've been busy with, but now it's the time to lift the curtain.

For the past three months, I've been a contractor for EDM Studio, working on the Museum of Australian Democracy at Canberra, Australia.

My main focus was the interactive 'Timeline' exhibit, where visitors interact with 14 52-inch touch screens, each displaying 20 years history of the Australian Democracy (catch a glimpse of it here. I've also been the testing 'champion', promoting Test Driven Development, and creating an integration testing framework for our apps.

All our applications are developed with Python and PyObjC, with a dash of Twisted. We've hit some performance problems that relate to Core Animation and the Python bridge, but the productivity gains realised probably offset these. As we wrap up the exhibit, we'll probably investigate these. This is first time I use Twisted in a production setting, and I have mixed feelings, which I hope I'll capture in a later post. Oh, I will also give a talk about PyObjC at EuroPython!

This is the first time I've worked in a globally distributed team, and it's been a fun challenge. Trac has been invaluable, as was Campfire. Still, a lot of time is spent in communication and coordination, compared to having people in the same room, or even on the same keyboard (yes, I miss pair-programming). Time zone differences were also fun to deal with :)

It's also the first time I've had that hard a deadline. The museum opening was at 8 May, so we had to ensure a smooth visitor experience. 'We'll ship when it's ready' was not an option. In the end, we pulled it off with some mad sprinting in the last couple of days, including the classic bug discovered 6 hours before opening time (and fixed just in time :). We had to cut back some features and keep things simple. KISS and 'simplest thing that might work', together with iterative development helped a lot there.

In other news, I'm slowly adjusting myself to being back in Greece, and also working from home. I'm contemplating starting a Python-Athens user group, so if you're interested, drop me line!