One of the common dynamics at PyCon is that you can’t see all the talks you want to. There are five tracks going at once, and often, you find yourself in a face-to-face conversation with a real person, and it seems a shame to walk away from an IRL interaction to watch a talk that will be available later on video.

So you tell yourself, “I’ll watch it later on video,” but if you’re like me, you rarely go back to watch the video. There’s something about 30-minute videos that are hard to sit still for. My mind (and mouse finger) wanders, and I realize I’ve missed something, and I don’t get out of it what I thought I would.

But I want to hear the talk! So both to keep myself focused on the talk, and to maybe give others another way to “hear the talk,” I’m going to watch some videos and write blog posts summarizing each one. I’m calling it the “too long; didn’t watch” series, and I’m starting with the six testing talks at PyCon.

When I give talks, I like to write them out in prose, partly as part of my preparation, and partly so the content is available textually. This will be kind of like that, except the text will be sketchier, and they aren’t my words. I know I appreciate having text instead of video, so this is my contribution to the text-loving world.