The Occasional Occurence

WARNING: this is YAPAP (Yet Another Post About PyCon), and a late one at that. Click to read more, else move along fair netizen.

I enjoyed every part of PyCon 2008. I guess I'm easy to please or something. Maybe I just enjoyed getting out of my home/office for a few days and talking to my coworkers and other online friends face-to-face for a change. Yeah, that was probably it.

Three of us from ClePy (Kevin, Gary and me) and the lone member of "PittPy" (Chad) piled into Chad's dad's CRV and drove for 6+ hours to Chicago on Thursday. Before I left, my wife asked me what in the world we'd all be talking about for 6+ hours to and from Chicago. A valid question since we're a bunch of computer nerds.

Well, funny thing; put an at-home Disney Imagineer, a philosopher-hippie, an opinionated vegetarian and a guy whose typical daytime social outlet is IRC into the same vehicle for a road-trip to PyCon and you have a recipe for some interesting conversation. Of course we talked plenty about Python but we also covered pumping CO2 into underground oil pockets, burping lakes, sagging high-tension lines, farming, quantum mechanics and religion amongst many other topics.

I don't have too much to say about the talks at the conference. I went to a few really good ones and a bunch of O.K. ones. Highlights included the one on "rolling your own persistence system with Python" and the one on writing Trac plugins. I think what made those two talks good was a) a speaker who was excited about the topic and b) the right balance of code and concepts. I walked away from both of those talks feeling like I could hit the ground running if I wanted to dig further into either topic.

As I mentioned earlier, the best thing about the conference was the people. Where else can you go where there are over one thousand other people into Python and doing all sorts of interesting things with it? I got to hang out with the cool group of guys (Jamie, Dave and Michael) that I work with plus the other folks who I have met through Python. Then there was the "web dudes" party, meeting some international Pythonistas, exploring downtown Chicago, hanging out with Bob at the CherryPy BOF and copious amounts of pizza at Gino's East.

I think that one thing I'll do differently next year is get involved with more of the open space talks. I think that smaller more focused groups with more interaction would make for a better experience. And maybe I'll come up with something to give a lightning talk about.

So yeah, great conference. Thanks to everyone who worked hard to make it happen.

cw

PS

Check out my PyCon photos.