Me and Guido van Rossum at PyCon 2009 in Chicago
I have been in Chicago for PyCon 2009 this weekend and I must say that it was a tremendous conference. These guys know what they are doing and they are doing it well.
First, the hotel was alright. There is not much to say about it except for the fact that I had to walk 10 minutes to get to the main hotel where the conference was. From what I got, they had to reserve two hotels because they wanted something bigger and they had a contract with a previous hotel.
The food was pretty good. We had a continental breakfast every morning. We also had a great lunch every day that was served fast and professionally.
Most of the talks were interesting. Some of them had either a monotonous speaker or were less captivating than I though they would be. Since all speakers were giving their own free time for this, the quality was high. We were asked to vote after each presentation by dropping a bingo chip in either a green bucker for good, a yellow bucker for so-so and a red bucker for bad. It was an original way of measuring appreciation but my feeling is that way too many people abused it. The logistic of organizing all this was mostly perfect. There was nearly no downtime for people to setup and start their presentation at the right time.
Everyone was given the opportunity to speak during the lightning talks. They were scheduled 12 hours before talking place and all that was required to speak was a laptop to show something and write your name on a sheet. Given my future implication in some python projects, I might do one next time I go.
Another nice thing about PyCon was the Open Spaces. It is a nice concept where people write some topic on small paper cards and place them on a board to setup the time and the place of the meeting. People than go have a look at the boards and plan to attend whatever they like. They had something like 12 smaller rooms that could be used for this. All this was going all around the clock. On Friday night, I played board games with other Python users up to 2 in the morning. It was all fun.
I have had the chance to meet with so many inspiring people. I met with Guido van Rossum for a quick picture. I was so impressed how friendly, open and easy going he is. He attended the conference just like the rest of us without special treatment (from my point of view). Everyone was down to earth and simple, including him. I also had the chance to meet with Python users from Québec.
The community around Python is fantastic. They are a bunch of friendly, intelligent and open minded guys (the PyGirls were drowning in the sea of males) sitting on a diamond mine. There is much to discover by digging below the surface on a social and technological level.
When I left, they were starting their sprints, a developing session, to advance various open source projects while being face to face with people that are often sitting in front of their computer around the globe. Have I had more money and time, I would have stayed to help some of these projects.
I am now back to reality. Time to get those Python skills ready for the next PyCon. See you there.
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