Geordie Enterprises

This was my first PyCon and it was fairly interesting. The most interesting part for me was being able to meet all these prolific open source project coders face to face. Seeing Michael Bayer and Ian Bicking in person to give a talk, sitting next to Ben Bangert (creator of Pylons) to discuss our Pylons project, having dinner with Titus Brown, Brandon Rhodes, and Noah Gift, standing in line for a latte with Guido Rossum and finally seeing all these people that use Python despite it not being the wildly promoted and mainstream languages like Java or C#.

The hot topics for me at least were: Turbogears2/Pylons merging, IronPython and Silverlight, the future of sqlalchemy, Google cloud applications, and Amazon EC2 programming.

For me the talks were a bit speedy and there were difficulties with microphones and displays now and then but I did get a sense of things in every talk. Personally I would think Google could drop a few more $$ in the mix for better facilities and maybe a bit bigger presence as far as speaker talent and labs possibly. I would have loved to have had a Google lab with experts sort of helping you work through proficiency labs about using their services with python libraries.

Also, O’Hare airport as a destination sucks. If you are going to have the location be a cool city, then have it in the city not 30 miles outside! Then again maybe I’m a bit more pampered than your average python programmer.

Even though it was well managed and the community was great I probably wouldn’t go back to another PyCon unless I was participating in a sprint and even then I’d wish we were staying in the city, whatever city it may be.