To be honest, I still have not made up my mind about the conference. There was a lot, some was great, some was not. And I drove to and from, 4 days each way, which was an experience on its own.
Atlanta turned out, quite unexpectedly, a very nice city, remarkably different from the rest of US of A, for one the streets are not laid out in a grid (although of course there are some) and with the help of my couch surfing host, we went to some really nice, authentic and interesting places to eat. Most important to note, a Korean-flavoured taco place, the runner up is an authentic Cuban joint, that serves sandwiches, burgers and most importantly sucos, kind of like smoothies. Had I stayed in the hotel, as the conference recommended, I would have missed so much! Kudos to William of couch surfing in Atlanta!
Tutorials
I picked only one tutorial, as I wanted to find out if tutorials were worth it. As such I picked the most appealing to me, on machine learning. First half was really good, perhaps just a tad too slow for me, as it allowed to go and refresh my classification concepts on Wikipedia, but when I tuned back in, I have already missed a little bit of the talk. Second half was a bit confused. The code examples didn't seem to complete in reasonable amount of time and it seems almost none tried to run them, talk was more on how it's done with this particular library and less on why it's done or why Python is involved at all. These were nice 3 hours, although to think that I shelled out 100 bucks for the tutorial, I expected more.
Keynotes
I missed the PSF chairman address, but was on time to see the 1st keynote, delivered by Hilary Mason. That was a downer. Sure, there was a kitten and a dubious, but fun, statistics on pycon web site. But there was no content, absolutely zip! It is as if the speaker was instructed to dumb down the address so that a complete stranger who walked in to the wrong hall would understand. After all she's not a bad speaker. And to think that I could have had breakfast instead!
"Chat with Guido" was more interesting. I wouldn't say it was super, as apparently Guido is not as concise in his speech as in his programs, but it was interesting nevertheless.
Sunday didn't seem to feature a speech deserving to be called Keynote. Threadless was interesting to listen to, the rest was entirely forgettable.
Talks
Now that all is attended and done, very few talks come to mind. In all honesty, very few were memorable enough.
Friday started with a rather interesting and forcefully delivered talk "Getting the job," that focused on non-technical aspects of getting hired, in particular to a company that uses Python, loves open source and hiring is done by a regular manager. It emphasized social skills and left me with impression that a lot needs to improve in software companies.
The other interesting talk was, remarkably "Javascript for Pythonistas." That should say something about a Python conference if one the more interesting talks focuses on a "competitor" language.
I must have missed a couple of talks, as I went to talk to all the interesting companies at the startup row.
I was really looking forward to Zed Shaw's talk on ZeroMQ on Saturday, based on his spectacular, stunning talk "ACL is dead", that includes part on "how to keep your soul" (in the industry). This time it was not as great, perhaps because the allotted time was significantly shorter.
Unfortunately I missed Augie Fackler's talk on choice of http libraries in Python. I have seen him prepare earlier and must have been a great talk, but I figured I'd check other talks first, becuase surely the beginning of his talk would be too basic. Well by the time I got there, all I heard was "that was it, do you have any questions?" He only used half his slot, and there were no questions. Or none that I remember. I can't wait for all the videos to appear online so that I can check it out.
Sunday was a total bummer. There were lightning talks in the morning, at least one of which was good, obligatory business-like talks and 3 time slots for normal tracked talks. First of these features a rather non-issue talk masterfully delivered by Raymond Hettinger, and the next 2 slots there was obsolutely nothing worth staying at the conference for. The half-day was concluded with more lightning talks, at least 2 of which stood out, I'll post links when videos show up, and introduction to sprints that was downer too. I should have realized this in advance and gone to see the city.
And the ones that I mentioned were the good talks. More than once did I find myself bouncing between one room and next and back, just because there was nothing worth listening to!
Goodies
PyCon featured a swag shop, ran by Elegant Stitches, there were a couple of cool t-shirts, "flash wound" with a keyboard jammed in a broken monitor and a neat Python with an apple tee, perhaps referring to the tree of knowledge. Some swag was good, none was great. As with much tech swag, there was conspicuous lack of colours, women's cuts or even some sizes.
There was also a book store, with hoards of books on Python and related subjects, what surprised me the most was that all books except for one (and I checked) had code examples in serif font, most as far as I remember didn't even bother to highlight the keywords. Some went as backwards as include screenshots of IDE. I could perhaps accept that in an old Fortran book published in the age of punch cards, but nowadays surely programming is done on a display with syntax highlighting and therefore programmer is accustomed to seeing her code in good sans-serif font, in colour, keywords in bold and perhaps comments marked in some way (though I'm strictly against italics and underlined text). Surely then modern programming books must adopt same convention! If printing in black and white saves money, sure, but the rest?
In Conclusion
Will I go again? Only if someone pays me to.
Should you go? Well that depends:
- If you practiced Python for years, don't go, you won't learn anything.
- If you are a student, it's too expensive, though if you get funding, go for it.
- If you have many friends to meet at the conference, sure, go ahead.
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