On the plane ride back from PyCon today, right before getting all excited about a new code idea, I sat there reflecting about PyCon and about all of the things that I remembered.
I remembered feeling like a saturated sponge, soaking up all the knowledge that was possible from all of the amazing people who I met. I remembered Macs and Ubuntu, and the sea of laptops on which they were operating. I remember the panels and discussions, where insight into the development process was shared. And I remembered every night getting back to the hotel room, crashing down into the bed, and being blissfully exhausted.
PyCon brought me to a new place with open source software. Before going, I knew that I wanted to help, in an abstract sort of way. But I wasn't really motivated until I saw the type of creative thinking that was going on. It must be that creative thinking is infectious, because new ideas have been popping into my head ever since the convention. It would be great to take a month or two and just brainstorm and program and implement all of the things that I'd like to do, without having to worry about where I can slot in that coding time.
Very interesting, as well, was how non-age-discriminating everyone was. I was expecting to be looked down upon since I'm only 20, but even in the van on the way to the hotel, I was asked if I was giving a speech. Next year, maybe!
Things that I'm excited for in the upcoming weeks and months: databrowse (will be huge in the Django community), hot club of france (vital for the community aspect of Django), Python 3000, Hopefully an array interface built directly into python (thanks NumPy guys!), and finally my own new brainchild: autoapi. I'm not fully ready to talk about it, but it is a mechanism triggered similarly to Django's admin interface, which provides automatically a publicly accessible api for your app.
Also, the DjangoForge app is in Alpha stage, currently attached to www.flosblog.com. I don't know what will happen from here, however. Comments on the app ranged from "Hmm" to "Ooh!" but mostly "Hmm"s. It didn't feel great to have people be so unenthusiastic about my work, but that just means that it's not good enough. Also since it's a community project, it really should have been a community effort (which the hot club of france will be, hopefully). In all, it was as good of a learning tool as anything else could be, and possibly something to put on a resume.
So in all: Excellent! I met so many new people and learned so many great things. I wish that I could have split up and attended multiple talks and BoFs and lectures all at the same time! After having only worked with this technology for 6 months, I can't imagine anything having a greater impact on my aspirations than what this community has done to them.
All Content
