PyCon 2008 has come to an end for me today, and while it was a highly different event for me this year than last year, it was more enoyable in many ways. During my flight today, I contemplated the previous week and my thoughts invariably came back to four main themes:
Formal Talks and the Controversy Surrounding Them
I was blissfully unaware of all of the controversy surrounding the conference this year until well after everyone else seemed to be. I disagree on many of the points that were brought up on the Python mailing list, but I can't help but think that a few of the points brought up there hit close to the truth.
Last year was my first PyCon, and every talk that I went to excited me, intrigued me, inspired me, and made me feel like Python was really something great. This year, I seemed to consistently pick the talk right next to the great talks--I could tell because of the laughing and cheering from the other side of the wall.
That's not to say that I didn't attend any great talks this year. The PyPy and IronPython/Silverlight talks were definitely highlights. Both projects are really thinking outside the box about traditional ways of doing things and are succeeding in implementing their crazy ideas that could never work. It's exactly that kind of conceptual evolutionary change that excites me to try new things myself, and anything that does that is a good thing.
The Django Community Thrives
Wow. The Django community is now huge. At last year's Django BoF, we were able to sit in a big circle and eat pizza and talk about Django, but this year there were way too many people for that to have been possible. The BoF was literally a mini-conference inside of PyCon this year.
It seems like everywhere I went, I'd run into somebody that I recognized from the Django community. There were even some crazy times where people actually recognized me! (Sometimes I forget that people actually read this blog.) Whenever there were Django people to be found, they were always grouped together and keeping each other company. I think that this is mostly a great thing, as long as it never turns into a reality distortion field.
No matter how you look at it, the rate of growth of the Django community, even when compared to the growth of the Python community, is staggering. At one point in Adrian Holovaty's "The State of Django" talk, he asked everyone to raise their hand if they were learning Python specifically through using Django. A large portion of the people in attendence raised their hands. How cool is that!?
Sprints
Sprints dominated my time this year. Last year I got to stay for one portion of one sprint--simply not enough to really understand what sprinting is all about. This year, however, I got to sprint a lot! The first day, I smashed through about four patches and then started working on many-to-many intermediary model support. The merging of newforms-admin is really one big barrier for this patch right now, so I was basically forced to stop working on it.
Aside from those contributions to Django itself, however, about 5 of us (who, by the way ranged in previous experience in Django from almost none to branch committer) began working on a project for the community. Unfortunately we're not yet finished with the site (we're probably sitting at about 75% complete), so I can't publicly reveal it. Rest assured that I'll blog about the site itself once it's ready.
In all actuality, however, we didn't put our noses to the grindstone on this site. Sure we got a ton of work done on it in an extremely short amount of time, but we could have gotten more done. Instead of being code monkeys, though, we really ended up taking the time to just drink some beer, make fun of each other, and get to know one another. And that's really what it's all about.
It Always Boils Down to the People
This feels like it's becoming sort of a recurring theme to my blog, but it's something that I find to be true time and time again. If PyCon had been just the talks and coding by oneself, it would not have been very fun--it really boils down to this: it's the people who make life fun. People that challenge you, trust you, people who don't match up with your expectations of them, people who make you laugh, and people who you just can't figure out.
There's never a better place to find people who fit all of the above criteria than PyCon, and in this case we all share a common interest: Python. I found myself thinking at the end about some of my fellow sprinters that we had become quite good friends. I don't know why it happened, but in only a week we really seemed to get along.
Why do I love PyCon? Because you can get into debates about computational linguistics, walk 20 blocks with arms full of beer, stay up all night coding, and groove out to some really amazing live jazz, all in one week. That's why I love PyCon.
(Note: There are no links in this post since I wrote it on a plane and posted it in-between connecting flights in an airport.)
I'm currently on my way to Chicago for PyCon 2008! I've miraculously convinced two of my good friends, Tony Hauber and Chris Coudron to come along as well. They're even going to participate in the sprints.
Last year I was still 20 years old and therefore couldn't participate in any of the drinking activities, but this year it's a different story. It's going to be really fun to see that side of the conference this year.
Come talk to me about...well..anything, really. Pretty much any Django-related activity is a good bet on where to find me, otherwise hit up Twitter/Pownce, as I'll attempt to use those services to their fullest. Have a wonderful PyCon and I hope to see and talk to a lot of you there!
I was lucky enough to be able to attend PyCon last year, and hope to do so again, but some great resources are starting to show up online for those who couldn't. One example is Jacob Kaplan-Moss's talk named Becoming an Open Source Developer: Lessons from the Django Project.
Even if you've read James Bennett's excellent writeup from the conference, some audio from the event itself can always be fun to listen to. Right now that's all I could find, but there's new audio showing up from PyCon every week. The only way to stay updated is to subscribe to the PyCon 2007 Podcast RSS Feed.
P.S. Hello Django community aggregator!
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.
I'm, right now, sitting in the advanced Django tutorial at PyCon. How cool is that?
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