Brain Spill

I was there on the Thrusday to attend a tutorial called Python Epiphanies. The tutorial was educational in understanding some of the inner workings of Python. But I have a hard time trying to figure out how to use the knowledge I gained there. 

And they were dancing.... how cool was that? It was a splendid opening ceremony. 

Thursday evening was bag stuffing. Where we helped out by stuffing the swag bag. I got to work side-by-side some well known figures in the community (Jesse Noller, Pydanny). After that I hung out with some Heroku folks and learned about their awesome work culture.

Later that night, Yannick and Bryan gave a Pycon newbie orientation. I took their advice and gave a Lightning Talk about bpython (my talk is 10min into the video).

I socialized plenty and got a lot of useful contacts from different companies. I got to meet the founders of Octopart, my favorite Electrical Engineering based startups. 

I also met with Kenneth Reitz who is famous for his requests library and this awesome talk Python for Humans.

I was quite thrilled when I first saw Guido at the Lunch hall sitting right next to my table. I was too shy to talk to him, but I managed to get a picture with him (in the frame). 

Real gutsy! Maybe next year I'll actually shake his hand and get a picture with him. 

• I enjoyed Paul Graham's keynote quite a bit. He talked about daring startup ideas. His keynote is summarized in these two essays. 
• David Beazly's keynote was a walk-through (demo) of tinkering with PyPy. It looked hard as balls and I kept hoping a happy ending where he declared victory. But it ended up being one of those art movie endings that leaves the listeners in a confused and inconclusive state. 
• Guido's Keynote on the other hand was interesting. His talk was sprinkled with unintended hilarity that ensued due to Google's presentation software. He was sporting an awesome T-shirt that read "Python is for girls" and talked about dealing with Python Trolls.

I knew that all the talks were video taped and posted online, so I didn't worry too much about missing some when I had conflicts.

The following talks piqued my interest and will make me go exploring a little bit. 

Permission or Forgiveness - Quaint. Applying Grace Murray Hopper's logic to Python programming. 

pandas: Powerful data-analysis tools for Python - Useful. 

Webserver Performance Tuning - Sounded like a sales pitch for New Relic, but not in a bad way.

Angry Birds playing Robot - Hilarious and Informative.

Pyed Piper: Modern Alternative to Awk, Sed etc.  - Interesting.

I went to the open space organized by Pydanny where he brought his Capoeira instructor who taught us some awesome moves. By the end of the class, we are all breathing heavily and energized. Once I tried to do a hand stand and lost my balance, but Aikido training kicked in and I gracefully rolled out of my fall with just a carpet burn on my elbow. 

I didn't get a chance to go to many of them, but I did attend the open space for SaltStack and sat with Seth House to try and get Salt running on my Macbook. After a few failed attempts, I decided to give Salt a chance on my linux desktop once I got home. 

Sunday afternoon Stephen McQuay (a fellow Utah Pythonista) and I decided to take up Vijay's offer to go visit the Computer History Museum where they were doing a live demo of the Babbage Difference Engine. OMG! It was awesome to watch the history come alive.