<div dir="ltr">If I have to publish this post in twitter it will simply become "Best conference<br>ever, thank you @pycon".<br><br>Conferences are always a good place to meet old friends or make new ones, to<br>meet like minded people with whom you can share your passion, discuss technical<br>
and non technical things in the same pace. There are few conferences where you<br>will see work getting done in a fast pace, `PyCon <<a href="https://us.pycon.org/2013/">https://us.pycon.org/2013/</a>>`_<br>was one of them. Of course we have the extra toppings of great food, drinks and<br>
stories. <br><br>PyCon US 2013 had all of them but in much larger plates. Nine days full of<br>excitement, 2500+ people under one roof, 6 parallel tracks of talks, the<br>language summit, first ever education summit, 4 days of continuous hacking on<br>
your favorite projects are a few things which are coming in my mind in less than<br>10 seconds.<br><br>Day -1<br>------<br>I reached SFO around 1:20pm on 11th March. Took a cab to Ramada in Santa Clara.<br>This was my first USA trip and after reaching hotel I found the place kind of<br>
empty. It was a strange feeling about not finding any person outside cars :) <br><br>Luckily saw Douglas Napoleone's email telling volunteers already reaching the<br>venue. So, I just took a cab and reached venue. <br>
<br>In the office room I met Douglas, Noah Kantrowitz, Laurens Van Houtven, Oskar<br>Żabik and later Ewa Jodlowska. Started setting up the "green room" with Douglas<br>and had enough fun while testing each of the radio equipments for volunteers. Met <br>
the amazing AV team, they need a special thanks as the event reaches to many more<br>people through their dedication and hard work.<br>Had dinner with others and came back to the hotel late at night.<br><br>I have to mention one thing, the warm welcome I received from everyone<br>
through out the conference. I never felt for a moment that I was there for the<br>first time or meeting them first time. We always talk about how open the<br>communities should be or how diversity should help. Trust me when I say that the<br>
Python community at PyCon will give you the same warm feeling which you get from<br>your close friends or relatives. This is just another reason to be in PyCon, be<br>the part of the bigger family.<br><br>Day 0<br>-----<br>
Next day reached venue by 9am, through out the day many more people started<br>coming down. Registration was started by 3pm, so did the needful. <br><br>By afternoon Toshio reached the venue. It is always fun to meet to people<br>
whom you know him/her for<br>long time and I was sure this PyCon is going to be full with those fun moments<br>as I will be meeting most people for the first time face to face. Met lmacken, <br>threebean also in the hotel.<br>
<br>At nigh around 12 of us went out for dinner to a restaurant, the food was<br>amazing.<br><br>I came back to the hotel around midnight and found Ramki and Konark already<br>reached.<br><br>Day 1<br>------<br>Had to wake up by six so that we can get ready and reach venue by 7:30am but<br>
reached few minutes late and straight went behind registration desks, the queue<br>started growing as the day progressed but it was never too long. The custom<br>application we were using for registration was one of the main reason to get<br>
things done in a fast pace. <br><br>After the queue started staying empty for long, I rushed to the language summit<br>before it started. The details from the day is in this `post<br><<a href="http://kushaldas.in/posts/notes-from-language-summit-at-pycon.html">http://kushaldas.in/posts/notes-from-language-summit-at-pycon.html</a>>`_. The<br>
young coders tutorial was going on up in the tutorials room at the same time. <br><br><br>Day 2<br>------<br>Morning met Mark Shannon in hotel and we all shared a cab to reach venue. After the<br>usual registration desk work done I moved to the education summit. During all the<br>
three panels we heard some great success stories and discussions went on. The<br>panels were on "Curriculum", "Teaching" and "Engagement". I found that in<br>dgplug summer training we are actually executing many of the suggestions came up<br>
in the panels.<br><br>After lunch I went in to the "Python 3 Metaprogramming" by David Beazley. He<br>already tweeted that brains might explode during this tutorial and it actually<br>did for many of us.<br><br>
PyCon SWAG bag stuffing party was in the late afternoon. This is generally a<br>difficult task in a conference where you have high number of people turning up.<br>But within couple of hours we finished off 2500+ bags and had too much fun.<br>
<br>In the evening there was "Opening Reception!". Alex Gaynor and myself became the<br>bouncers and guarded the door :p<br><br>Later at night we had the volunteers and speakers meet. Every little steps were<br>
explained in great details.<br><br>Day 3 (first day of main conference)<br>-------------------------------------<br>Queues started becoming long in the early morning but due to great setup of<br>morning breakfast tables and event-bag pickup counter, it never felt much. We<br>
managed to finish off the registration without any trouble. <br><br>Jesse Noller started the day with some exciting announcements, one of them was<br>about a raspberrypi for each attendee.<br><br>Next was the keynote by *Eben Upton* from Raspberry Pi Foundation. After the<br>
keynote people started moving into different rooms and hallways were also full<br>of people.<br><br>I attended Ned Batchelder's talk on *Loop like a native: while, for, iterators,<br>generators*, and Raymond Hettinger's talk on *Transforming Code into Beautiful,<br>
Idiomatic Python* and finally Mike Müller's *Functional Programming with<br>Python*. Most of the time in the day, I was meeting people and discussing<br>various technical aspects of different projects. These kind of hallway tracks<br>
are of course the best part of the conference.<br><br>At night after another awesome dinner, packaging and distibution tools<br>mini-summit started in room 206. The current status and future goals of various<br>projects including setuptools, distribute, wheels, pip, virtualenv, zc.buildout,<br>
PyPi were discussed.<br><br>Reached hotel around 1am and just crashed.<br><br>Day 4<br>------<br>Woke up early. Day started with lighting talks, I spoke about retask project,<br>somehow I was feeling uneasy about showing only code in the slides, strange!.<br>
Through out the day there were many fantastic talks, more interesting<br>discussions on hallways. Sometime in the afternoon Tavis Rudd gave a personal<br>`demo <<a href="http://pyvideo.org/video/1735/using-python-to-code-by-voice">http://pyvideo.org/video/1735/using-python-to-code-by-voice</a>>`_ of his<br>
system, completely blown away with the accuracy.<br><br>In the evening there was "Porting to Python3" session in open space. I never had<br>any of my modules ported to Python3. Barry Warsaw led the session, we quickly<br>
went through the basic differences between 2 and 3 and saw some common problems<br>people get into. I started porting `retask <<a href="http://retask.readthedocs.org/">http://retask.readthedocs.org/</a>>`_ to<br>Python3. Toshio introduced me to `six <<a href="http://pythonhosted.org/six/">http://pythonhosted.org/six/</a>>`_ and by<br>
the end of session I managed to port retask into Python3. <br><br>At night we as usual sat down in hotel bar and pool side, met many new faces<br>from Montreal, who will be leading the event next year.<br><br>Day 5<br>-----<br>
Reached venue around 9am and went directly to the poster session venue, put up<br>my poster on darkserver. Missed both the keynote sessions due to this but people<br>started coming in as the keynote finished.<br><br>One good thing about poster session was direct interaction with audience. The<br>
major feedback I received during the day was the following<br><br>* Support other distributions, starting with CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu.<br>* Make it easier so that people can have custom installations inside companies.<br>
* Provide a framework so that people can import from various sources with much<br>less coding.<br><br>Many devels acknowledged that becoming single source for all different<br>GNU_BUILD_ID(s) from the distribution is important.<br>
<br>In between Dave Malcolm took the charge of the explanation of the project to the<br>audience and we also had few pictures taken.<br><br>In the closing ceremonies Diana Clarke took the charge of running next year's<br>
PyCon from Jesse.<br><br>Next was introduction of various sprints by the leaders. It was very clear that<br>the number of people attending sprints is also going to be high. We slowly<br>started moving things back to the sprint rooms.<br>
<br><br>Day 6 (first day of sprints)<br>----------------------------<br>First time managed to sleep more, till 9am, it was much required extra sleep. We<br>reached venue, Ramki went to PyData, me and Konark moved to different sprint<br>
rooms.<br><br>Through out the first half all the different bugs in cpython I tried to work on<br>were either not-reproducible or can not be introduced in 2.x as they were new<br>features.<br><br>At night started discussing about retask with Maximiliano Curia, he submitted<br>
many patches since then. Later started port rst module into Python3.<br><br>Day 7<br>------<br>Finished rst porting to Python3, so now it supports both 2 and 3. Had long<br>discussion with Dave Malcolm on his current projects. Later he helped me to<br>
explore more on elfutils and how to go ahead to have a library around it so that<br>we can bindings in different languages as required. I also showed my work on the<br>Python bindings to `elfutils <<a href="https://github.com/kushaldas/elfutils">https://github.com/kushaldas/elfutils</a>>`_.<br>
<br>Day 8<br>------<br>Started working on few smtplib related bugs in cpython, R. David Murray already<br>committed one of the patch and the other one is up for review. His help to the<br>new-comers was really helpful.<br>
<br>Day 9 (last day)<br>----------------<br>We all moved to one single space, even at the end there were around 50 people<br>working in various projects. Met the mailman team. Though out the sprint days<br>mane left and it was time for me to say good bye to everyone. Toshio dropped me<br>
to Lawrence caltrain station and I came back to SFO and stayed back at Yannick's<br>place for the night, I had my flight back home around noon next day.<br><br>I personally found the development sprint days very much useful, we just sat<br>
back and hacked on our favorite projects, many projects got work done, many new<br>developers joined the teams.<br><br>In betwen I was trying to figure out if we can get some hardware donation to our<br>`Bijra project <<a href="http://bijra.dgplug.org/">http://bijra.dgplug.org/</a>>`_ , which got slowed down due to<br>
hardware issues. Mark shannon heard the issue and donated his Raspberry-Pi and<br>later Harry Percival donated his. Steve Holden also came up to help and he<br>promised to send a few more devices to the school. We will still require some<br>
more help in finding some cheap HDMI to VGA adapters.<br><br>Personally this trip was very meaningful in many ways, being in the venue during<br>the event is of course a different experience. If you are a Python programmer or<br>
someone who loves new technologies or someone who just loves to meet interesting<br>people, come down to PyCon, find the nearest one in your region. `PyCon India<br><<a href="http://in.pycon.org/2013/">http://in.pycon.org/2013/</a>>`_ will be happening from August 30 to September 1st<br>
in Bangalore this year. Hope to meet many of you again there and in future<br>PyCon(s).<br><br>I also thank `Red Hat <<a href="https://www.redhat.com/">https://www.redhat.com/</a>>`_ and `Fedora Project<br><<a href="https://fedoraproject.org/">https://fedoraproject.org/</a>>`_ for making trip possible.<br>
<br><br><br clear="all">Kushal<br>-- <br><a href="http://fedoraproject.org">http://fedoraproject.org</a><br><a href="http://kushaldas.in">http://kushaldas.in</a><br>
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