Lonely Lion

So, PyCon is over (for me). I wasn’t able to participate in the sprinting this year, probably a good thing as too many late nights make me cranky. All in all, I had a great PyCon, met a lot of interesting folks, learned some new stuff, and had a lot of fun. The sessions I attended were good, but the BoF’s really stand out for me this year. Especially the Netflix BoF and the follow-up data-visualization BoF. Both were small (+! Small BoF’s FTW!) and really got me thinking.

The conference itself was really well managed. Things ran smoothly, people mingled, sandwiches were eaten, and talks were given. Friday and Saturday night were both pretty late and beery, yet again proving that I’m 31 and have baby. My rockstar genes have seriously been damaged by fatherhood. As an aside, I’ve been giving a after-several-beers rant about how MySpace is the greatest thing since representative democracy for so long now that Atul Varma finally cut off further discussion until I blog the speech. It’s a pretty good speech, I’m not sure it’ll survive the light of day, but I’ll work on it soon.

The best part of PyCon, in my esteemed opinion, is the people you meet. I finally got to talk to Mike Bayer, whom I’ve often pointed out as “the most prolific Python library writer ever.” I’ve been a fan of Data Wrangling for a while, and had the chance to talk to its steward Pete Skomoroch. He led the Netflix BoF, and his colleague Chris Gemignani led the data visualization BoF. They work for Juice Analytics, which seems to be doing some really interesting work.

PSC (whom I work for), was a sponsor this year. We had some good conversations with people at our booth, and sponsored a dinner Friday night. It was sort of our coming out party, as we’ve been working pretty hard (though quietly) for the past year to establish a solid Python based consultancy within a 100 person IT firm. PSC has been around for 17 years, has a great group of traditional manufacturing clients, and has never been unprofitable. They saw opportunities in the Python world, and hired me last year to help build a team. We’re 7 developers strong as of this morning. That, coupled with 1040 attendees at PyCon this year (up from 600 in 2007) says to me that Python is really building a market here in Chicago and elsewhere. It’s an exciting time to be a Python developer.

Anywho, great PyCon this year folks…looking forward to next year already.