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.

Anywho, Pycon is on! Hurray for Pycon!

Chicago! Hurray!

Just a heads up.

I think this will be the first year I actually propose a talk.

Presentations were also great last night, Feihong Hsu presented “Unicode for Small Children,” which came from a suggestion at Pycon to “explain unicode to me like I was in kindergarten.” It involved magical unicorns, and was pretty informative. Some good discussion popped up afterwards.

Ian showed the OLPC laptop “XO”. He’s hoping to get some Chicago sprints together, working on applications for the laptop. Everyone seemed pretty interested. I know at Pycon some folks expressed a lot of interest in having a Chicago sprint, so hopefully that will happen soon. There’s still some questions about the best way to build a development environment for the machine, so as soon as that’s taken care of, sprinting can commence. If you’re interested, join the ChiPy mailing list.

Ted Pollari gave a good talk about Pycon 2008 coming to Chicago, encouraging people to get involved. It’s a year away, but there will be a lot of work in the next couple of months. Again, if you’re interested in helping out, join the mailing list. We should have a list of things people can do in the next few weeks.

Lastly, Pete Fein presented his new Pycon inspired project, Grassy Knoll, a REST wrapper for a PyLucene repository. Interesting stuff all around. Great meeting!