Thoughts after attending my second PyCon
Here I am again, sitting in an airport waiting to board my flight away from PyCon. And what a conference it has been! Where do I even begin…
The experience this year was one of inspiration for me. After arriving at SFO, I headed straight to Santa Clara to help out with the Young Coders tutorials, a free Python tutorial geared towards kids. It was amazing. I walked into a room with a sea of faces beaming with the new knowledge they were acquiring. (It was referred to as “coder face.”)
I also had the incredible opportunity to be a speaker this year. My colleague Mark Lavin and I spoke on Developers & Designers: Collaborating on your Python projects. It was such a fun talk to give and am grateful for the opportunity. We had some really great questions and many a folks telling us afterwards how much they appreciated our perspectives. Wow. It feels good to feel that you’ve possibly inspired or motivated someone else!
And then, there was the gift of a Raspberry Pi to each PyCon attendee. I wish I had, had a better camera with me so that I could have gotten photos of the faces in crowd when Jesse Noller, PyCon Chair, announced that everyone in the audience would be getting a Raspberry Pi. Those faces and the kids in the audience jumping up and down in their seats, was a truly amazing site to see!
My Raspberry Pi, decked out in it’s new Pibow home
Overall, I would have to say that my experience this year was all about people. The people whom I rarely get to see in real life and more frequently talk to via a keyboard. It’s these in person moments that have the most impact on us as a community. Getting to know all of the amazingly smart and kind people I am surrounded by is truly inspiring.
Looking back on my post from last year, I never would have believed you if you told me what the future held at PyCon 2013. Thank you to everyone who made this year a success and making me very proud to be a member of the Python community.
Oh yeah… and let’s keep on making more cool shit.