Pycon 2008, day one!

By Christine Lemmer-Webber on Fri 14 March 2008

Pycon, day one! (Or that is, day one if you didn't attend tutorials yesterday.) Best day of my life? Well, no. One of the best days of my life? Oh yes, certainly.

Anyway, summary is:

  • Lots of cool swag
  • Looks like Python 3.0 and 2.6 are going to be developed nicely so that the transition will be really easy.
  • Django 1.0 coming soon, possibly after this upcoming sprint
  • Met a lot of interesting folks. Was surprised to meet some people whose writings and work I've followed in my spare time. Kevin Kubasik, whose blog I've seen a bit on Planet GNOME stopped by our booth.
  • That whole stalking Phil Hassey thing was a joke, and I didn't expect to actually spot him in the crowd, but I did and I somewhat rudely and awkwardly interrupted a conversation of his, and didn't recover. So the whole joke of me looking like a stalker probably actually did make me look like a stalker. Oh well.
  • Brian Fitzpatrick, an acquaintance and head of the Open Source department in Google's downtown engineering office, gave me a sticker that said "My other computer is a data center". The irony induced by the context of my previous employment didn't strike me until several hours later.
  • Massimo Di Pierro, professor at DePaul's CTI department, physicist, web framework author, and all around cool guy, gave me a Web2Py hat. I didn't see him give anyone else one of these hats, so I'm pretending it's just because I'm awesome.

Also, as to whether or not I'm giving a talk tomorrow, I'm not really sure. I signed up, but I signed up in the special first-grabs sponsor talk sheet, and I think I might have done so too late. So not sure if I'm going to get to speak, but I'm preparing anyway.

Oh hey, and if you are there, stop by Imaginary Landscape's booth in the break sessions! I'll probably be around.