PyCon 2012!
The main conference part of PyCon, held this year from the 9th to 11th of March at the Santa Clara Convention Center, finished about three weeks ago with the raffling off of an Aldebaran Robotics robot. Sadly, I didn't win it, although I did get a picture of the conference chair carrying it around like a baby.
I'm a little unsure how to sum up the conference -- no surprise, then, that I'm finally writing about this so long after it happened. Three weeks' worth is a lot of ambivalence. But, conveniently, three weeks brings it up to around the time for my annual introspective post, so I can focus on the conference here and all the tl;dr Life things -- which make me ambivalent -- there.
In some ways, the conference was unambiguously awesome. The theoretical conference cap was 1500 people -- we hit that mere days after early registration closed, and with miscommunications and new sponsor sign-ups and so on, ended up with over 2200 people at the conference! It was the biggest PyCon yet -- the most talks, the most posters, the most sponsors, and the most dancing robots!
OK, so there were some things that could have been done better -- and the unexpected sheer size of the conference did cause some issues. Some talks, for instance, were uncomfortably crowded, and the hallways (especially with the confusing labeling of the talk rooms) were less than fun to navigate. But the basic logistics were handled pretty well, I thought, and the focus could stay on content (the talks and posters were recorded) and community. Which were generally great.
Personally, it was a pretty good PyCon. I've helped to run bits of the conference before (as a session runner / session chair), but this year I helped coordinate the post-conference sprints (several days of open-source hackathon), which was pretty cool -- I really felt like I was helping out, and giving back to a pretty awesome community. Plus I got to stroll around wearing an epic hat.
So, all in all, a pretty great conference. Now let's see how we can beat it with PyCon 2013!
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