With over five weeks still to go until PyCon 2008 in Chicago registrations already number over 180, almost three-quarters of the total registrations for the first PyCon in 2003 in Washington DC. The tutorials, running for the third year, are also popular and many of them already have enough registered students to guarantee that they will run.
I'm delighted to see that my own Python 101 for Programmers is a popular offering—it's intended for people who have had little or no previous exposure to the language, and I am trying to cover all the essentials in three hours! Let's hope that it brings some new members to the Python community.
If you have never been to PyCon, I would like to recommend you try it. It's definitely not a stuffy atmosphere, people go there to have fun as well as do productive work, you can learn huge amounts from both the tutorials and the regular papers, and the sprints are a great way to get into a new project and learn from the developers themselves.
It's a unique event, besides being terrific value for money.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke
Musings from the technological frontier
1 comment:
The 180 number is from early on Saturday. The current number is over 230.
Personally I think the key difference for the average attendee over other conferences is the 'hallway track' and Open Space. Last year I witnessed a lively discussion on abstract base classes verses interfaces between two core developers and a number of attendees. Guido walked up and joined the conversation, clarifying his position and things got more lively. Afterward, one of the people turned to me and asked 'did that just happen?'
Not only did it happen, but that type of thing is a common occurrence at PyCon. Jim Fulton even took time out of his busy schedule during the sprints to hunt me down and yell at me about some PyCon website issues ;-)
It is one thing to have a discussion in python-users or django-users or even python-developers. It is quite another to have a similar discussion in person and breaking out the laptops!
Early registration ends on the 20th, so start making plans now!
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