PyCon Day 0: A Mixed Bag

Wel, the curse of PyCon struck again this year, and I woke up bright and early to find that my laptop had blue screened. Three hours to the start of my tutorial presentation! Fortunately I was in good shape in terms of backup, having brought my external disk drive with me, and Greg Lindstrom was also able to provide me with a thumb drive containing the PowerPoint slides and PDFs, so I was prepared for not having my own computer available. Fortunately after ninety minutes of repair work the machine was once again in a bootable condition, but it meant that I missed breakfast and was a little later into the tutorial room than I anticipated.

It was difficult for me to judge how well the tutorial went down, so I'll have to rely on people who attended it either commenting here or writing it up in their own blogs. I hope they all remember to fill out the evaluation forms, available electronically as well as on paper. That way I'll have some sort of objective evaluation, but at least a couple of the audience were kind enough to tell me afterwards that they felt better prepared to deal with the conference, which was after all the main idea.

In the afternoon I attended Getting Started with Pylons/TurboGears2 & WSGI: Modern Python Web Development, by Mark Ramm and Ben Bangert, and in the evening Practical Applications of Agile (Web) Testing Tools by Titus Brown and Grig Georghiu. I'll be writing those up in separate posts if you're interested.

In and amongst all that, friends old and new continued to pour in. Too many to mention without fear of upsetting someone, but excellent to see. This conference is going to be a blast, I just know it, and I am very excited about the prospects of the next few days even though it means being away from home. There's a buzz. Or is it just me?