PyCon Proves Its Worth

Here's a great quote from Catherine Devlin's blog post Five Minutes at PyCon Changes Everything reporting the unexpected recruitment of a high-powered development team after giving a lightning talk:

If I'd had $1 million of startup funding to hire a staff to work on sqlpython, I couldn't have gotten a team that large or that talented. I figure that gives me better than a 1000-to-1 return on my PyCon investment. :)

It's also been extremely gratifying to discover that the dip in numbers (initial assessment says we were maybe 10% down on 2009) represents an amazing result. Apparently many conferences have seen attendance at 50% of last year's numbers, and some have simply canceled because the cancellation fees were a smaller that their expected loss.

This really vindicates the low-cost community-based approach that PyCon has always used. Several people told me that they booked to attend the conference without knowing whether they could get company approval, because they knew the conference was great value and they could afford to attend on their own dime. PyCon is a very special conference indeed, and the Python community makes remarkable things happen there every year.

False Economy?

I went to a meeting the other day with one of my clients and two third-party developers. We were meeting at the developers' offices, in a town I'm not familiar with, so when I arrived I looked for the closest parking garage and parked there.

Arriving at the offices, the opening smalltalk included parking. Both my client's representative and the two developers had parked in two-hour free parking areas, and when I said I'd used the parking garage eyebrows were raised and one person asked me "how much does that cost?". I replied "I don't know, I didn't even think to look".

The meeting lasted four hours, so half way through the other three participants in the meeting had to take ten minutes or so out to juggle their cars and avoid tickets. On my return to the parking garage I discovered that the charge equated to approximately three minutes' billable income, which I was happy to write off. Assuming the other three participants are similarly expensive their decision may have saved them personally a dollar or two, but it probably cost the client over a hundred bucks in lost time.

Yet I'm the one who's regarded as stupid for paying to park so I can happily take as long as I need to meet without interruption. I'd like to think my clients pay me the rates they do so, among other things, they don't have to pay me to go out and move my car in the middle of meetings. A couple of dollars out of my pocket is well worth it if the client gets (and perceives) better value for money as a result.