My first PyCon

In 2012 I traveled for the first time to a Python conference. I live in Recife and was about to go to Rio de Janeiro to attend my first Python Brasil. I’d already attended a few meetups in my city, but this was different. Since then I never stopped attending Python Brasil. I also started to organize some events, like local meetups, the first Python Nordeste (conference on Brazil’s Northeast region) and even a Python Brasil in 2014, 2 years after my first one.

Last month I arrived in Portland (such an awesome city!) to my first PyCon! I started attending Jacob’s tutorial “Let’s build a web framework”. For those who don’t know him, Jacob is a co-creator of Django. It was such an amazing tutorial, and, as he quoted James Tauber “Reinventing the wheel is great if your goal is to learn more about wheels”. During the tutorials I saw Guido, Python creator, in person, got a bit nervous and couldn’t say much more than “Hi Guido, nice to meet you.” What I actually wanted to do was to thank him, to say that I’m a huge fan of his work and that starting working with python and its community changed my life. Hopefully I’ll have another chance.

And then the conference itself started. More than 3300 people, at least 5 times bigger than the biggest conference I had attended before. Lots of people that I follow on twitter or see commits on projects that I use everyday. Also great talks! I missed Raymond Hettinger’s talk on Modern Python Dictionaries but got the chance to watch Tom Christie, Django Rest Framework creator, talking about his new framework API Star. I also watched Flávio’s great talk on how to make a good library API and many others.

I would like to highlight two keynotes. First, Lisa Guo and Hui Ding presentation about Python and Instagram - which is the biggest Django application in the world. Secondly, the talk of Kelsey Hightower that built an app to use google’s assistant to deploy an application using kubernetes.

In the sprints I had the chance to work on Django Channels with Andrew Godwin, he is one of the Python Brasil [13] keynotes.

Finally I wanted to thank a few people that reviewed my talks proposals: my awesome friends at Labcodes, Frank Wiles, Jeff Triplet and Luciano Ramalho. Even though they weren’t accepted, I learned a lot in the process and it will for sure improve my future proposals. Thanks a lot!

PyCon was amazing, I can’t describe it with words, but I hope this quick overview can give an idea of how awesome it was. Looking forward to Cleveland next year!

And as Naomi Ceder said, “Come for the Language, stay for the community!”