I have tried to do a full writeup of my PyCon experience this year, and failed miserably, so this is what I’ll do: This post will focus only on the conference experience – lessons learned, sessions attended, and projects discovered will have their own posts; this is the other stuff.

So what about the conference as a whole? It was, just like Atlanta last year, an overwhelmingly positive experience. This was the first time I volunteered, and I really felt that that was a given win – from getting to have a say in the program by joining the program committee, through doing a session as a session runner and getting to see all the work that goes on behind the scenes, to responding to a just-in-time tweet to join the swag-packing party. Just standing somewhere and looking confused would prompt someone more experienced to help you out, and people were just so genuinely nice. Will definitely do again.

The venue was good, although as others have already remarked, the open spaces were too far away from the main rooms – I believe this made both the BoFs and the hallway track a bit less exciting than last year.

Food was acceptable, and lunch was served in a timely fashion – breakfast was awesome the first day, and good the following days.

The swag was good, apart from the orange bottle opener – you know who you are. Also, so many t-shirts!

(I really need to fix proper tags for posts so that I don’t have to hack a post on PyCon into the Python rss feed used by Planet Python…))