PyCon 2015 was an incredible experience. This was my first PyCon, and I was amazed at the welcoming community and the level of quality. At most conferences, the talks are hit-and-miss: for every great talk you see, there’s one you don’t get a lot out of. At PyCon, I enjoyed every talk I went to, including – especially – the keynotes.
I’d heard that PyCon did a good job of supporting and welcoming a diverse audience, and it’s true. Not only did they provide childcare (!) and have many events for marginalized groups, but many talks were about or mentioned diversity. The highlight for me was Kate Heddleston’s talk, “How our engineering environments are killing diversity (and how we can fix it).”
Her talk was full of concrete actions to take and was broadly applicable. The things she talked about were not only the right ways to help make sure your organization isn’t ruled by implicit bias, but were the right ways to treat all people. I found myself identifying with many of the stories she told, reminding me that patriarchal systems hurt all of us. Her comments about why to focus on positive feedback instead of negative feedback and how inappropriate it is for workplace criticism to focus on personal expression instead of work quality were so on point.
Another one of my favorite talks was Sarah Bird’s talk on using Bokeh for plotting.
I’ve played with Bokeh a bit before, but mainly focused on using matplotlib for graphing and plotting with Python. This talk definitely convinced me to give Bokeh another try, and I might move to teaching it instead of matplotlib.
I also had never been to Montréal, or Canada at all, so that was really fun. I both ate at Tim Horton’s and got some poutine, so my Canadian tourist card is filling up. I don’t understand why we don’t eat poutine in the US, though. We have french fries and we have gravy. This seems like an obvious thing for us to do.
To be honest, I wasn’t a giant fan of Python before. I didn’t dislike it, but I saw it too conservative, overly explicit, and not as powerful as some other good choices. Part of that is that I was wrong – learning about some advanced Python features has convinced me of its power – but not all of it. Python is more verbose and explicit than Ruby, for example. (I changed how I feel about that, though: it’s great for teaching.) However, the community around Python is so great that I really don’t want to be doing anything else. All programming communities have good people – I’ve met some of the nicest people in Clojure – but it’s obvious in Python that the values of inclusivity and kindness come from the very top and permeate the culture.
I’ve always prided myself on being an extreme polyglot, but I think I’d like to settle down for a while and spend several years writing only Python (and JavaScript and SQL and bash scripts and …) Ok, maybe not only Python, let’s say mainly Python. Anyway, I’d like to focus and set down roots. I’ve found my people.