PyCon Canada Begins!

Today was the opening of PyCon Canada 2013, with some volunteer prep work to get things ready in the afternoon, followed by a casual mixer in the evening. This is only the second PyCon here in Canada, and it’s already grown significantly from last year’s small venue. I didn’t go to that one, but I’ve been told it was small enough to be held in a Legion hall. This year it is being held in the Chestnut Conference Centre, which is part of the University of Toronto.

mixer

The mixer was a lot of fun, with food and beverages graciously supplied by Upverter. I got to meet several people as well as connect with many others whom I had already met. Based on my small sampling, there was a good mix of seasoned Python developers and relative newcomers to the language. One of the best parts about conferences like this is learning what others are doing with the language, and there was a wide range just in the discussions that I had: some doing web development, while others focused on internal tools for their companies, while still another was working with medical research teams to analyze data.

The conference proper begins tomorrow morning, with a keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, followed by a full day of sessions. My talk isn’t until Sunday afternoon, which means that I’ll probably spend a lot of tomorrow revising my slides again and again between now and then.