Meditations on Tech Conferences

I went to PyCon over the weekend. It was definitely the largest tech conference I've been to so far. Subcultures fascinate me in general, but this was really interesting. Over 1000 really smart, focussed and innovative technical types crammed together in the same hotel. It was kind of like drinking from a fire hose - I needed to take little timeouts in order to make it through the weekend.

Geek culture is generally polite and trustworthy. I found that I had no problem letting a complete stranger watch my laptop while I went to the bathroom.

Maybe it was just affinity at work. I sense that many people were dealing with similar problems that we were trying to solve in different ways. For example, I found that one tutorial leader was applying himself to a problem space (massive, fail-safe parallel computing), using Python, that seemed very similar to the kinds of things that Erlang was designed to handle.

Perhaps Test Driven Development should be called Guilt Driven Development. Mostly it seems to just make developers guilty about not testing their code enough. Or for those who do test, smug. Bastards.

Oh and finally, I learned a lot about using slides. So many people know this, but I've never seen "less is more" so graphically spelled out for me. I'm never using bullets on a slide again.