EuroPython is now over, so it's time for me to write down my thoughts and impressions!

The venue

I have been at the same venue, the Birmingham Conservatory/Music school last year at PyCon UK '08, so the place was familiar. This year however the weather was unusually hot and humid and it was obvious that the building wasn't designed to handle that kind of conditions. And of course geeks are not famous for their love of hygiene! (And Greeks are famous for whining about any other kind of weather :)

The crowd

This year there were around 450 delegates from 20something countries - I can't be bothered to look it up. The venue felt a bit too small for that number of people, and some rooms overflowed. Still, nothing that put me off - I have no trouble sitting on the floor for an interesting talk.

Notably missing were the US delegates - at least that's the feeling I have from looking at name tags. This had the effect that there was an absence of "famous" people. Perhaps my expectations were set too high by last year's PyCon UK, where there were at least 3 core python devs around. It may be that months after PyCon '09 it would be difficult for people to go to another conference. There was a plan to bring Guido virtually via a video conference, but two attempts that were made failed - perhaps for the better given that some questions that managed to squeeze through were not that interesting.

The community

A big concern of mine this period is the community. After moving back to Athens, I really miss the interactions that my colleagues and the various user groups provided. I have been always thinking about starting a group in Athens, and I was really pleased by both the unconference/open spaces discussion that was held, and by realising that the PSF is willing to fund such efforts. Once work-related things relax a bit, and the famous Greek summer is over I will try to get the ball rolling.

My talk

My introduction to PyObjC talk went well, I think. About 25 people showed up at what had to be the hottest room in the whole Birmingham. We had two little fans that were pushing hot air around. We even had some questions by people who did not know me, which is good! I think a lot of people were disappointed to find out that you can't develop iPhone apps with Python though.

This and that

I don't know if I'm spending too much time reading blogs and following people on Twitter, but I couldn't find enough talks that really jumped out for me. From the ones I attended, Simon Willison's talk about Crowdsourcing with Django stood out, first because Simon is a really good talker (it'd be interesting to find out how much he prepares for his talks), and also because the first project I ever made with Django was a crowdsourcing app for gathering Greeklish word transliterations. (Aside: A top 5 is a great idea, and I wish I had come up with a progress bar back then). Also, a big thanks to Greg Holling for his Ctypes talk!

I feel that there were not enough talks that covered things like that - very useful, basic libraries that you can't easily approach on your own, or that have to be demonstrated to you in order to make sense. I would love for example a pdb talk or an introduction to Twisted talk. I think that next year I will propose a 'Python Dev Environments' talk. There are a lot of people out there that don't know about virtualenv, pyflakes, tabnanny and a lot of other things that make your life easier.

I was drawn at the closing prize draw, and picked the much-coveted (and sold out) Natural Language Processing with Python book. Last year I won the 'Best Lightning Talk' award (an Xbox 360 ), so it seems Birmingham is turning out to be quite a profitable venue :)

I also bought The Geek Atlas and Head First Web Design, from the O'Reilly stand. I also bought another 4-5 books from amazon, which I hope to read and review during the summer.

I met some wonderful people that unfortunately did not have any cards made, so I hope they will email me instead - I has some nice little MOO cards made and I gave out a lot of them. I also learned a fantastic card game called "Durac" (or something like that) that is apparently the official PyPy game. Or as Carl put it "the only game that is consistently played at PyPy sprints". Trust a German PHD student to be as accurate as possible in his definitions :)

I tried to participate on the sprints on Friday morning but my brain doesn't really function after drunken nights, so my attempt to refactor (almost rewrite) PySmell failed miserably.

Closing thoughts

My biggest gain from Europython '09 is a renewed vigor to help organise the Greek Python community. It's a shame that there were only two Greek developers there, one being Nikolaos Papagrigoriou who I met by accident in a talk, the other being me. (Incidentally, we were not marked as Greek in the delegates list, because we used German and UK addresses when booking). I hope to remedy this for the next one :)

I think we need more invited speakers for the next EuroPython. Self-proposed talks can only get you so far - perhaps some way for the participants to highlight their interests when signing up? Or just drop all talks and organise an unconference? Though for 450 people it might be tricky.

A big thank you to the organisers for pulling this off in their spare time, and I hope I'll see you again next year in Birmingham!