Vancouver Python Workshop (Day three)
And so the last day of the conference arrived. For me the last day just meant the drudergy of accounting and getting all the expenses through. This only took about 30 minutes, but still 30 minutes of accounting is less fun than almost anything else.
The last day had another good set of talks in the web track. Unfortunately most of the talks I wanted to hear were in the other room, I did sneak out to hear Brian Dorsey’s talk on distributing web applications on Windows. Something we did a occassionally at Enfold.
There was more of a Plone theme in the web track and we had a panel discussion on Plone past, present and future. Since I know nothing about Plone’s future anymore I let Calvin take up the future part, but I can’t remember what he said or what was said in most of the panel actually.
I spent quite a bit of time worrying about my Clouseau talk which I added to the lightning talks. The lightning talks went well, there were some that were even funny like the South Park web proxy. I’ve always been a fan of lightning talks as long as they stay to 5 minutes, anything else is unstructured rambling. Mind you as one person pointed out, remember when filling 5 minutes of a talk (say at school) would be a nightmare.
Then it was Ian’s final talk about movie restoration, which he did well. It’s a great talk combining technical bits with interesting bits. I missed bits of it due to running around.
That evening was a collapse in front of the TV and watch 24, turning my brain off. For next morning we were off to Long Beach….
All in all the conference went well. There was more pressure this year because our costs were increased. For those of you who don’t know, all the profits go to the PSF. If there is a loss, it hits me and the organisers personally. Not a great deal for us, but taking risks is needed to get things done. As it turned out by increasing prices (and still being probably the cheapest conference out there) we paid all our bills and will still make a donation to the PSF.
Next time I think we’ll concentrate on getting a better hotel to address some of the complaints about that. We’d like more lead time to get some speakers in too. And I think the idea of becoming PyCon West is all the more realistic as well.
Just got the final accounts to do and then the conference is done and dusted. Thank you to everyone who attended, spoke and helped out.