Seek Nuance

I didn’t claim my “swag bag”. I wasn’t even tempted. I don’t need another meh coffee mug or pen. I don’t need a small stack of paper brochures I’ll only discard.

It’s time for conferences to retire the swag bag!

This anachronism should have perished years ago. Anything I want to discover, I can discover on the web 1000x faster than I can in a swag bag. You expect me to flip through the paper collateral? If I’m interested in web-based analytics, Python IDEs, or “live chat” technology for web pages, I’ll search online. I know the swag bag is a tiny and unrepresentative subset of my options. If you’re expecting me to think, “Ooo, I’ll use their product, they’re in my swag bag!” your model of how brains work (well, my brain, anyway, but then again mine’s the archetype) is wrong.

Back in the day, you looked forward to finding the latest copies of software, or interesting trial/demo/crippleware, in a swag bag. Trial copies of Visual Studio, or a Linux distribution, or the like. Or, going way back, new products that you never heard of. None of that is true anymore.

I know swag bag material helps sell sponsor slots, and that’s how conferences defray costs. But they’re still nigh useless, and bad for the environment. It’s a matter of time before vendors wise up to how little return they get on their swag dollar. Conferences should move now to kill this ancient custom!

Every attendee received a Raspberry Pi, Model B unit. Very cool! I didn’t have any interest, so I didn’t claim mine. All the unclaimed units are being donated to charities and schools, so my Raspberry Pi will go to some worthy cause somewhere. I hope some girl or boy is inspired by it.

I wanted to take in some evening events, but except for the first night, my control rods went in around 6:30 pm and I chilled instead. On the plus side, I got lots of sleep and woke up refreshed each morning. In fact, I noticed myself dragging less on the conference’s last day than I normally do at this point in a conference. Getting good sleep is good. Who woulda thunk it?

I’m enjoying myself more this year than last. I think it’s because my head’s in a better place than it was last year. Things are better at work, a dim light may be visible at the end of the tunnel, etc.

Odd.

I’m attending PyCon again this year. The tutorials and the main conference.

In past years, I posted commentary about the sessions I attended. I won’t do that this year. Don’t feel like it. Not sure why.

Living at PyCon 24x7x365 would be so much fun.

The first day of the main conference! I’m anticipating syncing up with friends, like Andrew and Kirk. With tinges of loss and misery caused by Joe‘s and Ryan‘s absence…

Great Keynote speeches. Morning is metaclasses, classes, and subclasses. Should one run away from metaclasses, or view them as just another tool?(Apologies to Edward Teller‘s estate.) The subclassing talk taught me a thing or two.

“If your class has only two methods and one of them is __init__, it’s not a class. It’s really a function.”

Advanced security topics summary: We’re all doing it wrong and we’re all hoseheads.

Lots o’ good ideas and tips about context managers and decorators. I’m going to rip up some code when I return to work on Monday.

Yesterday was SQL and MongoDB. I plugged up some knowledge gaps. Goodness. Except for a Ming firehose onto which I held for dear life.

Today is a “Python epiphanies” tutorial, and NLTK. More goodness.

Up for day 1. A nice day in Santa Clara. A lime has no place in a breakfast fruit bowl. If I have anything cosmic to share, I’ll do it here.

WAKE UP!

I’m off to PyCon 2012 tomorrow. Yee haw!

Rick Harding of Lococast.net and Mike Pirnat from the From Python Import Podcast interviewed me about my PyCon 2011 bus trip. Listen to it here.

A live blog of the day..

1611: That’s all, folks! Will now figure out what to do before leaving to return home tomorrow. And I have some ideas for how to spend my time on the bus; I need to flesh those out.

1430: Lightning talks and closing remarks.

1340: Hidden Treasures in the Standard Library. A clever trick for serializing arbitrary objects and classes in JSON. Good logging tips.

1310: Scaling Python past 100. Meh.

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