The Conference That Was Almost Called "Pythaluma"

As my friend Thursday said in her excellent talk (sadly, not up as of this time) naming things is important. Avoiding in-jokes is, in general, a good idea.

It is with mixed feelings, therefore, that my pun-loving heart reacted to Chris's disclosure that the most common suggestion was to call the conference "Pythaluma". However, he decided to go with the straightforward legible name, "North Bay Python".

North of the city by the bay, lies the quiet yet chic city of Petaluma, where North Bay Python takes place. In a gold-rush-city turned sleepy wine country, a historical cinema turned live show venu hosted Python enthusiasts in a single-track conference.

Mariatta opened the conference with her gut-wrenching talk about being a core Python developer. "Open source sustainability" might be abstract words, but it is easy to forget that for a language that's somewhere between the first and fifth most important (depending on a metric) there are less than a hundred people supporting its core -- and if they stop, the world breaks.

R0ml opened the second day of the conference talking about how:

• Servers are unethical.
• Python is the new COBOL.
• I put a lot of pressure on him before his talk.

Talks are still being uploaded to the YouTube channel, and I have already had our engineering team at work watch Hayley's post-mortem of Jurassic Park.

If you missed all of it, I have two pieces of advice:

• Watch the videos. Maybe even mine.
• Sign up to the mailing list so you will not miss next year's.

If you went there, I hope you told me hi. Either way, please say hi next year!