2017 saw a new chapter of Pycon in India, Pycon Pune. Pycon Pune 2017 felt more community focused, had loads of upstream contributors as speakers and participants, community booths (Pyladies, PSF) and loads of hacking.

Pycon Pune 2017 was a 4 day event, from 16 Feb - 19 Feb. The first 2 days were conference days, and the remainder 2 were for devsprints. This was my first year as a Pycon volunteer. I spent most of the time with Farhaan recording talks and running around with mic during QA sessions. Another great thing about this Pycon was that I had my wife, Sumukhi attend Pycon with me. Although, it was a totally new world for her, sometimes boring and dauting, yet, she had fun time volunteering in the conference.

What I liked about the conference

  • Single track: it was easier to focus
  • Great opensource talks
  • A lot of keynotes by awesome speakers across the globe
  • The venue
  • More open source community centered
  • devsprints with upstream contributors

What I didn’t like

  • Conference badges (it was printed in haste, in the last moment)
  • There was no separate rooms for coding and discussions

Talks I liked

  • Keynote by Honza Kral
  • Writing beautiful code
  • Keynote by John ‘warthog9’ Hawley
  • Building trust in releases
  • Keynote and scientific lightshow by Pravin Patil
  • Keynote by Katie Cunningham
  • Pagure - Past, Present, Future by Farhaan and Vivek
  • Django on steroids - lessons from scale by Sanket Saurav
  • Keynote by Terri Oda

I pitched Opencabs (An open source web framework to manage cab services), a pet project of mine, in the lightning talks and it got the attention of quite a few folks who want to solve social problem statements with Open Source.

Devsprints were fun. It was about mentoring and getting mentored. While I mentored a few folks to get their feet wet in Django by contributing to Opencabs, I got mentored by Honza to resume my contributions to Django, and Nick Coghlan to submit my first pull request to Cpython. In the midst of all these, I didn’t manage time to hack on ircb, but I am optimistic to land a few commits to it this week.

To sum up, Pycon Pune was fun and I am looking forward to it next year.