Pycon disappointment

[Mike Driscoll]

> But it gets worse. The lightning talks, traditionally the best, newest
> and edgiest part of the conference, were also sold like commercial air
> time. Vendors were guaranteed first pick on lightning talk slots, and
> we in the audience, expectantly looking forward to interesting and
> entertaining content, again started to feel like things were awfully
> commercial. And what seemed like a good idea, moving lightning talks
> into plenary sessions with no competition, began to look like another
> way to deliver a captive audience to vendors.
>

This was my first time at PyCon and when I went to the Lightning Talks
yesterday, I was also under the impression that they were for
attendees. About half of the ones I saw were commercials. It was weird
and made me wonder if they were always like that.

> On top of that, the quality of the presentations was unusually low.
> I'd say that 80% were not worth going to -- there were definitely some
> good ones, but it was a lot of pain to discover them.
>

Do you mean the "official" presentations or the lightning talks? I
thought both were kind of bad. Jeff Rush was great in both of the
sessions I saw and the gaming presenters were also good. But I saw a
lot of people who had never presented and were unprepared. In fact,
one didn't have any code whatsoever to share and the other one only
started showing some code during the last 10 minutes of his time.

The sponsor keynotes weren't all bad. I thought the White Oaks guy was
quite sincere and it was cool to hear about Python from the business
side. And the Google rep probably had the slickest presentation I've
ever seen. In retrospect, I'm not sure what it had to do with Python
though.

Mike