Pycon disappointment

[J. Clifford Dyer]

I just want to step in and offer my 2¢.  This is my first PyCon, and I
agree that a lot of the Lightning talks seemed pretty useless.  Overall
though, I had a great experience at this conference.  I learned a lot; I
met a lot of cool people; and I got really excited about new ideas to
bring back home.  

Django code lab was fantastic.  

Teach me Twisted was a fantastic, innovative, and effective way to teach
a new technology.  There was a little bit of difficulty hearing over the
cross-talk, but I just moved up front and had no further troubles (and
better access to the Balvenie single-malt!

Most of the sessions I attended were moderately to highly useful.  FWIW,
none of my presenters had laptop troubles, except at teach me twisted,
but we weren't on as much of a time crunch, and we took care of that one
pretty easily and kept going.  

The only useless one I attended was actually the most highly technical,
not because it didn't have good information, but because functions were
used without reference to what module they had been imported from and
slides containing 15-20 line functions were left up for about thirty
seconds, and then were gone.  I couldn't even finish reading them.  

Note to speakers:  do not say

   x, y = tee(foo)

say

   from itertools import tee
   x, y = tee(foo)

or better (for pedagogical purposes)

   import itertools
   x, y = itertools.tee(foo)

I don't disagree with the criticisms leveled throughout this thread, but
I do want to say that I think it has been a great conference, and for
me, the problems did not ruin the experience.  Heed these criticisms and
it will be even better next year.  Ignore them, and it will probably
degrade over time.

Thanks,
Cliff