DjangoCon 2013, talks, tools and the circus

The talks

Regarding conferences, it is said that talks and presentations, they aren't so important, but I'm not quite of that opinion. It is true that today, many of the things heard of at technical conferences sound familiar to you, you've know them from the Internet, but it's not quite the same. Yopu have gone abroad, you stick to a schedule, and you are pre-programmed to pay attention to what the speakers say. At thuis conference, each participant had 30 minutes and then we had our round of questions. Talk after talk, no parallel sessions: I think that is the right approach. My experience with conferences based in parallel sessions is that you end up with a sad feeling that you missed something.

In the presentations we've seen a little bit of everything. We've wrote about it, both my coleague Jatsu Argarate and myself in Spanish. Philosophy talks, work methodologies, humor and sarcasm, django package presentations, presentations about databases... I also missed a few things:

• The future of Django or a possible roadmap.
• Some new awesome must-have tool or something.

The former, because it was a DjangoCon and I expected to exchange ideas about the evolution of Django. The latter because in a congress of these you usually  hope to discover something completely new to bring back home. (However, the new django-cms looks great, it was the subject of a lightning talk).

On the other hand, a DjangoCon tradition was broken: they always brought someone critical to Django. Not this time.

There are quite a few notes on the net about the conference, but perhaps the most complete and relevant are those made ​​by Reinout van Rees . On the other hand, everything was recorded and presentations will appear in pyvideo.org .

The Circus

The location of the conference has been spectacular. A real circus tent, all paraphernalia included: popcorn, balloons, costumes... If you came out of the tent you had chairs, blankets on the grass. Perfect weather helped, too. All was fine.

The location has helped to cheer up the atmosphere, wonderful weather and the spirit of the circus, that put us all in good spirits. Very good vibes among the attendees. Like many conferences, as important as the tech taks is the networking opportunity, and in this case, the circus greatly helped it. We meet some old acquaintances, put real faces to Twitter avatars , and we also made ​​new connections .

Organizers created a Storify with what happened, and there is this Flickr group with photos.

I must heartily thank all that the organization did. They really did a great job, and most of the attendees agree, no doubt. At the end of the Conference we got all stand to applaud the organizers, they deserved it.

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