My Italian PyCon experience

I came back yes­ter­day from the third Ital­ian PyCon (aka pycon3) which was held in Flo­rence and all I can say is that has been an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. I had the chance to meet a lot of new great people as well as the BDFL (which won’t be back in Europe for quite some time, as he said). Here fol­lows a resume of what I think were the most inter­est­ing talks.

On first day, there were two keynotes: “A ret­ro­spec­tive of how the com­mu­nity helped build Python 3.0”, held by Guido van Rossum and “Zen and the art of Abstrac­tions’ main­te­nance” by Alex Martelli. I can just say that they were two extremely inter­est­ing talks which by the way weren’t diving too much — or any at all as in Guido’s talk — into code.

On the second day I really enjoyed two talks: “Erlang + Python, join­ing two worlds” by Lawrence Oluyede and a really great talk by Ray­mond Het­tinger, “Easy AI with Python.” The former left me with a great curios­ity about the func­tional lan­guages world, while the latter really impressed me with how easy is to solve cer­tain AI prob­lems with Python (I solved many of the prob­lems Ray­mond talked about pre­vi­ously, but never in Python and never really thought about even trying to).

On third day the Anto­nio Cangiano’s talk was enlight­en­ing. Even though it wasn’t really Python spe­cific, he has given a great insight of how you can, well, “become rich with Python.”

Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t follow the Sunday afternoon’s talks since my air­plane was leav­ing at 3.00pm, but at the end I can say that this was an incred­i­ble expe­ri­ence that I hope I can make again next year. And as a side note: the food was marvelous.

Leave a Comment


NOTE - You can use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> <pre lang="" line="" escaped="" highlight="">