It was great to meet the people I met at Pycon and to see all of the talks. I enjoyed Salt Lake City a ton - I wasn’t sure what to expect, never having been to the city before other than passing through as a kid, and I was delighted with how pretty Salt Lake City is.
I wrote this quick recap on the conference, and, since it will be in Salt Lake City again next year, I added some notes about what I liked about Salt Lake City.
Conference Format and talks
What I liked most about each of the talks was that they were only 30 minutes each. No questions were taken at the end of each talk, due to covid guidelines. Perhaps oddly, I did like that there were no open questions at the end, because each speaker usually encouraged audience members to ‘find them in the hall’ instead of ask a question in front of 200 other people. There was a kind of approachability here which I really liked. I’ve been to some other kinds of conventions where the speaker gets on stage, gets off stage, and virtually runs away from any audience members. I’m sure there were some hallway-shy speakers at Pycon, but for every talk I saw, each speaker encouraged audience members to meet up or ask questions in the hall.
Keynotes
I loved the talk from Sara Issaoun, which you can view on youtube below!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6SWPjdxvEI
What I thought was most interesting about this talk was the worldwide collaboration needed in order to get the imaging completed. I won’t spoil much more than that! Watch the talk!
Salt Lake City
I loved walking around Salt Lake City. Everyone was very nice, to the extent that some local passerbys helped me figure out the parking system utilized by the city when they saw me standing around looking confused. A person whizzed by me on a sidewalk on a scooter and shouted “Sorry!” and I said “Sorry!” and they said “Sorry!” again. Usually, in other cities, cough cough, scooter-riders nearly mow me over without a word.
There are tons of restaurants to check out in Salt Lake City if you’ve never been there before, or recently. We didn’t have a lack of places to eat or areas to check out over the weekend after the last conference talks of each day.
I was surprised and happy to see that there is a Cotopaxi store in Salt Lake City, and it’s right by the convention center. After getting my Cotopaxi jacket and backpack at REIs in DC and Colorado for a few years, there was nothing quite like getting to go to a store where ALL of the selection is Cotopaxi. I picked up a new backpack and some smaller packs to carry things like my brushes and paints.
The best place to stay for this conference is probably the Marriott, which is across the street from the conference center. I do have to say I loved our little Air Bnb, it was super close to the conference center, but we found ourselves calling an Uber/Lyft a few times as the area is hilly and takes a bit of walking.
I hope I get to go back to Salt Lake City in 2023 but we will find out if Baby Jewell (due date August 4!) will be okay to travel or not by then. I did see a couple other parents of babies at the conference but not many. It’s hard to get those little guys on a plane or across the country by car. Fortunately, the venue did seem as kid-friendly as possible.
The only bad thing that happened at Pycon was I didn’t win the raffle that Amazon had going for the super cool LED python, I would have loved that thing! Overall the conference was a blast and I loved every moment.