Next stop:

Planning a dinner - soon at its own domain!

As I was writing a few days ago, I'm moving. What you see at the link above is just a couple of pages put together in an hour of break from the work on the real thing: for the real thing, I still need one more class (class as in "let's do it Object Oriented"), and some half-decent CSS (suggestions are welcome especially for the latter).

[A random question: what do you listen when you are working - if you listen to anything at all? Apparently, alternating Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen and Wicked with a double dose of Defying Gravity is a slightly peculiar choice.]

More PyCon! It's a wish, not just a title.

I left the last post minutes before Jessica McKellar's keynote at PyCon 2013. Unfortunately the keynote was cancelled. Raymond Hettinger followed a series of lightning talk with a keynote the theme of which was "Python is amazing" (I don't rememeber the exact words, but that's the main idea). YAY!

Getting started with automated testing, by Carl Meyer, was a great introductory talk, a good way to remind me that not writing tests is not (just) being lazy, it's counterproductive (and therefore leads to more work later).

Then I moved on to a couple of much-needed talk on community building: Scaling community diversity outreach, by (take a breath) Asheesh Laroia, Jessica McKellar, Dana Bauer and Daniel Choi, and, after lunch, How (Not) To Build An OSS Community by Daniel Lindsley. So far my contacts in London for programming have been by mentor in the TechAbility programme (my gateway drug pusher, the way I really got into programming - thank you Ben!), a couple of friends and of course my husband (but I tend not to talk too much about computers with him). I probably never realized how much I miss a "real life" (as opposed to "just IRC/internet") community since I got here. There are the GNOME beer events, of course! But the only London Python User Group I see online is "professionals only", so it doesn't look very newcomers-friendly... and there is no chapter of the PyLadies in London. (I was told that I should set one up - but I cannot do it on my own. And yes, dear Londoners, this is another cry for help!) All of this probably just means that I need a job, I am tired of doing things on my own. End of the rant, sorry.

Later in the afternoon, yet another fantastic talk. Lynn Root presented Sink or swim: 5 life jackets to throw to New Coders. It was perfectly tailored for the stage I am in my programming education: I know the basics, now what? Well, there is her website, then there is... teaching others. I sense a pattern here...

And then I went to rest, because the day after I had to present my poster and I was already too nervous.

The day after - the last day - was basically "hey, here's my poster". I had presented a poster only once in my life, but it was a much smaller (although quite big!) conference, and it was in another field (game theory).

And you know what? I loved it! (Even if it meant missing the keynotes... and the other posters.)

I talked about what I did last summer, why it's a good idea to do something like that, how you do it (and what you shouldn't do); most important, I spread the word about the Outreach Program for Women - all the leaflets but one or two were gone by the end of the session, and many people went away with the link to the website scribbled on a piece of paper!

I wasn't able to stand on my feet, afterwards. So: nap! And then, introduction to sprints...

...so that yesterday I managed to find something for me at the OpenHatch sprint. I helped with a webpage that was incomplete (a webpage that was... teaching - how to contribute to an OpenSource project. Mmmmh, more of that pattern), and I cleaned up the wiki a bit. I had never heard of OpenHatch before this conference, but I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful frienship (to use the words of Claude Rains in Casablanca).

And now I should be packing (how will I stuff all the t-shirts I got into my suitcase?) and go on my way...

So: a big thank you to PyCon, to the PSF (who generously sponsored my travel and my hotel!), to all the wonderful people I met, too many to fit in a post here (also: I am terrible with names, I would probably forget someone). And... maybe see you in Florence later this year!

PS: I wrote the post this morning (PST). It's now almost night (also PST, I don't want to know what time it is in London), and I am at the airport - flight delayed by approximately 3 hours. I use the airport connection to give you... the poster! With a huge thank you to Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Meg Ford who sent me so many useful suggestions.

And I also saw a kangaroo in the wild.

Hi, I am in Australia.

I am at linux.conf.au in Canberra, to be precise. Always trying to learn something new - I cannot wait for the talk about Git for Ages 4 and Up, by Michael Schwern, today (Thursday - I am still not completely over the jet lag).

What have I done so far, besides meeting very nice people, too many to mention?

On Tuesday there has been a miniconf for women - Haecksen, which I learned it is the German word for female hackers. Men were welcome, of course! The talk that struck me the most there was Denise Paolucci's Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: great suggestions on how to fight that bug in your brain telling you you are going to be found out , from "always ask questions"  to "mind your (internal) language" to "teach". A very funny exercise followed the talk: a typical self-deprecating thing was reported by someone in the audience, then whoever thought that of him/herself once raised his/her hand - and it looked like a calisthenics class after a while. I find it interesting how this useful talk was felt to be needed for women, or at least mostly for women: and how I think that yes, indeed, it's mostly a woman's problem. Could it be caused by how women have often to manage conflicting expectations? (Of course I think that men have problems with expectations too, but I also think that at least these are mostly due to "simple" bars set too high, not with "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations.)

And a mention must be made of Radia Perlman's keynote, also on Tuesday. It was interesting, it was funny, it was accessible: I was absolutely fascinated - and no, it was not just the graphs. It ended with one of the wisest suggestions I have ever heard, for everything in life: before fixing a problem, make sure you know what the problem is.

OK, now it's time for breakfast, and another exciting day!

(And if you're wondering about the kangaroo: yes, I am sure I saw one the other night.)