Today we have a guest blogger with us. Evan Porter recently returned from Montreal where he attended PyCon 2015. Evan was kind enough to provide us with some notes from the event. We will now turn the mic over to Evan.

The weekend of April 10th, 2015, I achieved a long-time goal and attended PyCon. This year, it was held in Montréal, so the bar was as low as it was going to be. Travelling to a new city in a new situation was a little nerve wracking, but once at the conference, I never felt out of place.

I attended the conference days of PyCon, and skipped both the tutorials and the development sprints. The conference days are where the talks take place, the exhibitors discuss their organizations (and hand out swag), free spaces are available, and poster sessions are held.

The talks varied widely from the highly technical talks on the inner guts of the CPython interpreter, to discussing how one can contribute to an open source community. There were even non-Python talks on technologies such as supervisor, git, and docker. I was impressed by the variety, but upset that it made choosing which talks to go harder.

One thing that surprised me was that they had tours of the city. I skipped out on morning talks to go on a guided tour of Old Montréal. Instead of having some PyCon volunteer show us around, the conference organizers arranged to have professional tour guides to take small groups of conference attendees. Our tour guide was very knowledgable and even managed to keep us mostly dry in the scattered showers we had that morning. He knew the histories of the various buildings and locations, and even knew which movies were filmed where. You might miss out on talks, but you can catch up later as they are all placed on the web.

The exhibitors hall was a great place to get information on companies who use Python, or have services of interest to Python devs. Google, Twilio, and GitHub all had booths. I was even surprised to see CaptialOne there. Nearly every company there also had a booth at the job fair on Sunday if they were hiring.

The most surreal moments were walking down the hall and passing Guido van Rossum. For me it was like confirming Santa Claus was real.

PyCon was a wonderful experience.

All of the talks for PyCon 2015 can be found here: http://pyvideo.org/category/65/pycon-us-2015

My favourite talk: http://pyvideo.org/video/3420/bytes-in-the-machine-inside-the-cpython-interpre Bytes in the Machine: Inside the CPython Interpreter

Evan shared this photo with us showing the inside of the conference building