Yep, slept too long again. I’m just doing a terrible job of getting moving in the morning. We missed every keynote of this conference but at least all talks are recorded and are already appearing on Youtube. These Pycon people really know what they are doing. The conference has been spectacular again.
Anyway, I did get up and dressed in time for the job fair. We went in and I had no idea what to do. I suck at this! But Andrew said to just go up to booths where I’m not interested in working and talk to people to get over the nervousness. I did that and of course was blown away by the company and what they do. It would be working with scientists who do genetic research! Gah, that would be amazing! But they are in San Francisco and they don’t do remote. Dangit. I wandered around to a few more booths and then saw Michael, a Mozilla employee I chatted with often at the office. It was really nice to see him so we stood and talked for a long time! Jonathan from Dreamhost walked by and confirmed our lunch. I was still sure he’d find a way to cancel because I suck at self confidence.
Turns out he was waiting for me! Woo hoo! Andrew came with us and we went to a nearby noodle house we had eaten at last time we were here. We even got seated at the same table. We had a really great talk, he was very nice, had a very interesting back story, was interested in mine. All in all it felt great and felt like a better meeting than it would have been over the phone. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much but maybe it all worked out for the best. I would love to work there.
We headed back to the conference for more talks, one about serialization which was really interesting and one about something really boring. After those it was time for Guido to give a final talk, then someone gave the final keynote and another person gave final statements and thanked the many, many, many volunteers who made the amazing conference possible. They also announced where Pycon would be in 2016 and 2017. It’s in Portland which wasn’t a secret but they played a really nice promotional commercial. The only thing missing from it was the Unipiper. I was kind of surprised about that. Next the people running sprints came up and talked about their projects. So many sound so interesting. We are staying so I can participate in a couple of days of sprints but now I have no idea what I want to work on!
We were going to grab Carl and go to dinner with Michael and some others but they were going to a steakhouse so we hopped on a bus and went to some interesting vegan raw food place. It was my first experience with raw food. I had always avoided it because it seemed really boring. Our food was pretty good though. Even Carl, who is most definitely not vegan, enjoyed it. Dinner was long and leisurely and then we ordered dessert. They do a fantastic job of raw dessert. We walked back to the bus stop and waited for a while while talking about this and that. A bus showed up but it was not the same one we took to get there so I asked the driver if he was going downtown. He waved me on and said, “It’s free. Come on.” so we all boarded. His machine was broken apparently but we had no idea if it would really take us where we were going. Whatever, it was a beautiful night so we would figure it out. We did make it downtown though and the driver was nice enough to tell us where to exit. We walked Carl back to his room and then headed back to ours. I sent Jonathan an email thanking him for making some time to go to lunch in the midst of conference chaos and then it was time for bed.
This has been a wonderful conference again! I got to see Sumana, Asheesh, Honza, Elana, Shauna, and Carl. I got to see friends from Portland. I met tons of new people, some in unexpected places and had a great time.
Today I learned that Montreal seems to have a LOT more hippies than Portland. It’s a wonderful, diverse, beautiful city. I hope we can come back just because.