Two out of three Python conferences done for 2011 :-) Right after DjangoCon Europe 2011 I left for Florence (Italy) to attend this year’s EuroPython. Compared to all the other conferences I’ve attended so far this has by far been the one with the longest schedule. 5 days with 3-4 parallel tracks each, filled with talks about topics from GeoDjango to developing games with Panda3D.
Sadly, Reinout van Rees wasn’t among the attendees so we will have to live without his awesome talk summaries this time around. But at least quite a few people have already uploaded their slides and added them to the event page on lanyrd. For attendees (and IIRC everyone else after some time) there is also a video of each talk available.
For so many topics you also need a venue than can hold all 600+ people who want to learn about them, and the Grand Hotel Mediterraneo only 20 meters from the Arno was definitely up to it. Sure, there were times when not everyone could get a seat, but most of the time it worked out rather nicely. Luckily every room was air-conditioned, otherwise we would have probably all melted within seconds ;-)
Since I’m already writing about the venue, I also have to mention the catering. Besides the lunch, which was served in three large rooms within the Hotel’s main building and offered a buffet of great and light Italian cuisine, there was also one coffee break in the morning and one in the afternoon with delicious pastries :D I guess, I’ll need at least a month to lose all the weight I’ve gained during that week ;-)
Sadly the Wifi couldn’t really keep up with that level of quality. The hardware side of the serivce provided by com-com didn’t really feel like the limiting factor, though, with each room having at least 2 access points. What might have killed it was probably that everyone had to sign up through a single gateway-site, which ended up being offline more often than not :-( At least it showed, that using Mercurial or Git is really better than any centralized system ;-)
The evenings after 8 pm were usally spent in small groups (up to 20 ;-)) searching for some nice restaurants, which we found easily enough, ranging from pizzerias to real restaurants where we simply had to go through the whole menu ;-) For me personally, every restaurant we went to was a place where I’d definitely go to again:
- Pizzeria I Tarocchi
- Ristorante Ricchi
- Pizzeria Bounty
- The Williams Pub (although I’d probably eat something completely different this time or stick with the beer. They even had Hoegaarden :-D)
Sadly, I only had about 2 hours time for Florence itself during the day and that only because on Thursday I simply skipped a few talks. The heat nearly killed me but the HDR shot above was definitely worth it ;-)
Next years EuroPython will once again take place in Florence and I’m definitely looking forward to it. I just hope that the timing won’t place it again to close to another major Python event like the DjangoCon Europe or some other PyCon somewhere with 10°C less ;-)
In any case: A big thank you to all the organizers and sponsors for a great week in Florence :D
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