PyCon has been fan­tas­tic. I sup­pose this should come as no sur­prise. I have always been impressed with the hard work and ded­i­ca­tion of the com­mu­nity but I’ve always held myself out­side; peer­ing in, watch­ing. This year, my good friend Mike drove the point home: the only way to really enjoy PyCon is to dive in and engage.

He was cor­rect. The dif­fer­ence has been amaz­ing. The pas­sion here is infec­tious and makes me want to get involved. Every­one is so acces­si­ble, so easy to talk with; how could you not want to make things bet­ter by helping?

There have been a num­ber of sur­prises, but the largest by far is the desire for more episodes of From Python Import Pod­cast. Our last episode was put out a year ago, after PyCon 2011. Folks have been ask­ing for more of our brand of com­men­tary, and who are we to deny it to them? __fpip__ is com­ing back this month, fea­tur­ing inter­views with Steve Holden of the PSF and the PyLadies.

Today’s keynotes have me think­ing about new top­ics to explore. Stormy Peters has me think­ing about Com­mu­nity and Pri­vacy; how they inter­act, how they should pro­mote and shield each other. A ques­tion asked of Paul Gra­ham of YCombi­na­tor got me think­ing: what is the moral respon­si­bil­ity of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists who invest in med­ical star­tups? What eth­i­cal issues are there in devel­op­ing new soft­ware solu­tions for the fore­cast­ing of health issues based on a person’s genetic code?

And then there is the code…that feel­ing of itch fin­ger­tips that makes me want to sit down and craft some­thing inter­est­ing. In the past, fig­ur­ing out *what* to write has always been the issue…people are already attack­ing the com­mon prob­lems of the web and secu­rity. The area that I find inter­est­ing now is the man­age­ment of devel­op­ment teams. That got me thinking…what sort of tools could I develop to aid me in man­ag­ing my own team? That’s my itch. I’m going to spend the next year scratch­ing it, and I’m going to pro­pose a talk at PyCon 2013 to dis­cuss my findings.

Time for me to get back to the con­fer­ence. More later.

Christo­pher T. Miller

Christo­pher T. Miller is a soft­ware devel­oper by trade and a writer by neces­sity. He is one of the co-founders of Podiobooks.com and is the Over­lord of The Secret Lair. He has not yet been eaten by a grue.