Google hosted DjangoCon the weekend of Sept. 6–7. I’m so happy I went! I spent a little extra time in San Francisco so I could spend time with friends I see entirely too rarely.

Yes, it did take me all month to get around to writing this up.

Thursday, 4 September

Laurel picked me up at SFO, and after dropping my bags off at her place, we headed over to The Phoenix bar, where we met up with a whole bunch of people:

• Fellow #emacs denizen Thomas Knoll,
• Former San Diegans Matt, Rion & Erin,
• Laurel’s Andy,
• Dave, interning at Yahoo for the summer,
• Alex, with whom I worked for a year without ever actually meeting,
• Stephen O’Grady and Ryan Tomayko, both of whom I’ve followed online for some time, but had never met.

A good time was had by all.

Friday, 5 September

The next morning Laurel, Andy, and I had a gloriously greasy breakfast, after which I did approximately nothing until lunch. I took BART downtown to meet up with Jason for lunch—We used to work together, years ago, and spent quite a while catching up.

Laurel joined back up with me and took me on a walking tour of the city, which to this point I hadn’t really ever spent much time in. After helping Rion and Jessica move into their new place, several of us embarked on a holy pilgrimage to La Canasta, home of the perfect burrito. Eventually I hopped on BART and headed across the bay to stay at Brad and Bethany’s.

DjangoCon

DjangoCon was fantastic. You can watch videos of every presentation online.

Saturday

Brad and I headed down to the Googleplex in the morning, registered, and hit up the conference. The three stand-out talks of Saturday:

• Any serious Django developer needs to watch James Bennett’s discussion of Reusable Apps. Seriously, this will get you to totally reexamine your Django development philosophy.
• James Tauber showed us all how far Pinax has come in a few short months.
• By now, you’ve probably already heard that Cal Henderson’s Why I Hate Django completely rocked.

At some point during the day we met up with Anders and Damon, Matt and Lindsay’s friends from Seattle. Brad and I ended up hanging out with them at the Django 1.0 Release Party at the Tied House later that night.

Sunday

• Adrian Holovaty moderated a panel discussion of Django in Journalism which was excellent. I especially liked the bit at the end of the Q&A when they talked about where the news industry is going in general.
• Malcolm Tredinnick talked about Code Design & Patch Writing, which wasn’t really Django-specific—his advice would do you well for contributing to any serious F/OSS project.
• Simon Willison, Russ Keith-Magee, and Andrew Godwin sat on a panel discussing Django and Schema Evolution (migrations for you Rails people). They’ve each developed a migrations tool, and are now trying to figure out what an ideal Django migrations tool would look like.

I had fanboy-chickened out of introducing myself to James Tauber and Lisa Dusseault on Saturday, but at one point Sunday I noticed them talking together and figured I could kill two birds with one stone. James nudged me to contribute to Pinax, and Lisa and I ended up talking about Ravelry, a social network for knitters that Erin and Lisa both use.

After the conference several of us had dinner at Laurel’s Andy’s place—home-made steak and lobster. Seriously. Nom.

After dinner I went out for drinks with another #emacs guy, Brian Palmer, along with Matt, Anders, and Damon.