TITLE: Headed to PyCon, Virtually
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 21, 2023  3:33 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 Last night, I
<a href="https://mastodon.social/@wallingf/110234410209964510">
   posted on Mastodon</a>:

<blockquote><em>
 Heading off to #PyConUS in the morning, virtually.  I just took my
 first tour of Hubilo, the online platform.  There's an awful lot
 going on, but you need a lot of moving parts to produce the varied
 experiences available in person.  I'm glad that people have taken
 up the challenge.
</em></blockquote>

 Why PyCon?  I'm not an expert in the language, or as into the
 language as I once was with Ruby.  Long-time readers may recall
 that I blogged about attending JRubyConf back in 2012.  Here is a
 link to
<a href="https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2012-05.html#e2012-05-22T19_53_23.htm">
   my first post</a>
 from that conference.  You can scroll up from there to see several
 more posts from the conference.

 However, I do write and read a lot of Python code, because our
 students learn it early and use it quite a bit.  Besides, it's a
 fun language and has a large, welcoming community.  Like many
 language-specific conferences, PyCon includes a decent number of
 talks about interpreters, compilers, and tools, which are a big
 part of my teaching portfolio these days.  The conference offers
 a solid virtual experience, too, which makes it attractive to
 attend while the semester is still going on.

 My goals for attending PyCon this year include:
 <ul>
 <li> learning some things that will help me improve my programming
      languages and compiler courses,  </li>
 <li> learning some things that make me a better Python programmer,
      and <li>
 <li> simply enjoying computer science and programming for a few days,
      after a long and occasionally tedious year.  The work doesn't go
      away while I am at a conference, but my mind gets to focus on
      something else -- something I enjoy!
 </ul>

 More about today's talks tomorrow.
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