2018 conference reviews

Quick facts

• Location: Huntington Convention Center, Cleveland, Ohio
• Number of times attended: first time in 2018!
• Cost: $700 (covered by work)
• Travel costs: $0, just had to pay for parking
• Workshops/tutorials: available at an additional cost, did not attend
• Days attended: 3 days of the main conference i.e., Friday to Sunday

High level notes

• Definitely a technology conference so most relevant to developers but still relevant to Product Managers who play in the "developers are my customers" marketplace.
• Amazing feeling of diversity. Very positive vibes. Felt class leading from an inclusion perspective.
• Everyone was super nice. Everyone I engaged with seemed to be really open to conversation and sharing ideas.
• Closed captions available for each talk. Accessibility win!
• Good food. Queues for food were fine.
• Presentations were excellent. Talks covered a range of skill sets and there was always something interesting to go listen to. Keynotes, regular talks and lightning talks were all great. I did not attend any "open spaces" but that's definitely a goal for next year.
• Sponsors/booths were really interesting. Good to see podcasters there and see Python start-ups represented in "start-up row".
• Tons of other conference related events e.g., development Sprints, fun run, dinners etc.
• All PyCon talks available on YouTube.
• I found this post on How to have a great first PyCon super useful and relevant.

Things to do differently or try next time

• Go to pre-registration to avoid the day 1 registration queues!
• Attend an Open Space
• Attend a workshop
• Attend a development Sprint

Conclusion

This was my first big "tech conference" and it was an awesome experience. I would recommend this conference to any Python hobbyist or professional sofware developer. I bought tickets for PyCon 2019 with my own money as soon as they were available and I'm already looking forward to it. I walked away from PyCon with plenty of new ideas and things to try when reading/writing code.

Quick facts

• Location: The Ohio Union, Columbus, Ohio
• Number of times attended: 2018 was my second time
• Cost: $0
• Travel costs: approx. $250 for hotel and petrol/gasoline
• Workshops/tutorials: available, did not attend
• Days attended: 2 days of the main conference i.e., Saturday to Sunday

High level notes

• Conference is free and ridiculously good given this price!
• Venue is awesome. The conference is pretty compact and every conference room is a short walk away. Given the conference is at the heart of the Ohio State University, there is no shortage of bars and restaurants to check out in the evening.
• Talks are great. Like PyCon, there are talks for every level of Python programmer.
• 2 talks related to digital accessibility. Hooray!
• Conference t-shirt was super snazzy 😎
• All PyOhio talks available on YouTube.

Things to do differently or try next time

• Book my hotel early!
• Attend an Open Space
• Attend a workshop/tutorial

Conclusion

This is an insance conference given that it's free. The quality is so high. I think I'll always go to PyOhio as long as I'm local and able because the venue is great and so are the talks. A bit like PyCon, I walk away with loads of good ideas to try out next time I'm reading/writing Python. One of my favorite talks from the event was A Guide to Software Engineering for Visually Impaired. The talk goes through what it is like to write code when you have limited vision. The talk was enlightening and inspiring.

Quick facts

• Location: Cleveland Public Auditorium, Cleveland, Ohio
• Number of times attended: first time in 2018!
• Cost: $1,617.05 (covered by work)
• Travel costs: $0, just had to pay for parking
• Workshops/tutorials: you could attend 2 workshops, I attended 1 workshop
• Days attended: 3 days. 1 for workshop, 2 days for main conference

High level notes

• Workshop on day 1 was very interesting and, for me, the highlight of the conference.
• Food was very good. Bento boxes for the win!
• Struggled with the conference format on the first day of talks. There was only 1 track and the majority of the talks seemed irrelevant to me or just full of ideas that were "too big" to be actionable.
• Format of day 2 talks suited me. More tracks, more small talks with Q&A. The vibe of the smaller, interactive talks was a better fit for me.
• Sponsors talked between talks - I didn't enjoy that.
• Too many sponors seemed to be analytics focused. I wish there was more variety.

Things to do differently or try next time

• Go to more than 1 workshop!
• Bring a friend. I felt as though there were lots of "teams" there which made socializing a little harder for someone flying solo.

Conclusion

This was my first Product Management conference and it is interesting to compare the experience with the Python conferences I have attended. I was expecting to enjoy the conference more because Product Management is my day job. I ended up enjoying it less.

I think my biggest complaint was that too many of the talks seemed to include ideas that were too big to be actionable. For example, there might be a talk about how to do innovation at your company. Innovation might be a sexy topic but changing the way an organization, particularly a big company, makes product decisions and innovates is super hard so the talk becomes an academic exercise rather than a practical one.

Product Management is my day job and Python is a hobby. Perhaps I'm more open minded when it comes to something where I'm still relatively novice (Python) whereas the bar to impress is higher for something that I work on everyday. In other words, there is loads more low hanging fruit for me at Python events.