Wednesday, August 29th 2007

Intermission:

Python won't let me cross the boundaries of the list, so let me make it clear that, even though the conference started on Thursday, I got there one day earlier for the first public assembly of the Brazilian Python Association (and thus I indexed Wednesday at 0 and Sunday (the day after the conference) as -1).

Danilo came to my place in the morning, we took the car fueling, washing and oil changing, and drove to Guarulhos airport to meet Nate Aune. I didn't know him, but it wasn't hard to spot the american-looking guy underneath a palm tree holding a video camera and staring at his MacBook Pro :)

We waited a few more hours for Leo to arrive (he was returning from a month in Argentina) as his plane was late (how come Leo always manages to be late, even when he has absolutely no say over it??), had a quick spot of lunch at the airport and , by the time we finally left to Joinville, Nate, having arrived at 7am and it being 1pm already, knew the airport staff by name and spoke only in the soft monotonous voice of flight announcements. 7 hours, incessant rain, very dense fog and loads of lorries later, we arrived just in time to... Get lost in Joinville! Some more driving around, we asked a few locals and eventually managed to arrive at Sociesc's campus, where the conference would be held - and the Association's assembly had started about one hour earlier.

We arrived after the voting for the board had already taken place, but there was only one candidate group, which was elected by acclamation - and was the one I would have voted for anyway, so no harm done. There was some interesting discussion afterwards that served mainly to gather points to be addressed in the future. We should make sure that they are. I'd particularly like to see some action in one specific shortcoming of the Python community: we really suck at marketing! I'll probably write more about this later, but I think we lack better-looking websites (including python.org), easier, shorter tutorials (I'm sure there are a few, but they should be featured prominently on python.org) and basically more "wow factor" for newcomers (I believe experienced Python programmers are already reasonably well-served).

Anyway, once all the formalities were over, we carried on with what we were all really there for: dissing Java!

And beer, and food. Of course :)