I went to Pycamp 2011

I'm not a geek anymore.

I were, once: staying up late coding a feature, learning obscure programming languages, coding AI for trivial tasks. But I don't do that stuff anymore: I work office hours, I write little code outside my job, I'm even taking a course for BA in Sociology. I still read about technology and learn new stuff, but no more than any other one that loves its profession.

That's why, when a friend asked me if I wanted to go to PyCamp, I hesitated. I consider myself a Python newbie: I used it last year on my job and a few personal projects, but I'm conscious of how much I have to learn. I thought I didn't match the profile, that I wasn't so great. Just prejudice.

In the end, I said yes. I didn't know what we were going to do, except that it involved the snake's language. And I only knew one person. But the city convinced me: they say La Falda is beautiful this time of the year. :)

The first thing we did when we arrived was introduce ourselves. I confessed that I wasn't part of the Python group in Argentina and that I didn't even read the distribution list. A few laughed, and from that moment I was one of them. After all the introductions, I found out what I came to do: there were 20 projects, they asked me which of them interested me enough to contribute to them, and they left me to my own volition. There was a little project called peewee that captured my attention: we had to add support for MySQL (seemed easy enough), and Nassty, one of the two people on the PyCamp I knew, was there. So, I sited and started to code. Bah, I sited and saw leet coders set up a coding environment. In the end, I managed to contribute some code and gave a few suggestions here and there.

I finished early, so I talked with the rest of the crew and killed time in general. Everyone was cool, and they knew a lot. Around seven, I took a few juggling clubs someone brought and learned to juggle :D. That was a good sign: we were going to do geek stuff, but not *just* geek stuff.

The rest of the days were the same: contribute to a project for a while, and have a good time. One of the leet people that were there gave us a crash course in Twisted, and I programmed a chat server that censored you if you used the list of words you can't say on TV (George Carlin XD ). After that, I helped Ditto with the translation of Lalita's documentation to English (I did, like, 25% of the work), then I wanted to help with the i18n effort of pilas's API, but I had no idea what they were talking about. Instead, I took pyanola. They needed a GUI in pilas, but my lack of knowledge got the best of me again. I was lucky that San had a lot of patience. :)

I said I did other things besides programming. First, I went to the night clubs of the city, which were conveniently close to the hotel, with two other fellas. Unfortunately, most of the girls there had between 16 and 18 years old, so I felt I could be their uncle. What else I did: crash course on juggling, a guided tour through the Eden Hotel (a lot of Nazi history on those walls, really weird). the Eden Avenue (nice place), table-football minitournament, ArmageTRON minitournament, and a long list of et ceteras.

It was a cool weekend. Nueces, the guy that organized everything, did a pretty good job, he even found a bus for us poor lads that couldn't travel to our city because of the bus drivers' strike. There were a few people that weren't Python-savvy just like me, and they made us feel like one of the community. I'm satisfied with the people of pyar, so in the end, I joined the distribution list.

And this is how the road trip ends. FIN :P

P.S.: This is the English version of the previous post.