The flight departs on time from San Antonio to Atlanta for PyCon 2010.
It was uneventful and a typical airport experience. I always find it interesting how in just a couple of hours you can be 1,000 miles away from home. Dinner was next on my mind.
Scott, the amateur food critic and fellow Rackspace Recruiter, recommended a seafood restaurant, which was cool by me. We ended up at a place that, as far as the door man claimed, people from Boston flew down for. I was skeptical having spent 5 years in Bean Town.. the seafood is great there. Regardless we had some good seafood and experienced a very cool environment.
I think they sold bait as well.. at least that’s what one of the signs outside said. I will have to keep that in mind just in case I am planning a future fishing trip to Atlanta.
PyCon Begins
The next day was a big day for the conference. Van Lindberg, one of the organizers, said it was a record turnout with over 1,000 people. An excellent turnout considering that many of the developers pay their own ways to attend. They have a passion for learning or bettering themselves in this realm so they do what it takes to get there.
We talked to a lot of different people from all walks, but they had one interest in common. They all have a passion for learning and sharing knowledge around Python development.
As a recruiter, I am thinking to myself “Wow!” I should be selling these guys and girls on Rackspace.
Instead of pouncing all over them, I decided to start interacting with the community at hand. I truly think people need to be given information and come to their own conclusions at to whether or not Rackspace is the right place for them. If they do, then we can chat about employment.
As a professional recruiter I have been brought up under the guise that we need to sell our jobs. I am not sure this is the best way to recruit. A lot of recruiting seems to lack the real matchmaking aspect of it. If you create an environment which is attractive to the talent you are focused on it’s likely they will be interested in your company.
I think Rackspace has done a good job of creating an environment conducive to open source development. We are encouraging thought leadership in areas of databases and cloud computing. The open source developer’s have an advantage in leading this technology because they aren’t simply relying on the resources of one particular company. The whole world of development is at their hands as well as the advice of others outside their specific organization.
I think this is a very progressive group of talent and a way of thinking more and more companies will adopt …. eventually.
Saturday was a good time. We took a bunch of Racker Developers to see the Mississippi All Stars. It was a great time. Good music and great people is usually a pretty good formula for fun times. We arrived back at the hotel a bit late after the show.
Interestingly enough, there were still Pythonistas up with laptops in group development sessions. They were learning from each other even after midnight.
This was my second PyCon and I will say it is good to see a growing interest in the language. These conferences are always a good learning experience for me. I myself may not be writing the code, but interacting with the community is always exciting!
Did you attend PyCon? What were your lasting impressions?
