They say you know a foreign language pretty well when you start dreaming in it. It's a pretty surreal experience at first. Well, what about when you dream that you are sitting listening to conference talks and the conference is over? (Which happened to me last night) Probably means you just have conference overload. Being in talks, bofs, and keynotes from 9 am to past midnight for about 4 days straight can do this to one I assume.
One of my favorite things about Pycon was just seeing what other really smart people are doing and absorbing what I can. It's very inspiring, while at the same time exhausting. Most of the tutorials/talks/keynotes/lightning talks were pretty good. I've posted my notes to some of them.
Ubuntu appears to be the linux distro of choice now. I think I was the only one running a non-ubuntu linux (gentoo). This was quite surprising cause I met quite a few last year running Gentoo. (But since both make pretty liberal use of python I won't complain too hard). Only saw one Vista machine (Jim Huginin), but the rest seemed pretty evenly split among mac/xp/ubuntu. Draw whatever conclusion you want from that.
It appears that a lot of companies are looking to hire python people, and are having a hard time finding them. (Perhaps this is an advantage to the people who do virtual teams, like Canonical. Say what you want about telecommuters, but they don't have to limit talent to a geographic location).
Bofs are cool. (Birds of a feature sessions. A board is placed with times and rooms where people can put any random topic they want to talk about on it. People just show up and discuss things). They allow for more interaction and thus I think more details. I didn't attend too many last year so I guess I missed out then. The ones that stood out for me were on twisted, OLPC, Bazaar and advocacy. I was just a fly on the wall for one of the twisted sessions (have tried to learn twisted once or twice but given up after hello worlds), but it blew my mind how much information some people (glyph) can hold in their heads. During OLPC I got to play (or tried to play) with the laptop for a bit. The design of the hardware looks impressive, but the experience went downhill after that. The software was very alpha, and I had a hard time getting it to do much. (Hence the many impossible deadlines they still have til they ship in the end of the summer). If you know python, go help them out. The advocacy bof was interesting as well. Interesting to hear others (small and big companies) issues with adopting python as well as possible solutions (marketing and supporting local user groups seems to be the two biggest). The Bazaar stuff wasn't too new for me, but it was interesting to hear what Canonical is doing with launchpad. Also all/most? of the work Canonical does is in python.
Pycon 2008 is in Chicago. I've never been to the windy city before. Hopefully the site is big enough to hold lots of people. Attendance jumped 40% this year to about 600. Perhaps they can break 1000 next year.
One last hint if you go next year... check out #pycon (it can be quite amusing, yet also helpful at times)