Warning: Rambling, unedited, 7 month old recollection ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

Ah, PyCon India 2009. My first solo bit of travel outside Chennai. What fun it was :) Though it was almost 7 months ago, most of the memories are still fresh. Compare that to college, where I struggle to remember what happened last week…

Anyway, it was fun. I went off by bus with the rather interesting Anirudh – a profitable startupeer and someone I met when working with Busroutes.in. He has a finances related degree and his startup deals with (rather cool) car electronics. He was also a KDE contributor, and is a very interesting travel partner for reasons too numerous to mention here.

I spent some time at Lalbagh, roaming around by myself (and texting classmates with my legs hanging off a cliff-type place). Was fun! I’d definitely do that again – the place was extremely peaceful.

I stayed at Sudar‘s place. Staying at a bachelor’s place was fun – guess that was how my room would look like if I was left all to myself. It was, however, definitely too organized for my tastes – you could actually walk without accidentally stepping on stuff ;) He’s grown up too fast – he actually dragged me to a food place and forced me to have breakfast!

Hung around mostly with mech-yet-wannabe-geek Kausik (who once famously said that he ‘doesn’t want to use LaTeX for resumes because most people ask for docx or pdf’), Anirudh and Sudar (who was there only for Day 1). Had a longish talk with Kenneth, who I later found out was quite a celebrity on IRC/Mailing Lists. Meeting people you knew onlyine online IRL is unsettling at first.

The event itself went well. I was inside only for a couple of major talks – the one about waffle by cnu is the only thing I could remember. I was mostly out in the corridors, typing out code in (one of the many) laptops that Sudar has. The lightning talks were way more fun – because they were only 15 mins or so long and packed a lot of tech (I particularly remember the one about Python internals by artagnon and one about a GAE app by ideamonk. I gave one too – the last one, so I had no projector, no working laptop, no mic, oh and Kausik who was supposed to present with me ditched me in the last minute :P It still went exceedingly well – it was my first time ever talking on a stage of any stage outside college and the practice I had from giving them in college (Thanks to Dorai and the iCell) helped a ton. I even cracked quite a few jokes that was recieved well. Fun times – and I guess it finally killed the last remaining bits of my ‘shit, you aren’t really expecting me to go up there and talk, are you?’ feelings developed from school days :)

Before I left, I visited planemad at NID. Awesome place. Someday, I hope someone established a National Institude of Programming at such a scenic place, where people can come together and learn about programming rather than engineering (which is just college-management-speak for IT Industry Zombie Production Factory)

There you go! That’s a rambling account of my PyCon India 2009 experiences. Next one is probably going to be in Chennai – looking forward to that!