I attended PyOhio this past weekend, a great Python conference which I was pleasantly surprised existed! After moving to Pittsburgh last year, I’ve been looking around for meetups and ways to meet other developers. I found Ruby, Javascript, and Python user groups but this was the first major conference I’ve seen in the area. I attended with a friend I met from my local Pittsburgh Python usergroup and had a blast. I would definitely recommend attending!

Several highlights for me included:

• The talk about cmd2, an interactive command line. Expanding the command line and making things easier for myself and others has always interested me. It had some interesting ideas on how I would almost want Fabric to work. View the talk here.

• Speaking of Fabric, there was a talk given on that also. Fabric seems to be popping up everywhere, I’ve even given a talk myself, viewable here! It was great to be able to compare to my talk: it seems best to give a quick rundown of Fabric and then dive into examples. Fabric’s power seems hard to explain and easier to show.

• The talk on switching from PHP to Python from Emma was great, I love high level “lessons learned” style talks. View it here.

• One talk which I missed in person, but am glad for the great recorded videos, is the talk SQLAlchemy. It’s a useful tool but seems to have such a steep learning curve. More help climbing that curve is great. View it here.

• I won a book on algorithms in Python! Algorithms are something I’ve been meaning to brush up on and I love Python, so must be serendipity? This is the book, it’s been great reading so far.

I’m still flipping through some of the talks I missed, definitely some good material produced from this talk and definitely worth attending next year!