I wrapped up my participation in this year's PyCon last night. Being in Salt Lake City was great, since that's just a half-hour drive from my house, but it also means that I don't have the "completely focused on this" experience that traveling to a conference gives you. For example …

Wednesday was the final day of the main PyCon 2016 conference in Portland, Oregon.

Lightning talks

One of the interesting talks was about Web accessibility. It isn't always top-of-mind for me since I do little Web front end currently, but the speaker mentioned the Accessibility Developer Tools for Google Chrome …

Today's PyCon was a lot about meeting people. I hadn't really anticipated that, but it was a nice surprise nonetheless. But first things first...

Lightning talks (AM)

There were two sets of lightning talks today, book-ending the rest of the events. One interesting one was about using Minecraft to teach …

PyCon is in Portland, Oregon this year, which is not only more accessible to me than eastern Canada (the previous location), but also the area where most of my extended family lives. Those facts combined to make it a great time to attend for the first time.

In a way …

For those of us poor folk who didn't make it to PDC this past fall, Microsoft has been taking the show to us in the form of its MSDN Unleashed series. Rob Bagby, developer evangelist, came to Salt Lake City to present and give updates about new and upcoming technologies …

Friday was the third and final day of the QCon conference.

Frameworks and DDD (Tim McCarthy)

On Friday, I spent most of the day in the Domain Driven Design track, hosted by Eric Evans. The first speaker was Tim McCarthy, who has recently written a book on using DDD with …

It's another day of industry stand-outs at QCon.

Shifting Storage (Tim Bray)

The day started with a keynote from Tim Bray, of XML fame. Tim spoke about the application stack from this perspective:

• Application code
• Object-relational mapping
• SQL engine
• Operating system/file system
• Cache/disks

He mainly focused on the …

QCon is a software development conference sponsored by the InfoQ site and software consultancy Trifork. I am in San Francisco attending it, and here is a summary and some thoughts on the first day's sessions I was able to attend.

Agilists and Architects (Martin Fowler & Rebecca Parsons)

As much of …