[Inpycon] Venue suggestion for PyCon India 2015

[Noufal Ibrahim KV]

On Tue, Oct 07 2014, vijay kumar wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 2:40 PM, Arvi Krishnaswamy <arvi at alumni.iastate.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> How about a smaller space with capacity for 600-700 people max?  A more
>> focused Pycon that isn't trying to be everything for everyone with 1500
>> people :) I vote for staying at Nimhans but improving the quality of the
>> event for its core audience. Let beginner level sessions and training
>> happen via python express throughout the year. Quite honestly, I'm not sure
>> I will attend if we have 1500 next year :)
>>
> am -1 for not having beginners level sessions.  I personally think
> PyCon India should continue with all three level beginners,
> intermediate and Advance.  This is how PyCon India has grown and would
> like to continue to see same.  Just Fyi: This year we had more 60 %
> first timer.

I'm not particular about the size of the event. If I could sacrifice
attendance for talk quality, I'd do it. 

The main complaint about PyCon India (since the maiden event) has been
talk quality. We're aiming to be all things for all people and that
doesn't work out. While I think Arvi's work with the program committee
has been superb, the effect was limited because we *wanted* to dilute
the quality of the talks to satisfy newbies.

Now that Python express is there, I'm generally in favour of increasing
year round workshops and user group meetings for newbies and making the
conference more high end. No more "Introduction to X" style talks which
you can easily pick up from a website or a tutorial. The workshops can
be introductory but I'm also in favour of lengthening them and reducing
the number so that you'll have a few deep workshops instead of lots of
shallow ones. 

Even the talks, I'm completely okay with making it a single track event
with only a small number of high quality talks. The kind of talks I'd
like to see are

 - Scaling Django to X users - How we did it at "Awesome startup".
 - Handling large scale distributed systems in pure python - an
   adventure with gevent.
 - Interpreter hacks to sandbox code execution
 - Stripping down Python to run on a limited memory embedded device.
 - Why we rewrote a production scale Python app in Go and how we did it.
 - Reducing technical debt. in large flask projects. 
 - Why the GIL might not be a problem. 

Things like that where people have actually had experience in dealing
with the nitty gritty of solving hard problems and talk about their
experiences. These are usually small talks followed by long QA about
people experiencing similar problems. 

If we try to be everything for everyone, we'll end up being nothing. If
we announce that PyCon India is for experienced, serious Python
developers and live upto the announcement, intermediate and even some
beginner people will actually learn something new and improve
themselves. Advanced people will have a forum to discuss real problems
rather than an audience with 60% first timers. 

My main concern is that there are more newbies than experienced
folk. There are lots of outlets for newbies to learn things. Tutorials
on the web, user group meetups, tutorials, classes, python express
workshops etc. For advanced people though, there are almost no
outlets. I'm in favour of making PyCon India a high quality event. Even
by sacrificing number of talks and audience size. Quality over Quantity.


[...]


-- 
Cordially,
Noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in