I gave PyCon 9 days that I didn’t really have.

So, when I say that I’m looking forward to PyCon next year, I consider that to be pretty telling.

I think PyCon in general (and specifically the volunteers that made it happen) did an exceptional job of handling 50% more people than planned for. PyCon this year was huge, and that alone made it very hard to handle.

Sure, there were weak spots. But, I made the most of them.

So, lunch wasn’t as good as other years, but having it available made it so that we didn’t have to fart around going out and so I had more opportunities to interact with other people.

So some of the lightning talks were total corporate marketing… I turned to my right and chatted with Richard Freaking Jones.

What did I think about the talks? I had a whole slew I wanted to go to, and in particular 4 or 5 I really wanted to see. I saw two of these, one met my expectations and one blew them away.

But in general, I was too busy at the community conference interacting with the community to go to the talks. My general opinion is that I can learn what they’re talking about at any time, I don’t need to travel to Chicago to do that…

I come to the community conference to interact with the community. And PyCon had that in spades.

I made the best of something that had, admittedly, some problems. Would I have rather paid 10 times the money for one of these massively polished conferences? Absolutely not. I really don’t like the overproduced conferences. Amateurish? Sure, that’s because we’re all amateurs at putting on conferences. Which I think gives PyCon a lot of it’s appeal.

PyCon isn’t meant to be the Java 1 or Comdex of Python. It’s a very specific thing and I think it’s good at what it is.

The best talk I went to? A group of around a dozen Twisted folks and others sitting in a circle talking about licensing at midnight in the Deli.

PyCon? It’s a synonym for awesome.

Sean

Again, you are correct that Jacob’s comments were over the top, but if you read around, you will see that the organizers are responding to the feedback in a constructive way. As I mention in my post Aahz’s similar comments that attendees are the ones at ‘fault’ if the conference was not good, is wrong.

As for the PayPal system, you are correct that curl does support doing that, but the newly implemented ’security’ features of paypal prevent one from doing this as it will ‘lock down’ the account when too many requests come in from the same IP. They are moving everyone over to a SOAP interface. I did not have time to write a complete SOAP shopping cart, nor did we have the money (at the time) to pay for one of the approved carts which start at $4K. Those are an option for next year. There are some very nice Python based shopping carts which we are evaluating.

Yes we were ripped off. We will be getting off of the system. We did not discover any problems until they started, at which time it was way too late to switch.

I find it a little closed minded that you decided not to come to PyCon because paypal crashed on you, and because you failed to read the instructions on the hotel registration page, but that was your call. I did take many of your comments, especially your tone, both here and on the registration system, a little rude. It does appear that you have no intention in being part of of the python community at PyCon. That is also fine. As I said previously I do hope you enjoy the other conferences you go to. That was not a snide comment, but an honest sentiment.

Greg,
The volunteers needed this information months ago. If you’re like me and don’t have the time to contribute, your lurking on the Organizers list sure would have helped out.
No matter how you feel about the organizers now, give it some consideration. That whole PayPal discussion, IIRC, lasted at least a week. Your intelligence (both in the brainy and military sense) could have saved people a lot of trouble.
Thanks for taking this input into consideration.
Again, my 2 cents.

Volunteering for anything can be a thankless job, as I know from my own experience. Lashing out at those who didn’t volunteer with profanity, sarcasm, and snide arguments only makes the situation worse. Any inclination I might have had to help out next time is gone now that I see the kind of thin-skinned attitudes some of the PyCon team has in response to criticisms.

That said, clearly everyone who volunteered deserves thanks regardless of the problems.

As for the payment system, the problem is the PyCon site used PayPal’s post-back system, which turns control of the transaction over to PayPal’s servers, thus leaving customers exposed to a system out of your control. The right way to authorize credit cards is to send the transaction from your server to the PayPal/PayFlow Pro servers, behind the scenes, so the user’s browser doesn’t ever leave your site. You can use curl, for example. That way you can trap errors and problems and show your customers something more meaningful than a Java stack trace. I have quite a few clients using PayPal as their payment processor, and some of them experienced problems during the PayPal outage you pointed to, but none of them dumped customers onto PayPal’s site to see raw error messages. Your e-commerce system should not leave your customers exposed to unreachable or broken payment gateways — that is not state of the art and is, in my opinion, amateurish.

It’s a shame PayPal still supports the postback setup; Verisign was pushing customers away from that before PayPal acquired PayFlow Pro from them.

And if PyCon really spent “thousands” to process credit cards through PayPal, I’m pretty sure you got ripped off.

Note on the payment system being down and crashing. That was NOT our code or our site. That was our payment processor ‘PayPal’ for which we are spending thousands on that system. Using the PHP cart’s out there which integrate with paypal WOULD ALSO HAVE CRASHED!!! As it was not our system at fault but paypal’s. Thousands of sites were effected by those outages.

Don’t believe me? Well here is the proof!

And the problems have continued intermittently afterwards as can be seen by the status feed.

If anyone was ‘amateurish’ it was PayPal. Go figure. Our system did not loose even ONE registration even with all the problems. It never, ever crashed even once. THAT is a solid system.

So basically to everyone who thinks our registration system sucked, I can say with a clear conscience that yes it did, it was not our fault. I am better developer than that thank you very much.

Thanks for all the straw men!

0. yes Jacobs’ comment is a bit over the top, but you get the point intended. Don’t be so literal. Get a clue.

1. No you do not need to volunteer to criticise the conference!
We are accepting the criticism and making changes in response. as I have said MANY MANY times now. ‘Griping is fine, helping with the solutions is better, volunteering is best.’
Helping with solutions can just be submitting criticisms with ways to solve the problem, which many people have! It’s fantastic!

2. As for the registration system. Well how about I give your number out. Are you up for that? No one stepped forward to take on that level of responsibility. If no one volunteers, it doesn’t get done. period. I am very happy you have stepped forward to take this on.

3. No one is not taking the criticism. Where do you see that? Every one agrees that things did not work. Personally I Loved all the talks I saw (sans the lightning issue). But that is my opinion. I think the PC did a fantastic job. If others don’t feel that way, then they need to join the PC to fix it, as I personally see nothing wrong. That is the point. If you don’t like it, and the people who did the work do, then the only way to fix it is to fix it yourself.

I will not dignify the “Amateurish” comment with a full response. If that is how you feel this conference was run, then there is nothing more I can say on the matter.

From my own experience I understand the frustration that comes from volunteering for a job, doing a lot of work for other people, and then having to listen to complaints and criticisms from those who didn’t volunteer.

That’s how volunteering works.

If you can’t take the criticism, don’t f**king volunteer.

I appreciate the PyCon volunteers weren’t paid and put in a lot of their own time, for their own reasons, but that doesn’t mean the people who paid to attend and took time off from whatever else they have to do should just shut up or join the group of volunteers next year.

The registration web site couldn’t take credit cards for days on end, and crashed repeatedly with uncaught exceptions (clue: use working PHP payment processing code next time). Trying to book and confirm a hotel room seemed to be handled by one person on a cell phone at Starbucks. There was no phone number to call about the credit card problems, just responses from personal gmail.com email addresses. There’s no reason “run by volunteers” has to mean “amateurish.”

I don’t think we all have to volunteer to earn the right to criticize the conference. Simply paying for it gives attendees the right to complain. As Dr. Johnson put it, “You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”

Imagine the size of the Python user base if every criticism and complaint about the language was met by “f**k off or do it yourself” response. Get a grip, take the criticisms in stride, and if the job is just too thankless for you, don’t do it, but curse and insult the people who had every right to expect a better PyCon experience.

As one such speaker, I’d love to hear if people had feedback on the talk. I spent months preparing just the right talk and I’d love to know how I can improve to make sure I get a chance to talk at future Pycons where I can add value.

I have to add that I really did enjoy this Pycon.

I think an electronically controlled open space board would have solved a lot more problems since people uncomfortable with the less interesting talks would be able to quickly and easily review their open space options while sitting inside a session.

Another cool idea is to have a open space “lightning intros” going on during lunch or other down times to help give people a feel for the literally “underground” sessions that were going on.