The last couple of weeks I’ve had another bout of traveling to conferences. I’ve been lucky this time: all three events were absolutely amazing! First I went to the Google Summer of Code Mentors’ Summit in California, followed by Wordcamp Bucharest and finally to Tokyo for the annual Plone Conf.
GSoC Mentor’s Summit
GSoC is a decade old programme by Google where they sponsor hundreds of students around the World to work on Open Source software during the summer instead of waiting tables.
Each student gets assigned a mentor (or more) from the organization that owns the codebase the student is working on. For many years, I’ve been mentoring students working on Plone; this year included. So I got to go to the Mentors’ Summit!
The Mentor’s Summit is possibly the best conference you can go to. Imagine it: all the attendees are leaders and/or core contributors of their organizations. And there are over 200 attendees. The level of talks and discussions I had is just crazy, I really was learning a ton every day. Massive kudos to Google running the GSoC programme for 14 years already and for hosting us in Mountain View for two amazing days.
PloneConf 2018 Tokyo
The other contender for possibly the best conference is definitely the PloneConf. It’s an annual gathering of people using and developing Plone, the enterprise Python CMS.
But there’s a catch: a good chunk of attendees don’t actually do Plone any more, for years. Including me. But a lot of us still attend each year! The reason is a combination of great location, highly technical but open people and the infamous PloneConf party.
I gave two talks on the conf: Beyond 100% test coverage and Pipenv: Python dev workflow for humans. And two lightning talks, one about makefile and the other about minimal_openapi. Intense three days!
It was great to catch up with friends from the Plone community and talk technology, business, life, the Universe and everything. The hallway sessions reminded me how much I enjoyed working with Domen this summer and that I should reach out to (ex)Plone people more often!
Yes, most of the Plone folks have kids and/or gray hair these days, but not many other communities can throw a party like Plone does! It’s been two days and my neck still hurts from all the headbanging ?
Next year, the PloneConf is coming to Italy, only three hours drive from where I live, yay! And I’ll be bringing many Niteans with me. The process of assimilating the Pyramid framework under the Plone Foundation umbrella is well underway. And since we use Pyramid daily, it makes sense that the whole tech team attends the conference next year!
