After the big conference days the sprints days started. I was surprised by how many people actually stayed for the sprints. There were literally docens of people hacking together grouped by projects. It's amazing how passionate are some people about programming and how they enjoy sharing this with each other. That includes me, of course.

I've been at the PySAML2 sprint with Roland Hedberg and a couple of guys from Zeomega: Baiju M and Chris Austin. It has been a real pleasure to work with this gang. During the nights I hanged out with them and also Brad Allen and other guys from the Texas Python group.

Roland teaching SAML to the Zeomega guys

We managed to clean a lot of stuff at PySAML2, to release a new version, to improve the djangosaml2 package and to start making a Zope2 product for it.

Baiju and me are sprinting, don't you see?

One of these nights we went to a place where there were some good jazz music live. Ireally enjoyed the food, the music and the company of Chris and Baiju.

Today I did some tourism with Baiju and we went to the Atlanta Aquarium and the museum about Coca Cola. I did knew Baiju before since I translated his great book about the Zope Component Architecture but I never meet him in real life. He is a very good developer but also a really nice person. I'm glad I got to spend some time with him.

I've also meet other people here at PyCON. Here is just a brief list, sorry if I miss somebody:

  • Jeff Rush, a consultant and Zope lover. Very nice guy.
  • Laurens Van Houtven, my roommate and a cool guy that hacks on the Twisted project and has different slepping habbits than me :-)
  • Sylvia Candelaria, a very smart lady who knows about free software, linguistics, Spain, India and a whole lotta more things. I just talked to her during a lunch but she just blowed my mind with her wisdom.
  • Ralph Bean, a guy who was working on an open goverment website during the sprints. He was interested on my work on SAML stuff
  • Luke Macken, a Fedora hacker
  • Jordan Sissel, a guy who works for logglya nice service about logging with very cool stickers.

Other people I met but I can't recall their names include people from bitbucket, from eldarion, from linode, and many more!

Well, I guess that's all I have to say about PyCON 2011 but I'm probably forgetting lots of things since it has been a very exciting week for me. I hope I can make it next year at Santa Clara!