uapycon was great

I am fresh after returning from pycon ukraine in Kiev. The city was beautiful and people very friendly. The conference has been really succesful event, i am happy i could enjoy it.

We where welcomed by Siergiey, who came to train station holding card with our names written
and helped us to get to the hotel and then to get breakfast.



Contrary to our expectations it was warmer then in Poland.
Whole first day we (Marcin Szajek and Wojtek Troczyński and me) have spent walking through Kiev, starting from Marinsky Park - place full of young couples taking pictures right after wedding. Also we have seen bridge, where couples seal their relationship by putting locks on it.
Near the bridge was a statue of a frog, with something in mouth. Later we have been told thats a hedgehog inside, and the idea came from Russian animation made 40 years ago.



On the way to Marinsky Palace we have met a guy who is working there, renovating this place -
he helped us to get there and told a bit about Ukraine.

Metro in Kievs was complete new experience for me. Its dug really deep, so you go down on escalators for good few minutes, even though escalators are really fast.
Its definitely the best way to move quickly from one point of city to another.

Walking from park to Chernobyl museum we have seen a lot of churches, including Golden-Domed Monastery and one polish, and one long, twisted street, full of Ukrainian art, antiques and handwork. It was hard to find someone speaking english (unless you speak to someone young), so we had trouble finding the museum, and only get there after couple of rounds of circling near it. Chernobyl museum is nicely organized and full of artistic decorations, but there is really not much to see. After that we came to pre-party.

The next day was first day of the pycon conference. I enjoyed most of the sessions, though significant part of them was in ukrainian language, so i could only read the code if there was any on slides. During the lunch break we where surprised by GPL (Global Pizza Lock) - the pizzeria where we ordered food had probably only one oven, so there where long delays, and it turned out that "we" meant all speakers who where supposed to attend panel discussion, so organizers had to delay it a bit (we apologize for that). Discussion however was interesting, with a flamewar and lot of question from public. One thing we all agreed upon was that vi is superior to emacs.

At 6 pm me and Marcin Szajek have presented our experience with mongodb. Before the presentation
i wasn't really sure if this topic will be well received - in fact we weren't speaking about anything completely new, but it turned out that i was wrong and we were flooded with questions,
(one of them was about the presentation itself - we used prezi.com, which allows to create nice looking presentation and is completely different then anything else). It appears there's still a lot of confusion about NoSQL solutions and they all should put more work into presenting and differentiating themselves.

On the third day in Kiev i slowly started to understand ukrainian letters and was able to read their writing. I could master this skill on the conference, since most of the lectures
where in ukrainian language (except geo-django and html5 - both very interesting).
Lightning talks came also well - there was a lot of them on various subjects, i was really interested int transifex - translating tool that integrates with version control systems.
I answered the question about traffic on our sites by presenting logstalgia output.
The conference ended with a party in Sunduk pub (i am not sure about the spelling).

I am very happy that i was invited here by pycon organizers and 10gen. Kiev is beautifull city,
and not that much different from Polish ones - i really had a feeling of being at home,
not in a foreign country. I have met people from Austria, Germany, Siberia, Russia, England, USA and Ukraine of course, and it nice to be able to associate piece of code with a known face now.
I definitely will try to get there next year - meeting 200 python programers is amazing experience.

More pictures from Kiev
here