Through the 12th of November until the 15th PyconAr happened in Mendoza. Since it went on for three days and it was physically impossible to attend to all the talks, I will focus on the event experience wise and leave you with a link to the talks.
Let’s begin with the Django Girls workshop. Django Girls is an initiative to bring more girls into programming by making events aimed at women and encouraging people to make useful, functional software at the event. That functional piece of software is a Django blog. The tutorial includes stuff like command line usage, deployment to a real server and using bootstrap.
Anyone can come and participate in a workshop, if you are a guy, you just have to bring a girl along and that’s it. If you are proficient in programming and did the excellent Django Girls tutorial on your own, you can attend the workshop as a mentor. That’s what I did.
Mentoring was fun, but challenging. At first I wasn’t sure of what to do, then I was comfortable with my level of helpfulness. By the end I wasn’t sure if I was being helpful anymore, because I was tired and started to forget some stuff.
Everyone was great and the room was packed with people learning super fast. So if you were scared of programming until now, go ahead and give it a try. It’s easier than you think.
When the workshop was over, we all shared our experiences. I talked first because no one wanted to. I’m not sure if I said anything useful or coherent, but I’m sure that I at least inspired people to go forward and say better stuff than I did. I also got a cool bag out of it.
The following days had regular talks and lighting talks. I liked the lightning talks the most, because the short time span forced people to get super creative.
Another cool thing was that there were bot contests running. Two companies made two different games and you had to make bots to play them. I entered in one of the contests, but didn’t submit anything due to lack of time. You can check what people did for the Onapsis contest here, but you can’t check the Machinalis contest because I forgot the address.
It was my first Pycon and I really enjoyed the experience. I met some cool people and joined plenty of mailing lists. I really recommend you to come to the next one if you have the time.