Summary
Brazilians are very warm and friendly, and PyCon Brazil in Rio de Janeiro had over 300 very enthusiastic and committed Python programmers.

I went to give an updated version of my "Why I Love Python" keynote, but there was also interest in my trip to Burning Man, so I later gave "The World is Dynamic," which tries to show what I learned about software development by going to Burning Man. This talk has turned out to be a bit of a stretch, and on average about half the audience gets it but the other half is wondering why I'm showing all these pictures of Burning Man. However, I was throwing it in as a free bonus rather than the main keynote so it was really just for those interested.

Some of the people at the conference also wanted to try open spaces, so I offered to do my short introduction to open spaces on the morning of the third day, and we set up and had a few open spaces sessions after that so people could see how they worked. There was even some discussion of trying an open-spaces-only Python conference in 6 months in Sao Paulo (because open spaces conferences are quite easy to set up and organize).

The day before the official open spaces, a small group of us found ourselves having a spontaneous open spaces session on coding dojos, which I had not previously heard of. This idea was (also described by Uncle Bob) originally developed in France, and in the same way that open spaces subvert the dominant paradigm of eyes-forward conferences, dojos subvert the way we teach, so I find them quite interesting and something I want to try. In our discussion we talked about creating new and different kinds of dojos, and one or two experiments took place at the conference. For me, the most fascinating possibility is to create some variation of dojos on the web -- I fantasized that someday, any time of day or night, you might be able to find any number of these web-based dojos going on.

The three days before the conference I was in Sao Paulo giving a short version of my "Thinking in Patterns" workshop (it's normally 5 days). We had a nice turnout and everyone seemed to appreciate the workshop.

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About the Blogger

Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) provides development assistance in Python with user interfaces in Flex. He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2005), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences.