This week I have travelled to the Portland Oregon to partake in the annual Djangocon.  This is my first Djangocon and I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  After the first day, I have mixed emotions.

The last 2 conferences I attended were Google IO and the Zend PHP conference, both of which have a heavy corporate feel where the keynotes mostly seem to be selling some company or product.  Djangocon 2010 has not felt like this.  The opening keynote was given by the chairman of the event, Steve Holden.  The keynote largely had no focus and he was clear that he had not written down notes on what to speak about.  This left the last 15 minutes or so of the presentation as a bit of an uncomfortable period where silly questions were posed.

The daytime sessions were hit and miss.  There was a session about building advanced CMS systems that turned out to be more about migrating data and best development practices in Django.  On the other hand, I attended a session titled "Data Herding: How to Shepherd Your Flock Through Valleys of Darkness", which was a good walkthrough of development tactics for migrating large, legacy data sets.  I was happy to learn about iPython and will be adding this to my tool belt.

The closing keynote was titled "Topics of Interest" and was given by James Bennett, release manager for Django.  James gave a candid view of issues surrounding Django.  According to James, one of Django's biggest problems is the fact that it only has 14 committers and many of them have busy lives.  He didn't give solutions, but I found it encouraging that the core developers are thinking about the problem.

As my first introduction to the Django community in person, I find it is a lot like it is online.  There are lots of smart, well intentioned people developing and using Django but very little corporate presence.  I'm looking forward to day 2.