This week the first ever PyCascades Python conference for the Pacific Northwest took place in Vancouver, British Columbia.  I attended the event and was blown away by the quality of the presentations and overall conference.  If you have the chance in the future to attend PyCascades be sure to check it out!  If you couldn’t attend though, there are currently live streams on the PyCascades Youtube account which let you see all the talks.  Later these will be cut up into individual talks, but for now check the PyCascades schedule and watch each day’s live stream to find a talk:

• Day 1 stream
• Day 2 stream part 1 and part 2

A few talks that I really enjoyed were Guido van Rossum’s keynote on day 1 about the lessons learned from the transition to Python 3.  There was also a great MicroPython talk at the start of day 2 by Sev Leonard and went into using the ESP8266 for fun IoT scenarios.  Overall I found a lot of the most interesting talks actually had no Python code at all!  Many talks focused on community, diversity, struggles of learning, and more of the ‘soft’ issues with programming that you typically don’t see discussed.  Check out the streams to see all the talks!