Happy 10th Birthday Django!
Whew, what a conference! The talks were great, the venue was comfortable, and the BBQ was amazing. But that was only part of it. Many of the talks focused on the Django community and you could feel it in the room. We laughed from our bellies and teared up each time someone mentioned Malcolm.
I had the honor of giving the closing address, which was really just a thinly veiled way for me to have a Steve Jobs "oh and one more thing" moment. We had secretly conspired with The World Company, the place where Django was born, to open up the building so all of the attendees could get a quick tour and see EXACTLY where Django originated. Liberty Hall, where we held the conference, is conveniently across the alley from the Journal-World building so we all stood up, grabbed our bags, and walked over. The photo above is most of us in front of the News Center building where Django was born.
The night before the conference we had a very loosely planned evening of dinner and drinks which also included a quick Skype session with the Django Girls group in Australia to kick off the celebration. It was a great relaxed way to catch up with old friends.
Videos
The videos are up on PyVideo.org for you all to enjoy. As always Next Day Video had them up so fast it was a constant stream of "OMG my talk is already up" Tweets.
Photos
Even before Adrian mentioned in his talk about taking more photos of your projects for nostalgia purposes, we had it in our plans for Django Birthday. There is no telling if Django will make it to 2025, but assuming it does we have plenty of ammo for the next birthday party. I took a bunch of photos and we hired Dailey Images to ensure we captured all of the right moments.
Some initial quickly edited shots from Jason Dailey, the photos I took, and some from my friend Joe Griffin are in my Django Birthday photo album.
Kenneth Love also setup an iCloud album of some of his shots. Including one of the newspaper the next day with a front page photo of the block party.
The Party
Eldarion and RevSys sponsored the party with Lincoln Loop sponsoring the birthday cake.
While it was a bit warmer than I would like, the party was epic. We had all of the things you would expect at a 10 year old geeky kids birthday party. Snow cones, balloon animals, Gizmo the robot wandering around, and of course a bouncy castle. The Batmobile even made an appearance, but that wasn't planned... it's just #LFK
For the more adult of us, we also had 3 musical performances and started the night off with Adrian himself playing Django Reinhardt. Yep that's right, the guy who created Django, playing Django, at Django's 10th birthday.
Our friends at The SandBar were awesome enough to help us throw this block party and showed everyone an amazing time. We had the usual things you would expect, but also a special Python/Django themed craft cocktail tent and this awesome shrimp & rice in a pineapple food option that I have to try to recreate at home now.
When we started planning this party Jacob made me promise to not have any ponies, but I couldn't resist one. So in addition to our big cakes for all attendees we had the baker create a small cutting cake and let Adrian have the honor of cutting the pony in half.
I want to personally thank everyone who made the trip out to our little weird bit of the world. I hope you enjoyed yourselves and come back again very soon. Things went so well, I'm not sure I can wait until 2025. We may have to celebrate Django's Sweet 16 or something in the mean time.
Many thanks to our great sponsors for helping us put on a great and fun event!
And our travel sponsors:
