Back from my DjangoCon Trip

Not exactly news, if you consider that DjangoCon happened two weeks ago. Also, I landed on Santiago three days ago. But only now I feel like writing things on my blog.

Short history: it was a fantastic experience. Just awesome.

Heck, it was my first time in the U.S.

First time speaking in english. Or at least attempting to do so.

First public talk!

I had the opportunity to meet many smart and cool people, and to be in four wonderful places: Mountain View (or should I say the GooglePlex, as I passed most on that time there), Portland, Boulder and Stanford/Palo Alto.

If someone would asked me four months ago if I was going to visit the U.S "soon", I would said: sure, maybe for PyCon 2010, or if I'm really, really lucky, on 2009. Heh.

When I started with my proposal for the Google Summer of Code 2008, back in March, getting accepted was cool enough. Then, just finishing the project successfully was a reasonably ambitious goal, enough to make me very happy. Traveling to the core of Silicon Valley to show my work on a major conference wasn't even on my dreams.

Bottom line: Archiving one of your childhood dreams is really cool. I've attempted to express it with words, but I don't think that it is even possible. This is as close as it will get.

[Side note: If you haven't watched Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, stop reading this and either watch it now or at least bookmark it.]

On the other hand, I'm kind of spoiled now. Obviously I'm looking forward for opportunities to travel again there. Too much places that I wasn't able to visit on this time, and too much people which I'd like to talk to. Which reminds me that I have improve my spoken English skills (which were vastly improved on the short time I was on the U.S, but are still highly unsatisfactory), to enjoy better the (hypothetical) future experiences.

I think I'll make some posts focused on Djangocon, Portland, Boulder and Stanford when I get more time. Right now it's celebration time here on Chile (from yesterday and till Sunday!). As you can see, the returning date from my trip was very carefully chosen ;-)