PyCon US 2017 has come and gone, and the past few weeks have been busy with renovations and family related activities. So I have not been able to write as much as I’d like to. But now life is starting to gain some normality, and I look forward to more regular blogging.

I really enjoyed PyCon this year. I ended up spending a lot of time in the so-called hallway track, meeting old friends, new folks and learning about interesting projects and companies. I still have quite a large queue of talks to watch on Youtube on the PyCon 2017 channel. I did get to talk to Guido, and ask him about how one should approach development with the new async/await functionality in Python 3. In general, I am floored how friendly everyone was, and how many amazing conversations I had.

I stuck around for the coding sprints, as I try to for every PyCon. I worked on APIStar (a cool new simple Python 3 web framework that uses type annotations), Paramiko and Ansible, and managed to be fairly productive. A bunch of PRs were addressed in the docker_* modules for Ansible. Paramiko finally got some Flake8 love. And APIStar now has better support for reverse routing.)

Aside from meeting with people, I enjoyed spending time in and around Portland. I do have to hand it to Portlanders, they have a lot of great restaurants and micro-breweries. Some of my friends involved in Fabric fact got me on the Untappd app just to keep track of the various brews I got a chance to try out. Another pleasant surprise was the swing dancing scene in Portland, especially everyone involved with Stumptown Dance. But definitely the most fun I had was visiting some friends I made in Portland, and also hiking outside of Portland. (Namely going to the Pacific Coast, and the various falls around Multnomah Falls.)

I do miss Portland, and I do hope to be back there sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I plan on trying something new. While my attempts at building a product have been informative, they have stalled simply because of the amount of work and long time of getting to market. So I’ll be trying something new: I’m open to working freelance on mobile (Kivy), Python web app and API projects through my startup: Amber Penguin Software. Feel to contact me if you have an interesting projects that you’d like me to work on.

More important I will be working on an ebook about two modern web dev tools that I use: (jq and httpie). If there is interest in this ebook, then I have ideas for other ones on Kivy, Ansible and Docker. If you are interested, please subscribe to the mailing list using the form below and I’ll keep you up to date on my progress. I will also be doing this through my startup just to keep things organized, and to enable me to bring on people as needed.