Last week, I flew up to Montreal for PyCon. I’m now home, without any new international incidents to add to my record. It was my first PyCon, but it won’t be my last.

If Python (or open source development in general) is your thing, all of the talks from this weekend appear to already be on YouTube. Since I mostly stuck to the hallway track, I’ll be watching a lot of these videos myself and don’t feel qualified to offer a review. However, the hallway track was fantastic and I would recommend it in future years.

I can review the swag I gathered at PyCon, though. Based on t-shirts alone, I’m pretty pleased. I found not one, not two, but three ladies tees that I liked enough to take home. Considering that booths at most other tech conferences only offer men’s shirts, the availability of ladies’ tees is a good indicator of an inclusive community.

Even better, though, there was plenty of non-shirt swag. Since I’m trying to make sure my wardrobe doesn’t entirely look like it came from a trade show hall, I’m always excited to see other swag that I’m actually interested in. I’m now stocked up on small notebooks for quite awhile, including a few that have a variety of pages for sketching different types of wireframes. I’m also up a beer glass, breath mints in reusable tins, and some pretty cool fake tattoos that I’ll actually wear.

I’d like to note that I’m totally cool with the booths that didn’t offer a whole lot of swag (or any at all) — I’m just as thrilled to just talk about cool products that I didn’t know about in advance and see some demos. I don’t have to have swag, but if it’s on offer, I like to see a variety that’s appealing to all sorts of conference attendees, rather than just to stereotypes.

And, as an added bonus, next year’s PyCon is here in Portland. If you’re interested in attending, keep an eye on the PyCon website. Just a head’s up, though: my couch is already booked for PyCon 2016 and tickets are guaranteed to sell out.