I spent a good chunk of this month at PyCon in Montréal, watching talks, seeing people I rarely get to see, and working on Mailman. My stay in Montréal felt homey thanks to Jo Walton and Emmet O'Brien, who put me up in their place for the duration. Much thanks, Emmet and Jo!

It was wonderful getting to sprint with the rest of the Mailman team, some of whom I'd never met before. I'm grateful to the Python Software Foundation and the PyCon sponsors for arranging the venue and food; one can attend the sprints at no registration cost, and I thoroughly appreciate that. I wrote a few patches, told other attendees about the upcoming release and got them to come test the install, and did a great deal of testing and bug-reporting myself, and generally a bunch of release management. I had the privilege of discovering a funny bug, although I wish the bug didn't exist since it prevented us from meeting our goal and shipping 3.0 by Thursday. (A 3.0rc1 release is imminent!)

On the last day of the sprints, I started a keysigning. I think every keysigning I've ever participated in has included philosophical and engineering questions about the usefulness of keysigning parties, why we bootstrap an anarchistic web of trust using government-issued documentation to authenticate people, the difference between "I control this key" and "I am the person whose passport this is," and the anti-mnemonic powers of gpg command-line flags. I feel as though there ought to be, and perhaps is, a haggadah for this ritual that incorporates these questions. I can't exactly remember this exemplary exchange from Thursday, but it went something like:

Me: I wonder what I would learn if I tried setting up my own keyserver.

Debian guy: You would learn that the system is utterly ripe for abuse and that we're just lucky no one has seriously tried it yet. It's an append-only distributed database, after all.

Me: (Pause.) I think I had already learned that particular social lesson and I was thinking more of the technical lessons.

Debian guy: Ah! Yes, there are some interesting backend protocols involved....

This was the longest stretch I've ever spent someplace Francophone, and I felt my high school French coming back to me day by day; towards the end I was able to put together "J'ai perdu un chapeau bleu" or "Je voudrais acheter cette chose" with tolerable facility. (I did indeed lose a blue hat that I bought in Washington, DC in 2001 just before I left for my trip to Russia; we had a good run together and I hope it ends up with someone else who likes it.) I have never played Flappy Bird, but I understand that a single error ends the round; similarly, bad French in Montréal is a sudden death game for me, in which a single mistake or even a tilted head while parsing a response can cause the interlocutor to switch to English. Like many people with one dominant language fluency and a lot of language smatterings, I find the wrong language's vocabulary springs to mind at inopportune moments. A caterer was serving me food; I couldn't remember the polite French for "that's enough" and my mouth wanted to say "ಸಾಕು" instead. Similarly, "mais" and "et" no longer come as naturally to me as do "но" and "и". But I have it easy -- evidently this is even less convenient when one of the languages is ASL!

The next PyCon North America will be May 28 - June 5 2016 in Portland, Oregon; this overlaps with the Memorial Day weekend in the US (May 28-30) which means it will probably conflict with WisCon's 40th anniversary, and I already have plans to hit WisCon 40. I hope to finagle schedules so as to attend WisCon in Madison and then fly to Portland to participate in post-PyCon sprints. But that might be too much spring travel, because what if Leonard and I want to do something special in April to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary? What I am saying is that adulthood sure does have a lot of logistics involving calendars.