This weekend just gone was DjangoCon, quite possibly the best conference I've been to (and I've been to a lot). It is certainly the only one where I've attended a talk in every single session.
Congratulations to Rob Lofthouse for a tremendous job organizing it. And kudos too to Leslie Hawthorn and the rest of the Google team for being such excellent hosts. The A/V and the WiFi were (perhaps expectedly) the best I've ever seen at a conference.
It was wonderful hanging out with so many people from the Django community, both people I'd met before at PyCon and others I knew from email, blogs, IRC or twitter. It was particularly fun to meet Russ Keith-Magee after what must be 10-15 years (Russ went to highschool with my sister)
I presented a talk on the history and vision behind Pinax which ended with the (hopefully) surprise launch of Cloud27. The talk seemed well received and people seemed to especially like the live launch :-)
My favourite twitter response to my talk was: "Pinax is every idea I've ever had." Everyone but James Bennett laughed at my Dr Horrible reference. After giving the old line "When all you have is a hammer, all you see is nails", I added "the hammer is my Pinax". (Worse pun ever, Mr Bennett claims)
Clint Ecker wrote a wonderful article about my talk at Ars Technica Ars at DjangoCon: Build your own social network with Pinax although it's a bad photo of me :-)
Judging from the response and the people that talked to be afterwards, I'm very excited about Pinax in the future.
Huge thanks to the Pinax team and especially Greg Newman for putting work in to get Cloud27 ready for launch at the conference.