The story is a kind of major dumbosity. In '07 I could expense the trip as education. In '08, I'd lost that feature of my employment. After that I was actively figuring out how to be self-employed as a writer and technomad, and completely took my eye off the various kinds of tax deductions and sponsorship opportunities that I might have leveraged. It was too complex, arbitrary, and bewildering for me.
PyCon is an energizing event. I can't say enough good things about attending session after session on Python and the Python-related ecosystem. In particular, it's a joy to see people pitching their solutions to complex problems.
Here's a reminder: https://us.pycon.org/2016/
Since I do some work for O'Reilly media -- if a pair of webcasts count as work -- I think I want to see if I can finagle my way into OSCon, also.
Here's the reminder: http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/open-source
I think I can leverage some material from Functional Python Programming to create an interesting tutorial. My webcast on the five kinds of Python functions can expand into a bunch of hands-on-keyboard exercises to build examples of each kind of callable thingy.
Proposals are in. Waiting for comments. Fingers crossed.
