Just getting things started here so I can post my thoughts during this conference. I'll likely create child streams for the Sprints and different talks that I attend. ---- While I can't attend PyTennessee 2014 myself, I'm thrilled that Eldarion is a sponsor and helping run the sprints. ---- Looking forward to picking up [Michael Trier](https://twitter.com/mtrier) and having a pre-sprint dinner before meeting up with folks at Emma. ---- Very active sprints for the initial night! Lots of Pinax activity. ---- Look at what Alex Gaynor has made [cryptography.io](https://cryptography.io/) ---- Wow. That was a fantastic conference. Very proud that this was in *my* city. I was too buys chatting with the attendees to spend time live "ThoughtStreaming". ---- There was a healthy interest in Pinax and Eldarion open source and got some great contributions on [biblion](http://github.com/eldarion/biblion), [kaleo](http://github.com/eldarion/kaleo), and [anafero](http://github.com/eldarion/anafero). In addition, was able to introduction the [pinax-starter-app](http://github.com/pinax/pinax-starter-app), [pinax-project-blog](http://github.com/pinax/pinax-project-blog), and in general the concept of Pinax as a whole to a number of folks. ---- The final talk/keynote of the the conference, I thought was fantastic and completed a nice theme in this conference which was the involvement of children who want to learn to code. ---- Jessica McKellar's final keynote:

Slides from my @PyTennessee keynote on CS ed. & teaching the next generation of Python programmers: http://t.co/Kgo68Oemdn #PyTN2014

— Jessica McKellar (@jessicamckellar) February 23, 2014
As well as Katie Cunningham [teaching a young coders class ALL DAY](http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/08/so-you-want-to-run-a-young-coders-class.html), made for what I hope to see more off at programming conferences. ---- I have thought for years now that schools should be teaching programming as young as elementary the way my generation learned typing. It was a standard thing. Even if kids are not going to be programmers, understanding the basics of development will serve them well. ---- The combination of Jessica's talk and Katie's light-talk report, provided lots of concrete ideas for taking action. ---- Katie had mentioned a link in her lighting-talk to a Github repo with the curriculum for running a class. But I don't remember nor am unable to find it right now. However, I think that would be a very doable thing to do at my kid's school one Saturday. ---- Had a great time at PyTennessee 2014. Participating in the Sprints was great. Being able to help programmers new to Django or new to contributing to open source was very rewarding.