I went in 2008 while in school when I was getting kind of bored with our CS program and thinking of dropping out. I found PyCon really enlightening. It was the

I went in 2008 while in school when I was getting kind of bored with our CS program and thinking of dropping out. I found PyCon really enlightening. It was the first time I was ever near that many other programmers, and I was completely energized. It also was really nice to realize how big the python community is. I came in through Django and webdev, but I got to learn a bit about how CPython and its community work, packaging and distribution, robotics, numpy, etc. Definitely go if you have the opportunity.