I flew out to Indianapolis for the weekend of April 13th to help run the first Indianapolis Python Workshop, which was co-located with Indiana LinuxFest.

This was the second city to use our Boston Python Workshop grant from the Python Software Foundation to help bootstrap Python workshops for women with new user groups in the US. Catherine Devlin and Mel Chua were the locals and main organizers leading the show.

Running the event as part of Indiana LinuxFest presented some challenges, but the attendees were great, including some very sweet father-daughter teams. This part of the country has some strong regional events, including PyOhio and Ohio LinuxFest, and I look forward to seeing more great outreach initiatives from Catherine and Mel that capitalize on this fact.

Catherine has a write-up on the event on her blog, and I took a few photos.

Since I was already going to be at Indiana LinuxFest for the workshop, I got the chance to give a rehash of my “The Internet Shouldn’t Work, Networking 101″ talk. It is a beginner-level tour through the Internet’s history, governance, protocols, and current events, with telnet, traceroute, and wireshark demos interspersed. Here are my slides from the talk.

Sunday Morning Linux Review, a “weekly podcast in a news format that focuses on Linux and Open source topics”, asked if I could give a short interview for the show while I was in town. Interviewer Tony Bemus and I chatted a bit about the workshop, school, Ksplice, and Linux, starting around 41:15 in episode 27 of the show, my first ever appearance on a podcast.