I went to my first Python conference in 2001. It was small enough that as a grad student, I was able to just walk up to Guido and have a talk with him because there wasn't that many people demanding his attention. And of course, now you go to Python and, you know, forget anything like that happening. There's just thousands of people and yeah, it's completely crazy. On the other hand, I do miss the days of the sort of smaller conferences where you feel like you got a hold of it.