Who wouldn’t want to be in Sandusky, Ohio in January for some geeky learnin’? Plus: it sounds like that Polar Vortex may be retreating a little for the week, so, bonus!

It’s been something like 7-8 years since I last attended CodeMash. I’ve heard the venue has changed a lot and the conference has expanded significantly. Used to be that the thing would sell out within an hour of going live!

Anyway, I’m looking forward to attending. As with most conferences I patronize, I like to plan ahead by pre-selecting as many sessions as I can: often, I agonize over my decisions because I tend to find multiple, interesting sessions happening at the same time. I want to do that agonizing ahead of time so I don’t waste a lot of time making decisions during the conference itself.

Unfortunately, I’m not finding the CodeMash Schedule page too helpful. I’m used to conference schedules where the time slots are on the Y axis and sessions listed across the X axis. That way, for, say the 8am session, I can scroll horizontally across all the scheduled sessions and pick the most appealing one. The CodeMash Scheduling page lists all the sessions vertically by their time slots. The data’s there: there just ought to be a better way to display it for my needs.

Well, there is: thanks to Python. I wrote a Jupyter Notebook to ingest the session data via the CodeMash API and then used pandas to pivot the data into a dataframe helpful to my needs. Then, I just exported this dataframe out to Excel and, voilà, I have my solution!

Now, off to spend a few hours deliberating over the offerings!