The PyCon blog

PyCon US 2012: Announcing Close of Registration (tomorrow)

2012-02-02T17:28:00.002-05:00

Well, this is bittersweet.

Only 9 days ago - January 25th - we closed PyCon Early Bird registration. By the time we closed early bird, we had a good indications that we would hit our cap of 1500 attendees. In fact, accounting for financial aid recipients, Startup Row attendees and sponsor registrations - well...

It looks like we destroyed that cap.

I'm amazed and humbled to be announcing this now - tomorrow, at 9:00am Central Time, we will officially close PyCon general registration. This means that tutorial only registration will stay open, but for the main conference days, we will no longer be accepting new registrations.

Until then, you will still be able to register on the site.

Please note that financial aid recipients and sponsors have been accounted for. If you fall into any of those groups, including the PyLadies grant group - you are all set. If you have a pending or in process registration, you are all set.

We also promised that Startup Row applications would stay open until February 10; we will honor that promise and will award PyCon tickets to founders of the 12 winning startups shortly thereafter.

Even after tomorrow, we will still allow people to register for tutorial days and book their hotel rooms - but note that those will only stay until the tutorials and hotels fill up. Please book your hotel stay ASAP - you can read more about what hotels we have, and how to book in our previous post. To quote:

In order for us to get credit for your hotel bookings, you must book through our registration and housing system at: https://us.pycon.org/2012/registration/register/ - or by contacting our housing bureau at pycon5-reg@cteusa.com or by phone at 847-759-4277.

We have blown out all our numbers - from attendees to sponsors, to the amazing line up of talks, tutorials and poster sessions. We can not thank all of you enough. We have amazing artwork, t-shirts, tote bags - and much more coming.

Thank you.

Jesse Noller, a humbled, and proud chair of PyCon 2012

PyCon 2012: Official PyCon 2012 Artwork - Awesome!

2012-02-01T20:17:00.001-05:00

I've got the great pleasure to finally show off something that's been in the works for awhile - we got to partner with well renown designer and djangonaut Idan Gazit for the PyCon 2012 artwork.

The result is pretty awesome and epic and will take form in the t-shirts, program guide and other areas of the conference. Take a look for yourself:

I was pretty ecstatic when Idan sent it over - he also added a pretty mind-blowing time lapse video of how it was created, saying:

… If you’ve ever wondered how the design sausage is made, look no further! Note the vast amount of time spent iterating, trying things out, seeing what works and often discarding things that don’t. It sucks to discard work you’ve spent time on, but that’s really just the nature of the beast, and better to fail early and try something different than keep beating a dead, er, snake.

You can see his thoughts, and the time-lapse video over on his blog. We're psyched to have Idan involved in the art for the conference!

In addition to this awesome artwork, we have to give a major amount of credit to the Eldarion team (specifically, their designer Yulka Plekhanova) for the awesome website design we have this year - the website represents a giant leap in terms of visual design for PyCon, and we can not thank them enough.

Awesome art, for an awesome conference and a blowout year!

PyCon US 2012: You want hotel? We have hotels!

2012-02-01T10:15:00.001-05:00

As noted in the previous post - we had a minor blip regarding the PyCon 2012 hotel - by minor blip, I mean we completely booked the Hyatt (our main hotel).

This issue has been resolved without needing me to resort to going to Home Depot and buying "The Dummies Guide to Hotel Building".

We now have plenty of rooms at:

Hilton Santa Clara - within walking distance of the venue. These rooms are marked as 159$/night - however, as we want to do whats right for attendees, we have asked the Hilton to credit each room night booked under out block 10$, while the PyCon master account will absorb the 10$ additional cost. This means that the base room rate for attendees will be 149$/night, matching the cost for the Hyatt.

The Avatar Hotel, Santa Clara - this one is not within walking distance, however the cost per night is 149$/night - matching our other rates, and we have negotiated a free shuttle for attendees to and from the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Finally, we are closing a deal with the Marriott Santa Clara - again, maintaining the room night cost, and while it too is not within walking distance, we are negotiating a free shuttle to and from the convention center!

I must note: All of these agreements include room minimums - this means that PyCon will get charged a lot of money if we do not book the blocks we have contracted for.

In order for us to get credit for your hotel bookings, you must book through our registration and housing system at: https://us.pycon.org/2012/registration/register/ - or by contacting our housing bureau at pycon5-reg@cteusa.com or by phone at 847-759-4277.

Please book your rooms through us, and please book as soon as you can! You'll not only get a room for the conference - you'll help us out, and be a part of what is already the biggest Pycon on record. If you haven't registered? You need to - registration is capped at 1500 attendees, and by all estimates, we are going to hit that number and soon. (All financial aid recipients are accounted for in attendance and hotel, by the way.)

Jesse Noller, PyCon Chair.

PyCon 2012: Hotel Availability

2012-01-30T14:44:00.001-05:00

Oh man.

It seems that every time we turn around that we're blowing out all the limits - real or perceived that we had for PyCon 2012. This time, we've booked - and I mean booked the Hyatt - our primary venue hotel.

The good news is that we have all pending hotel requests, and are working with the Hilton Santa Clara (right next door) to get you the same rates as the ones we have at the Hyatt. We are working around the clock to get this set in place and to process all pending requests.

I sincerely apologize for this blip in operations - but we will have rooms for you, and we will continue to provide the absolute best customer service you have come to expect from us. If you have any issues, you can contact pycon-reg@python.org or contact our excellent customer service team at pycon5-reg@cteusa.com or by phone at 847-759-4277

Once again, I apologize - and don't worry - you'll all have rooms! Even if I have to build a hotel myself.

Jesse, Chair - PyCon 2012

DNS problems with the us.pycon.org conference website are resolved

2012-01-28T05:08:00.000-05:00

Our hosting provider has informed us that the DNS problems have been resolved.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while this problem was being addressed.

DNS problems with the us.pycon.org conference website

2012-01-28T00:01:00.006-05:00

The PyCon website is currently experiencing DNS resolution problems. We are working with our hosting company and their upstream provider to resolve this issue. We hope to have this problem resolved soon.

Due to all your interest in the conference and the community help, this will be the best PyCon in history.

Thank you all for your patience while we resolve this issue.

UPDATE 9:55am Saturday (GMT): The DNS resolution issue has been fixed. Some problems may exist for the next hour while the DNS update propagates.

Early Bird Rates Ending January 25

2012-01-24T09:11:00.000-05:00

If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to register for PyCon 2012! You know why? It’s cheaper if you do it soon - by the end of January 25. We already think PyCon is an extraordinary value with ticket prices that haven’t changed in years, but we want to take that a step further. With discounts as high as 25%, the clock is ticking to get the deal of the 2012 conference season.

If your company is sending you to the conference, they can get you in the door for $450, with that rate going up to $600 after Wednesday. Another thing your company might be interested in is sponsorship, which among other benefits, helps PyCon keep these great low rates year after year.

If you’re paying for yourself or are employed by a non-profit, the regular $350 rate is reduced to $300 and gets you a one-way ticket to awesome. If you don’t believe me, check out this schedule. We think think you’ll love it. In fact, we think you’ll find slots in the conference where every single talk is one you want to go to. Thanks to our amazing community, we’re honored to have created problems like this for you :) Don’t worry, we’re recording all of the talks again so you won’t completely miss out on the other four presentations in a given slot.

If you're in school, either as a student or an educator, you can save $25 by purchasing early at $200. When it comes to education, we have a lot of it. Our two days of tutorials, March 7 and 8, are filled with sessions taught by the best and brightest in the community. With two three-hour sessions occurring each day, there’s a lot to learn and at a great rate: $150 per tutorial.

Remember, the rates go up January 25 so now’s your last chance to save a few bucks. The full details of registration are on our site at https://us.pycon.org/2012/registration/. See you there!

PyCon Poster Session - Third Time's the Charm

2012-01-21T20:58:00.000-05:00

17, 31, 50...

PyCon 2012 marks the third year of the Poster Session. The Poster Session has been training in the off-season and is back, bigger and better than ever. This year we have 50 posters for your PyCon enjoyment with the full list of accepted posters coming soon to the site. We've grown a lot since the original 17 posters of the inaugural session2 years ago!

Wondering how you'll manage your time and make it to all the posters that call to you? Wondering what's on the list?

We'll have Robots that test mobile applications and play Angry Birds in their spare time...

You can learn how people are using Python Power to increase student engagement...

You can find out how Python helps keep the Chandra X-ray Observatory operating safely...

You can get tips on Python Community development and the details of PSF Sprint Sponsorship...

Innovative uses of Django, doing Bioinformatics, Packaging, Cython and much, much more!

So be prepared - the PyCon poster session happens on Sunday, March 11 right after the morning keynote. An hour and half, 50 posters, robots and plenty of people excited about their projects to talk to...come ready. The poster session is a great way to connect with people of similar interests, get new ideas and start new collaborations. Is all of that not enough to excite you about the Poster Session? We also have snacks...

(from Zac Miller and Vern Ceder, Poster Session Co-Chairs)

PyCon 2012: Early Bird approaches; how much awesome can a conference contain?

2012-01-19T09:18:00.001-05:00

Wow.

It feels like only a few days ago I was still in the midst of helping wrap up PyCon 2011. In reality, PyCon 2012 is under 50 days away. At this point I feel like a deer in the headlights!

For example - Early Bird registration rates end on January 25th - that's only 7 days away! With the Early Bird discount, and attendance capped at 1500 attendees - now is the time to get registered! Registration includes breakfast, lunch and snacks too!

We have an amazing list of tutorials you can attend, a jam-packed line up of main conference talks, the Poster session is going to be awesome (the full list of accepted posters is coming), our Keynotes and Plenary speakers are amazing (and I haven't even added Guido to that line up yet!). We'll be holding a PyCon 5k Fun Run for charity, Startup Row has returned, and we're raffling off a robot!

If you need it - the room sharing page is live - and we're just beginning to organize the list of sprints for the conference - if the trend continues from past PyCons, sprint attendance this year will be massive.

We have a list of sponsors that's stunning - so many (over 100!) in fact we've had to update the prospectus to remove booth spaces - we filled the San Jose convention center's expo hall! Note, we are still looking for Summit and Sprint sponsors - email jnoller@python.org if interested.

Just to add fuel to the fire - we are also in the process of planning and announcing a dedicated on site Job Fair to happen in the expo hall alongside the poster sessions on Sunday the 11th! That means if you're looking for a job - bring your resume, github/bitbucket/etc link or business cards!

All of this - and we still have more announcements coming - I'm going to pack as much awesome into this conference as I can (or until I fall over). Open Spaces, Lightning talks, tutorials, posters, sprints, sponsors, robots - I'm not sure if the venue knows what's coming for them.

So get registered! If you're interested in volunteering on site - sign up to the pycon-organizers list. If you're attending - use the #pycon2012 hashtag on twitter - or add yourself to the Lanyrd directory.

I'm obviously excited - the team, the community and sponsors have all shown up in force to make this mind-numbingly awesome.

Thank you.

Jesse Noller, Chair - PyCon 2012

PyCon 2012: Close of Sponsorship applications

2012-01-11T18:52:00.001-05:00

This is the strangest announcement - one that I never dreamed of making. Ladies and Gentlemen, PyCon (sponsorship) is full.

The Expo Hall, anyway. At least close enough that we need to do the unthinkable - we need to announce that sponsorship applications for PyCon 2012 will be closing (unless you don't want a booth!).

The Python Software Foundation, and the entire PyCon US 2012 team would like to thank all of our current (and pending!) sponsors. We have an unprecedented 94 sponsors and other partners (such as PyLadies, OSU/OSL and others) not including pending sponsor applications.

This is amazing. It is a huge milestone for PyCon and the foundation and we can not thank all of the sponsors enough. On a personal level, I would like to thank each and every one of them - it has been an honor and privilege working with them and seeing their support for PyCon and the community as a whole.

Therefore I am announcing that we will close the conference to any new sponsorship as of Friday January 20, 2012.

We do still have sponsorship opportunities available until this - you can view our prospectus page for details, or email me with any questions you may have.

Also, remember to check out the PyCon Jobs Fair page - more and more sponsors are listing open positions!

Registration is open - we still have plenty of hotel rooms and tickets - but early bird rates end on January 25th.

Our Diamond sponsors are: Google, Dropbox, and Heroku.

Our Platinum sponsors include: Microsoft, New Relic, Survey Monkey, Nasuni Corporation, Facebook, Nebula, Gondor.io and EventBrite.

Gold sponsors include: ZeOmega, Bitly, White Oak Technologies, DotCloud, OpDemand, CCP Games, ActiveState, JetBrains, Caktus Consulting, Enthought, Cloud Foundry (VMware), Linode, Disqus, Spotify, Leapfrog Online, Loggly, Snoball, Evite, PlaidCloud, Revolution Systems, Canonical, Aldebaran Robotics, Mozilla, Lab305 JP Morgan, PiCloud, Splunk, Milo.com and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Silver level sponsors are: Urban Airship, Cox Media Group, Eucalyptus Systems, Olark, WiserTogether, ESRI, Accense Technology, AG Interactive, Vocollect, 10gen, BigDoor, The Open Bastion, Toast Driven, Net-ng, MyYearBook, Threadless, gocept, Lex Machina, Aarki, FreshBooks, Github, fwix, Imaginary Landscape, OpenStack, devsAr, Stratasan, MapMyFitness, Kelly Creative Tech, Bitbucket, Mailgun, Opscode, Continuum Analytics, Wingware, Emma, Shining Panda, Python Academy, Cisco, Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall, Kontagent, DataStax, EnergySavvy, O'Reilly and Truveris.

Thank You.

Poster Session Proposal Deadline Nears

2012-01-08T22:21:00.003-05:00

The preparations for PyCon 2012 are moving into their final phase. The talks have been announced, the tutorials are on the books, just about the only thing that remains is to submit a poster proposal!

Do you want to share your latest Python coding experiments? Or build interest in a budding project? Do you want to present something at PyCon, but don't feel that a talk is for you?

Now in its third year, the poster session has become a part of the PyCon tradition. Praised by presenters for being both an excellent opportunity to interact with interested people and a lower pressure, more accessible venue than regular talks, the poster session lets you reach more people at PyCon with less fuss than any other type of presentation. So if you have an idea that you want to get out there, or a project you want feedback on, submit a poster.

For more reasons why you simply must present a poster, see Brian Curtin's earlier post and for more information on the poster sessions and how to submit a proposal, visit the general description of the poster session or the poster session CFP.

Poster proposals are being accepted on a rolling basis for one more week (or until we hit our limit of 36 posters). Submissions are coming in, so if you want to be sure of getting a spot, go to the PyCon speaker information page and submit your proposal soon!

I hope to see you (and your poster) at PyCon!

Financial Aid Applications Due Tomorrow!

2012-01-06T15:02:00.000-05:00

If finances are what's keeping you away from PyCon, the Financial Aid Committee is there to help make it possible. The deadline for applications is tomorrow - January 7, 2012 - so hurry up and get your application filled out. It's a very quick process thanks to their online application.

Filling out the application requires that you know a few things up front, but will take you no more than a few minutes to complete. I just did a test run right now and it took me three minutes to click through and enter a few pieces of information.

What you need to know:

Do you need assistance with conference registration? This covers your ticket into the show. If you say no here, you will need to buy your own ticket. If you say yes here, don't go off and buy your own ticket to then be reimbursed for. If your application is accepted your ticket will be handled by the committee.
Do you need assistance with a hotel room? If yes, how many nights do you plan to stay? Keep tutorials and sprints in mind if you plan to attend those.
Do you need assistance with travel costs? If yes, what is it going to take to make your trip possible? Please be as accurate as can be. If your application is accepted, you will be reimbursed for your travel expenses based on this amount. Please also specify how you plan to travel.
Do you need assistance with tutorial costs? Tutorials are a separate expense from the three conference days, but we can provide financial assistance to some tutorial attendees. Please specify the names of the tutorials you wish to attend.

That's it. Just submit a few answers and you'll hear back from the Financial Aid Committee by January 10, 2012 with the result of your application.

Even if you don't need financial assistance, we're giving you some anyway: early bird registration rates are valid through January 25, 2012. Head to https://us.pycon.org/2012/registration/ and get setup today!

The inaugural PyCon 5k fun run!

2012-01-05T14:48:00.002-05:00

Many Pythonistas are active runners; many more are just looking for an excuse to get out there and start. From beginners to lifelong runners, we hope you'll join us at the inaugural PyCon 5K. Runners and walkers of all abilities are welcome!

As a bit of background: last year I attended GitHub's CodeConf. One of the activities at that conference was a 5K fun run, and it was a blast. Ever since then I've been thinking about holding a similar run here at PyCon. I asked my friend, fellow Pythonista and ultra-marathoner (!) Nick Lang to direct the race, and now it's going to happen!

You can find all the details on the PyCon website, but here's the short version: the race will be Saturday, March 10th, running 5K (3.1 miles) along a trail beside the conference venue. Registration is "pay what you want" (including free); all proceeds will go to charities: Autism Speaks, the American Cancer Society, and the Epilepsy Foundation. If you pay at least $20 you'll receive a commemorative t-shirt.

We hope to see you there!

PyCon 2012 Room Sharing Page live

2012-01-05T09:12:00.001-05:00

Need or want to share a room at PyCon 2012? The PyCon 2012 room sharing page is live - all valid site users can now add themselves to https://us.pycon.org/2012/community/roomsharing/ in order to coordinate room sharing. Room sharing is a great way to get to know others in the community - and also offset hotel costs.

Remember, room sharing is a required for those applying for financial aid coverage of hotel costs.

A Few Upcoming PyCon Deadlines

2012-01-03T15:53:00.000-05:00

This morning, PyCon's fearless leader Jesse Noller tweeted that early bird registration rates were ending in a week on January 10. He shortly followed up with good news: early bird registration has been extended and the discount rates will be available until January 25!

Yesterday was the original financial aid deadline, but don't worry if you missed it - there's still time! A few weeks ago we moved that deadline to January 7. If you're interested in the PyLadies grant for women, that deadline is January 31.

We still have open slots for the poster session and will be accepting proposals through January 15.

Financial Aid: January 7
Posters Due: January 15
Early Bird Registration: January 25
PyLadies Aid Grants: January 31

PyCon Startup Row 2012

2012-01-03T13:15:00.004-05:00

One of our most successful experiments last year was Startup Row. We knew that a lot of startups used Python, but we were astounded and excited to see the number and quality of new companies that were eager to participate at PyCon and show off what they were doing.

At PyCon itself, we got a lot of comments from attendees that Startup Row was their favorite part of the Expo Hall. From meeting and talking with the founders of so many great companies, it was obvious that they would go far. A number of them have even grown into full sponsors this year (congratulations Eldarion, DotCloud, and Olark!).

This year, we have our eye on the startup world even more. With Paul Graham of YCombinator as a keynote speaker, and PyCon being held right in the heart of Silicon Valley, it seemed right to bring back Startup Row for PyCon 2012.

We will be highlighting some of the most promising new companies that are using Python to build their businesses - including possibly yours. If your startup uses Python, we want to hear about it - and you could be one of the startups that gets featured on Startup Row at PyCon 2012.

Here are the rules:

Seed stage only. For purposes of startup row, that means less than $100K in outside funding or, if self-funded, less than 18 months old.
You must use Python somewhere in your startup. Backend, frontend, testing, wherever.
No repeats. If you were on startup row last year, your startup is not eligible. We want to give a chance to as many startups as possible.
If you are accepted, you must guarantee your attendance for at least the Expo Hall hours on your appointed day. We will work with you as to which day is better for you.

Here are the selection criteria:

Interesting technology. Are you doing something hard or unique? Tell us about it.
Traction and reach. Are you affecting a lot of people? How?
Concept. Are you changing the world? Disrupting an industry? Solving a problem? Sometimes you see what a company is doing and your jaw drops. If that is your startup, we want to hear from you.

Do you want your startup to be on Startup Row? You can apply at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PyCon-2012-Startup-Row

DEADLINE: All submissions must be received by February 10, 2012.

PyCon 2012 News - Tutorials, Talks, and Tickets

2012-01-03T12:47:00.000-05:00

The following was an email sent to all known Python local user groups -- a list totaling 108 locations around the world. If you're in a user group and *haven't* seen this information, please email brian@python.org or comment on the post if your group would be interested in receiving this type of "newsletter" format. We don't send them often and we won't spam you, we just want to reach the community for which PyCon exists to serve.

We are now 63 days away from PyCon 2012 in Santa Clara — it's hard to think about how quickly time has flown since PyCon 2011! We've lined up some great keynote and plenary speakers, announced the tutorial and talk selections, opened ticket sales, and have expanded financial aid opportunities. The community and our amazing array of sponsors have helped us break several records already, so we hope you're as excited about PyCon 2012 as we are. The conference runs March 7-15 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

The keynote speakers include Y Combinator investor Paul Graham and Mozilla's Head of Developer Engagement, Stormy Peters. Both of them bring interesting experience to the table, and they're both captivating speakers. Speaking of captivating, Dave Beazley was announced on the plenary track, with more to be added in the coming weeks. Guido — our Benevolent Dictator For Life — will also be joining the line up!

With 483 tutorial, talk, and poster proposals submitted this year, the program committee had their hands full paring that list down to 95 talks, 32 tutorials, and 36 posters (which we're still accepting). In the little time since we made these announcements we've heard a lot of excitement. You can see the tutorial selections at https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/lists/tutorials/, with talks available at https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/lists/talks/.

Tickets are now available with early bird rates available until January 25, 2012 at https://us.pycon.org/2012/registration. Tutorial and admission prices continue unchanged; if you've been following along the last few years, these rates are the same as they have been for several years. Our team's dedication to keeping PyCon cost-effective, community driven, and grassroots continues thanks to the hard work and support of the team and sponsors (https://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors/).

If financial assistance would make PyCon a possibility for you, we encourage you to apply to this year's expanded assistance program. With a deadline of January 7, 2012 (extended from January 2) and a new web-based application, the financial aid committee aims to make the trip, lodging, and a ticket a possibility for everyone. Thanks to a new partnership with the PyLadies organization, we're able to provide grants to women in the community who are interested in experiencing the conference. For full details see https://us.pycon.org/2012/assistance.

For more information about PyCon 2012, see our site at https://us.pycon.org/2012/. We also publish news on our blog: http://pycon.blogspot.com/.

Jesse Noller - Chairman

jnoller@python.org

Brian Curtin - Publicity Coordinator

brian@python.org

Announcing the PyCon 2012 talks

2011-12-22T14:23:00.004-05:00

On behalf of the PyCon Program Committee, I'm thrilled to announce the list of talks for PyCon 2012! It's an amazing program that's a true testament to Python's reach: we'll have talks covering embedded programming, REST APIs, GIS, cloud computing, web development, relational and non-relational databases, design, 3d printers, testing, debugging, high performance, scientific computing, and more. The unifying theme? Python makes it all possible.

As you may already know, this was a very hard decision process: we had roughly 380 submissions for only 95 slots on the program. Further, the quality of submissions was very high; the committee debated each and every talk very closely. I want to sincerely thank everyone who submitted a talk: the quality of PyCon comes from our speakers, and this year you all blew it out of the water.

Over the next few weeks we'll finish up and publish the conference schedule, so stay tuned.

Remember: Early-bird registration closes January 10th, so if you want to get in on this amazing conference, register now!

See you in Santa Clara!

Financial Aid Extended to January 7

2011-12-22T10:07:00.000-05:00

Last Friday I posted a guide for the PyCon 2012 financial aid program. Yesterday I got some good news: the deadline for applications has been extended from January 2, 2012 to January 7, 2012. The date for award notices remains the same at January 10, 2012.

For more information on PyCon's Financial Aid committee and their offerings, see https://us.pycon.org/2012/assistance.

HOWTO: PyCon US Financial Aid Application

2011-12-16T10:16:00.000-05:00

Each year the PyCon Financial Aid committee sets out to make getting to and attending the conference more affordable for those who need assistance. Whether you've got a flight halfway across the world or live down the street and have to pay out of your own pocket, PyCon thrives on the diversity of the attendees and the organizers hope make the conference possible for those who want to come. Applications for financial aid are due by ~~January 2, 2012~~ January 7, 2012.
New for this year's financial aid application process is an online form rather than the persuasive letter format of past years. As with any application, it starts with your name and contact info. What follows are a series of questions to figure out which conference-related expenses you'll need aid with.

Rationale

Here's where you sell your case for who you are and why you would benefit from assistance. Tell us where you're coming from and what you're up to. If you're unemployed, say so. If you'd spend a month's salary on plane tickets, say so. We're here to help, so let us know your situation so we can serve you best. Be sure to let us know if you were selected to present at the conference.

Conference Registration

Ticket sales recently opened up with early bird rates available until January 10, 2012, so check out the going rates. If tickets are a place you'll need help with, go ahead and ask for it!

Hotel Room

You'll need a place to stay while at the conference, and we can help you out at the conference hotel. All we ask is that you let us know how many days you plan to stay for. Keep in mind there's two days of tutorials, three days of conference talks, and four days of sprints, so plan your hotel stay for whichever parts you're coming for.

Travel Costs

The form starts with the minimum amount of aid you would require in order to make your trip happen. Following that, we ask that you let us know what your travel plans are. Do you need to take a train to get to a plane? Renting a car? Time travel?
You get to choose your method of reimbursement -- keyword being reimbursement. We can send you a check or do a bank transfer, but we require that you make the purchase before we give you the money. Cash is an option, but our ability to handle cash is limited, so please write a note about why cash is your preferred method.

Tutorials

If you're coming in on March 7 and 8 for the awesome tutorials, let us know specifically which ones you plan to attend. Tutorial assistance is limited, but let us know your plans and we'll see what we can do.

Review and Notification

Upon receiving your application for financial aid, the committee will review your submission and evaluate what you've requested. Be sure to keep an eye on your email in case the committee has any questions about your application. After a review of yours and all of the other applicants, you should receive notice on your application's status by January 10, 2012.
Again, be sure to get your applications in by ~~January 2, 2012~~ January 7, 2012! We want to help as many people as we can, and we hope to see you at the conference!

PyCon US 2012: I've got something special for you.

2011-12-14T14:37:00.001-05:00

I'm going to take a moment to admit something - chairing PyCon 2012 is close to a full-time job. You're working constantly - negotiating, planning, thinking about ways to make the conference better than it has been in the past. There are some less-fun parts, too: legal negotiations, making hard decisions - all the things you might think come along with trying to manage a volunteer run, community-driven conference. My family and coworkers are most probably tired of hearing me talk about everything going on that's going on to make this PyCon the biggest and best yet.

That said, being chair has its special moments. Even before PyCon opens in March, I get the privilege to work with an amazing community of volunteers and to act as a representative for the Python community as a whole. I get the privilege to hear about all sorts of wonderful, new places where Python is popping up. I get to have conversations with people and sponsors all over the world and to hear how Python is helping them, and listening to them talk about how great it is to be part of this community.

I get the privilege and honor to work with our amazing array of over 77 sponsors - companies like DropBox, Heroku and Google who have stepped up to be Diamond sponsors, I get to work with and listen to the stories of Gondor.io (by Eldarion), Nebula, New Relic, EventBrite, Microsoft, Nasuni (my employer), and SurveyMonkey. These - and all of our sponsors come from an array of industries and walks of life. From startups to corporate giants, all of these companies have come forward to show their support for the Python Community.

These companies support helps make PyCon affordable - it allows them to show the community their love and attention, it gives me the privilege of having a robust financial aid budget and to make outreach partnerships with organizations like PyLadies.

Today, I have the privilege of announcing a new Gold sponsor - but this sponsor is extra special to me, because they make something - programmable in Python, which is simply put: Awesome. It is this guy, fully programmable in Python:

Today I am very pleased to announce Aldebaran Robotics is joining us as a Gold sponsor. I was lucky enough to get a call from them about a week ago, expressing interest in reaching out and getting involved with PyCon, and the Python community. You might have seen some news about them - they were just featured on TechCrunch on Monday. They make robots - robots programmable with the power of Python (and you can join their developer program). Consider my mind blown.

This is one of those moments in a person's life when you just say "Yes". But as others can attest, I said "Yes… But…"

That "but" is why I'm so excited today - in addition to joining us as a sponsor, Aldebaran has agreed to allow me give one of these wonderful robots away to a single lucky attendee at PyCon (don't worry - I don't qualify). Yup - attend PyCon and stay until the closing ceremonies on Sunday (you have to be present) and you could walk away with 23 inches of next-generation, Python programmable, robot awesome.

PyCon 2012 registration is open - we already have an amazing array of tutorials and the main conference talk list will be soon to follow. Come join all of us working on this conference, our amazing supporting sponsors and the amazing community for something awesome.

Thank you - to the community, the sponsors and the volunteers for allowing me to experience this.

- Jesse Noller - PyCon 2012

Registration for PyCon 2012 Opened, Tutorials Announced

2011-12-12T11:43:00.001-05:00

The PyCon organizers have announced the opening of early bird registration and financial aid application for PyCon 2012. As with 2011, the conference rates are being kept the same across the board, with individual and corporate tickets selling at the early-bird rate of $300 and $450 USD respectively. Students are welcomed to purchase tickets at the reduced rate of $200. With a cap of 1500 attendees and many records already broken, taking advantage of early-bird rates will ensure you get in and at a great price. These early bird rates are valid until January 10, 2012.

Also staying in line with 2011 is the tutorial rate of $150 per session, an unparalleled value which includes one three-hour class as well as lunch and break refreshments. With a total of four sessions over the two days, March 7 and 8, 2012, we’ve already heard around the web that there are “too many awesome tutorials being offered,” so you’ll need to choose wisely.

The schedule includes a sampling of veterans and newcomers covering a range of topics that will interest all types of Python users. Raymond Hettinger, a perennial PyCon favorite and core CPython developer, brings his two-part Advanced Python course back for 2012. Twisted developer Jean-Paul Calderone introduces event driven programming with Twisted, while PyPy developers Maciej Fijalkowski, Armin Rigo, and Alex Gaynor teach the audience how to squeeze every ounce out of PyPy. From documentation to databases, performance to statistics, we think we’ve picked a great set of tutorials that will help attendees learn about a range of useful topics. For a full listing of tutorials, see our tutorial selections.

Also joining the schedule is Stormy Peters, Head of Developer Engagement at Mozilla, an engaging keynote speaker who we’re glad to have on board. Along with being an advisor to HFOSS, IntraHealth Open, and Open Source for America, she’s also the founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries.

Financial aid applications are now open through January 2, 2012. Each year the PyCon financial aid committee sets out to help as many people in need of assistance as they can, and this year the funding pool has been increased to ensure more attendees can receive more assistance. From conference and tutorial tickets to travel and lodging expenses, the group tries to make the conference possible for people across the world. The committee encourages anyone who may need assistance to apply, as each attendee makes this conference what it is.

PyCon also thanks the ever increasing group of sponsors, lead by diamond sponsors Google, Dropbox, and Heroku. Nebula and Eventbrite were announced as new platinum sponsors, and joining the gold level are Mozilla, Lab305, OpDemand, Leapfrog Online, and White Oak Technologies. New sponsors at the silver level include Python Academy, Eucalyptus Systems, Emma, ShiningPanda, Vocollect, ESRI, Truveris, Kontagent, Stratasan, Cisco, and Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall. As always, we thank all of our sponsors and invite you to check all of them out, or inquire about sponsorship here.

Announcing the PyCon 2012 Tutorials

2011-12-07T14:44:00.002-05:00

The tutorials team is pleased to announce that the PyCon 2012 tutorials have officially been selected and announced. The tutorials will be presented on the two days prior to the main conference - March 7th and 8th.

Each year we struggle to find the best selection of tutorials that will benefit the wider Python community. We only have a few slots, so we want to find tutorials that hit the sweet spot - excellent instructors, timely material, and broad interest. Making the selection was especially difficult this year due to the amazing array of tutorials proposed - and we are grateful for each person who submitted a proposal, even those we regrettably couldn't accept.

Each tutorial was reviewed by a panel of independent reviewers, followed by ten to fifteen hours of meetings where we discussed every proposal and made the hard choices of which tutorials we thought would best serve PyCon and the attendees. It was worth it, though; this year's tutorials present an astounding array of expertise for attendees to enjoy.

We have a new feature this year - Tutorial Tracks. Each year we notice that there are themes in the topics proposed, and we try to schedule accordlingly. This year, though, we have actually arranged a number of multi-session Tutorial Tracks where we are asking the instructors to coordinate their material to present an intensive one or two-day course focused on a particular subject. Tutorial tracks will be presented as a set of two tutorials taught sequentially on one day, or a set of four on both days (Wednesday and Thursday).

Our first two tracks deal with the fast-growing area of data science. If you want to hone your data-modeling chops across a number of domains, these tracks are for you:

Data Analytics I

Bayesian statistics made (as) simple (as possible) - Allen Downey
- Statistics is the first tool of the data scientist. Allen brings his considerable expertise as the author of "Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers" to help programmers understand and express statistical models, in particular the Bayesian statistics at the heart of many applications.
Tutorial: Data analysis in Python with pandas - Wes McKinney
- Wes is the lead developer of Pandas - a Python package known for its fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with “relational” or “labeled” data both easy and intuitive. Pandas is helps programmers do practical, real world data analysis in Python.
Social Network Analysis with Python - Maksim Tsvetovat
- Social network data permeates our world - yet many people don't know what to do with it. Maksim uses the approaches developed in his book "Social Networks for Startups" to introduce both theory and practice of social network analysis - gathering, analyzing and visualizing data using Python and other open-source tools.
Introduction to Interactive Predictive Analytics in Python with scikit-learn - Olivier Grisel
- Once you have your data, it is time to start teaching the computer how to understand it - and scikit-learn makes machine learning accessible to non-specialists while still providing the power of NumPy and SciPy. As lead developer of scikit-learn, Olivier bridges the gap between specialists and programmers to bring a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to your fingertips.

Data Analytics II

IPython in-depth: high-productivity interactive and parallel python - Fernando Pérez with Min Ragan-Kelley, Brian E. Granger
- IPython provides a rich and powerful set of tools aimed at maximizing developer productivity with Python while using the language interactively. The lead developers of IPython will show how to use IPython in different ways, as: an interactive shell, an embedded shell, a graphical console, a network-aware VM in GUIs, a web-based notebook with code, graphics and rich HTML, and a high-level framework for parallel computing
Graph Analysis from the Ground Up - Van Lindberg
- Van Lindberg is in love with graphs - and by the end of this tutorial, attendees will be too. Graphs can be used to express and solve a number of very common problems easily and elegantly. This is a from-the-ground up working session; by the end, attendees will have the tools and experience to model and analyze problems on their own.
Plotting with matplotlib - Mike Müller
- When it comes to plotting with Python many people think about matplotlib. It is widely used and provides a simple interface for creating a wide variety of plots from very simple diagrams to sophisticated animations. Mike is one of our favorite instructors, year after year, and he brings his touch to data visualization and plotting.
Introduction to NLTK - Jacob Perkins
- So much of today's data is text based - web pages, tweets, even "structured" data in databases frequently contains further meaning than can be unlocked using natural language processing. Jacob, author of "Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook," shows how to apply NLTK to your data to discover new meaning.

High Performance Computing

Our second track is focused on a subject near to many programmers hearts - performance. Especially when dealing with the large and fast-moving environment on the Internet today, speed matters.

Faster Python Programs through Optimization - Mike Müller
- This is one of the most consistent favorites at PyCon. Mike walks through profiling and optimization - finding the spots where algorithmic or implementation tweaks will do the most good. He then shows how different data types or different implementations can dramatically speed up your code.
How to get the most out of your PyPy - Maciej Fijalkowski with Alex Gaynor, Armin Rigo
- One of the most promising new developments in the Python world is the evolution of the PyPy interpreter into a fully JITted speed demon. In this tutorial, three core developers from PyPy will show you how to take advantage of PyPy's capabilities.
High Performance Python I - Ian Ozsvald
High Performance Python II - Travis Oliphant
- These tutorials are for when you absolutely need to go as fast as possible. Picking up where the other tutorials left off, Ian and Travis' tutorials show how NumPy, Psyco, Weave, f2py, GPU-based computing, and similar tools can eke out every bit of performance out of your machine.

Django (Wednesday)

Our next track focuses on Django - on of, if not the most popular web development framework in the Python world.

Introduction to Django - Chander Ganesan
- Chander's tutorial covers the fundamentals of development with Django, including generating a data model, dealing with settings and deployment, and putting together a simple web site using the framework. It is just the thing for those just getting started with Django.
Django in Depth - James Bennett
- James is part of Django's core team and the release manager - there is nobody better to take attendees on a walking tour of Django's deepest components. If you have ever wondered why or how Django does something, this is your chance to learn.

Core Python (1 & 2 on Wednesday)

Continuing with a long tradition, we have excellent beginning, intermediate, and advanced instruction in core Python available at PyCon. Based on attendee feedback, this year we have deeper coverage of early intermediate Python - moving beyond the basics into familiarity.

Hands-on Beginning Python - Matt Harrison
Hands-on Intermediate Python - Matt Harrison
- Matt was praised last year for his clear and concise explanations of core Python. These tutorials, from the ground up and on to intermediate Python, will be intensive and hands-on.
Python Epiphanies - Stuart Williams
- Stuart returns this year with Python Epiphanies - an intermediate course focused on helping programmers move past the initial plateau and become incredibly productive. This tutorial will deconstruct frequent incorrect assumptions about Python and give programmers the global view of Python needed to really excel.

Advanced Python I and II - Raymond Hettinger (a track all it's own!)
- A runaway success last year, Raymond's advanced Python courses show how the tools built into the Python interpreter or included in the standard library can be combined to solve difficult problems clearly and Pythonically. Raymond's deep insight into Python will leave you astounded - and a better programmer.

In addition to these explicit Tutorial Tracks, we have an amazing array of tutorials addressing a number of subjects:

Introduction to Game Development - Richard Jones with Katie Cunningham
- This tutorial will walk the attendees from some introductory game development theory (what makes a good game) and through development of a simple game (how to make a good game) with time left over for some experimentation and exploration of different types of games.
Making and understanding music with Python and a little bit of Math - Pedro Kroger
- Are you interested in learning more about music but have found most material to be kind of patronizing or to present things magically instead of logically? The good news is that much of music can be understood with programming and math, two things you're already good at! In this hands-on workshop you'll learn some elements of music from a (Python) programmer's perspective.
Developing custom PyQt widgets and graphical interfaces efficiently. - Luis Artola
- PyQT is the leading cross-platform GUI toolkit, and it has two excellent bindings to Python. Luis' advanced PyQT tutorial will show you how to leverage the power of QT to build beautiful and functional interfaces.
Writing a Pyramid application - Carlos de La Guardia
- A number of complementary web development toolkits have coalesced into Pyramid, a new(er) framework that has a lot of history behind it. Interested in moving beyond Django, or concerned that Django might not be a good fit for your application? This tutorial will help.
The real-time web with co-routines - John Anderson
- Web applications need to be fast and interactive - calling for a different kind of backend. Learn how to build fast and interactive web applications using Redis/ZeroMQ, Socket.IO, and GEvent while maintaining good test coverage.
Introduction to Event Driven Programming Using Twisted - Jean-Paul Calderone
- Twisted is one of the most performant and flexible frameworks around - but event and callback-driven programming requires programmers to reason about events in a way that is a bit... twisted. JP detangles event-driven programming into a understandable and useful series of abstractions.
Web scraping: Reliably and efficiently pull data from pages that don't expect it - Asheesh Laroia
- A highly anticipated return from last year, Asheesh shows you how to scrape the web efficiently and nicely. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to parse those pages and when to apply advanced techniques that make scraping faster and more stable.
Optimize Performance and Scalability with Parallelism and Concurrency - Bob Hancock
- Sometimes, you need to multitask - and Bob will show you how to do it. From how the operating system handles your requests through design principles on how to use concurrency and parallelism to optimize your program's performance and scalability.
Making interactive maps for the web - Zain Memon
- When asked to display geodata, most developers decide to put some big red markers on an embeddable Google Map and call it a day. If you're interested in creating maps that are more beautiful, more interactive, and more usable, this tutorial is for you.
SQL for Python Developers - Brandon Rhodes
- Relational databases are often the bread-and-butter of large-scale data storage, yet they are often poorly understood by Python programmers. (Quick - tell me the different between a LEFT join and a RIGHT join). Brandon's tutorial takes what you already know about Python programming, and advances into a new realm: SQL programming and database design.
MongoDB and Python - Rick Copeland with Bernie Hackett
- This intermediate-level class will teach you techniques using the popular NoSQL database MongoDB, its driver PyMongo, and the object-document mapper Ming to write maintainable, high-performance, and scalable applications.
Documenting Your Project With Sphinx - Brandon Rhodes
- Python projects can succeed or fail because of their documentation. Thanks to Sphinx, Python now has a “documentation framework” with indexing, syntax highlighting, and integration with your code.
DevOps for Python: Doing More With Less - Noah Kantrowitz
- The world of infrastructure as code is becoming far more pervasive and many Python developers are trying to find a way to get started. This class will get you up and running with Chef and Fabric to manage your systems be they in the cloud or under your desk.

All tutorial slots are 3 hours of teaching time, plus a break of 20 minutes for a total of 3 hours and 20 minutes from start to finish. Taught by some of the best trainers in the community - on subjects that are sure to be important, the tutorials at PyCon represent an excellent opportunity and value for anyone thinking about coming to PyCon 2012!

You will be able to register for tutorials along with conference registration shortly. Tutorial pricing has not changed and can be seen on the registration page.

Stuart Williams, Tutorial Committee Chair & the entire PyCon tutorial team

PyCon US: Information for International Attendees

2011-11-27T12:53:00.001-05:00

Just a quick message today for all attendees - but especially for international attendees.

It has been brought to my attention as conference chair that there are time issues when dealing with the acquisition of visas for attendees outside of the US - as has been previously noted, the Program Committee is running behind schedule due to the sheer volume of talks submitted. We plan on announcing accepted talks as soon as possible.

Registration, and therefore Financial Aide applications will be opening soon, tutorial selection is rapidly coming to a close. While I can not disclose details on talks or tutorial selection or rejection, I can go out of my way to assist international attendees.

Given the timelines involved, I am offering to immediately start assisting international attendees with the required visa recommendation letters as chair. I will draft and sign letters certifying your attendance and value to the conference regardless of speaker status - the assumption being that even without open registration, it is important it get these letters/visas approved in a timely manner.

If you are planning on attending - even not as a speaker or teacher - please send an email to Rami Chowdhury, International Travel Coordinator rami.chowdhury@gmail.com, with the required details and any caveats such as financial aid approval you might have.

As tutorial and talk approvals come in, we can either amend letters as needed, or you can choose to hold off until the decisions are announced.

Thank you - I apologize in the delay and gaps in this area.

Jesse Noller, Chair - PyCon 2012

What's up with the program committee?

2011-11-15T14:55:00.003-05:00

"What's up with my PyCon proposal?"

That's the question I've gotten pretty much since the day the call for proposals closed for PyCon 2012. Since the program committee does most of its work in private, it can try anyone's patience waiting to find out how their proposal fared. Well, starting with this post I'll do my best to keep you informed of where we are.

As Jesse announced last month, we had record-breaking levels of talk submissions this year -- about 380 talk proposals. And it's not just quantity: the quality has been breathtaking. Sadly, we have just over 100 spots on the schedule. Selecting the best proposals is quite a challenge.

Let me tell you a bit about how our review process works:

First, the committee reads through proposals and scores them (using a system based on the Identify the Champion system). The goal here is to identify "champions" -- a committee member who feels strongly that the proposals should be placed on the schedule.

Next, we meet in real time (on IRC) to discuss each proposals. Champions advocate, we debate, and ultimately vote. At this point, we're considering each proposals in isolation, judging it strictly on its merits. Typically we vote to accept about 75% of proposals at this point.

Of course, this leaves us with far too many talks for the schedule. So the final step is to make the hard decisions and cull this list of (excellent) proposals down to the final schedule. We do this by grouping overlapping or similar proposals and looking at the balance of talks at the conference as a whole. We gather for a final round of meetings, debating and voting on which talks are the strongest in each area.

So where are we now?

Well, we've completed the first part -- each talk's been reviewed by a number of reviewers (at least three, at usually five or more) -- and we've started holding our first round of IRC meetings. We've discussed about a third of the talks so far. Extrapolating from our current rate tells me we should have the first round finished shortly after Thanksgiving. Based on our timeline last year, this means we should likely have the final selection of talks done by Christmas.

Ultimately, this means that if you've proposed a talk you should hear back from us right around the new year. I know it's a long time to wait, but I know it means we'll have an incredible program this year.

Announcing our second PyCon 2012 keynote speaker: Stormy Peters

2011-10-18T10:23:00.001-04:00

I am very pleased to announce the second (and final) PyCon 2012 Keynote speaker - Stormy Peters.

Stormy is the Head of Developer Engagement at Mozilla. She is also an advisor for HFOSS, IntraHealth Open and Open Source for America, as well as founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries. Stormy joined Mozilla from the GNOME Foundation where she served as executive director. Previously, she worked at OpenLogic where she set up their OpenLogic Expert Community as well as founding the Hewlett-Packard Open Source Program Office. Stormy graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science.

She is passionate about open source software and educates companies and communities on how open source software is changing the software industry. She is a compelling speaker who engages her audiences during and after her presentations - and has spoken at OSCON, GUADEC and other conferences. Her talk "Would you do it again for Free" for example; is an excellent talk on Open Source and motivation.

PyCon 2012 is going to be amazing - we have three excellent keynote and plenary speakers, and more plenary talks coming. We've just closed a record-breaking call for proposals and also have a record breaking number of sponsors. The PyCon team is pulling out all the stops for 2012 - we're working hard to make 2012 a year to talk about for a long time.

- Jesse Noller, PyCon 2012 Chair

PyCon 2012: Announcing New Diamond Sponsor: Heroku, Call for Proposal Ends

2011-10-13T13:46:00.001-04:00

The PyCon team is honored and proud to announce a new Diamond Sponsor for the conference and also that the record-breaking call for proposals has closed.

We are very proud to announce that Heroku — a premiere Platform as a Service provider — has joined PyCon as our final Diamond level sponsor. Heroku joins Google and Dropbox as the premier sponsors of PyCon 2012. Heroku recently announced first-class Python support on their platform; their blog post announcing this support shows that they care about Python and have a long term dedication to the language and its community.

We thank and welcome Heroku, and we look forward to their involvement in PyCon and the Python community.

Just as amazing as a new Diamond sponsor is the fact the PyCon 2012 Call For Proposals is now closed. Speaking as a team, we can say:

“This. Is. Amazing.”

We broke all records on the number of talks (374 as of this writing) and tutorials (89) submitted. Further, the quality, breadth, and depth of those talks and tutorials is stunning. The community has truly outdone itself this year (and the Program Committee has its work cut out for it). We have destroyed every previous measure and record — thanks to you.

As the call for proposals has ended, the efforts to review proposals ramps up. Today is the first official day of review season. We’re seeing incredible submissions with well thought out plans, mind blowing topics, and the high quality the community has come to expect.

Last year was a challenge — we had to pick out about 100 talks, 32 tutorials, and 35 posters from over 250 submissions — but this year the bar has been raised. We’ve got over 450 submissions — a massive increase over last year! Sadly, the session limits will remain about the same, so the program committee has its work cut out for it. It’s always a tough time having to turn submitters away, and it will only get harder for the 2012 conference. We’ve got a lot of hard work ahead to put together the best schedule we can.

As review season begins, we’re looking for help on the review team. If you’re interested in volunteering your time to help examine, question, comment, and vote on submissions, send an introductory email to the PyCon Program Committee. We need all types of people for this: all levels of experience, all industries, all users of Python. If you have the time, we would love to put it to good use!

Once again, thanks for all of your submissions, and thanks to Heroku for joining us. We’re looking forward to working with all of you, and we can’t wait to see how this years schedule shapes up.

Finally, thanks once again to all of our sponsors for supporting this great conference and adding to the excitement (note that we are still accepting sponsors):

Diamond Level: Google, Dropbox and Heroku.
Platinum Level: New Relic, SurveyMonkey, Microsoft, Eventbrite, Nasuni, Gondor.io, and Nebula
Gold Level: Walt Disney Animation Studios, CCP Games, Linode, Enthought, Canonical, Dotcloud, Loggly, Revsys, ZeOmega, Bitly, ActiveState, JetBrains, Caktus, Disqus, Spotify, Snoball, Evite, Mozilla, Lab305, Leapfrog Online, and PlaidCloud
Silver Level: Imaginary Landscape, WiserTogether, Net-ng, Olark, AG Interactive, Bitbucket, Open Bastion, 10Gen, gocept, Lex Machina,fwix, github, Toast Driven, Aarki, Threadless, Cox Media, myYearBook, Accense Technology, Wingware, FreshBooks, Wiser Together,Vocollect, Eucalyptus Systems, ESRI, Shining Panda and BigDoor
Lanyard: Dreamhost
Sprints: Reddit
FLOSS: OSU/OSL, OpenHatch

See you March 7-15, 2012 in Santa Clara, CA!

PyCon DE 2011 - The First

2011-10-11T20:24:00.000-04:00

What a conference. 200 Pythonistas met for the better part of the last week in Leipzig.

We started out with a tutorial day. More than 80 people took advantage of the opportunity to attend 13 tutorials covering diverse topics including algorithms, database programming, web frameworks, scientific data analysis and Python introduction.

In parallel to the tutorials we had a barcamp with about 30 people that discussed different topics and had lightning talks. Topics included web frameworks and SQL/NoSQL compassions.

The core conference had three parallel tracks with 30-minute and 60-minute slots. Our rather rigorous time management worked out: all presenters stayed within their allocated slots. It is a German conference after all. ;) Over three days we had 55 talks. The topics covered a wide range. Web development and scientific applications were the two largest themes but many other topics such as teaching Python, migration to Python 3 or Python compiler were covered.

All talks are on video and will be posted as soon as the upload bandwidth allows. We had a multinational team of video filmers form the US, UK, Norway and Germany. Thanks for your effort and the great job you did.

We had three keynotes with very different focuses, one at each conference day. Jan Lehnhardt of CouchDB fame provided a perspective on the Python community from the outside. Paul Everitt, early-day Zope activist, draw from his large experience of doing things well ahead of its time. He gave some insight into the past that provided lots food for thought how do things right and how to be successful. Andreas Schreiber, scientists at the German Aerospace Center, showed the impressive use of Python in high-tech. The only conclusion can be: "The future
is all Python!".

The weekend was reserved for sprints. About 30 people gathered at the first sprint day and worked on Python, Cython, Zope and other software packages as well as on the Germany Python website. The second day saw a few less people continuing their work.

All technical and organizational things worked out smoothly. The Wi-Fi was stable over the whole conference, not a single complain. People liked the food (part of it was vegan), projectors and microphones worked. Minor problems were solved in record time by the house technicians. The city tour and the social event were well received judging by the feedback from the
participants.

But the most important thing, you could feel the community. Quite a few people knew each other before. But many saw others the first time in real live. It was the biggest gathering of German speaking Python folks after all. The hall way track was always well attended. People were hanging out late to talk, discuss and deepen connections. The atmosphere was positive all over the place. Everybody could feel it. No email, twitter, irc or skype comes even close to live human interaction. After all, this is what made us human over the last few hundred thousand years.

PyCon DE 2011 is also the birthplace of the Python Software Verband e.V. an organization comparable in scope to the PSF but for the German speaking Python community. It's a good start because we can build on many years of organizational experience of DZUG e.V., the German Zope User Group organization that widened its scope to become the Python Software Verband e.V. This should give the organized German speaking Python community a head start.

Everybody left high spirited looking forward to PyCon DE 2012 that will happen. Details coming soon.

Proposals are due tomorrow. Start one today!

2011-10-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

We're pretty lenient around here and don't mind if you start your work the night before, unlike some of our teachers in college. In fact, we don't even mind if you turn in incomplete work by the deadline, as long as you work with us to fill in your details. If it's October 12 somewhere in this world, we'll take whatever proposals you have for PyCon 2012 and we'll start working through them to plan the 2012 conference, taking place March 7-15. PyCon's new home is Santa Clara, CA for the next two years, and we hope you can join!

If you want to be a part of the show but haven't nailed down an idea, don't worry, we already did some research. After emailing over 100 Python user groups and other Python related communities, we sifted through the results and came up with lists of talk and tutorial ideas.

PyCon is a great platform to share your projects, ideas, thoughts, or whatever else you have. The Wednesday October 12 deadline is for all tutorial and talk proposals, so start writing one up if you haven't done so already! Poster proposals are open through January 15, 2012, so focus on your last minute talks and get to posters next week :)

Submit and edit your proposals at http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/. Good luck!

Time is running out: PyCon 2012 submissions end in 4 days!

2011-10-09T10:30:00.001-04:00

Yup! Time is running out for PyCon 2012 talk and tutorial submissions. The call for proposals ends in 4 days!

The good news is that if it is Oct 12th anywhere in the world, you will still be able to submit proposals to the system - but you shouldn't wait until the last minute to get your proposal in.

Proposals can be in rough draft form - the program committee can, and will help you refine and improve your submission as needed. This includes talks and tutorials. Remember - accepted talk and tutorial speakers/instructors do get guaranteed registration - we've set a hard cap on registrations of 1500 attendees again this year, and by all estimations we're going to hit that cap very quickly!

If you need help thinking of ideas - check out our posts on Posters, Talks, and Tutorial ideas - there's also a post about reaching out to people you'd love to have speak at the conference. There's also the #pycontalksiwant search on twitter.

We're looking forward to seeing all of you in Santa Clara. It's going to be a great year!

You Should Propose A Poster

2011-10-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

You really should.

The poster session is perhaps the most interactive portion of the conference, putting the presenters and the audience on the same stage (well, the floor). As the audience comes and goes amongst the rest of the posters, your presentation could go in any direction. The creator of one of your dependencies might show up. One of your competitors might show up. People who don't know anything about your project might show up. People who maximize your project to its fullest extent might show up. Guido van Rossum might show up. You never know.

The layout of the event is very open, with rows of 4'x4' poster boards, leaving plenty of room for gatherings at each board and allowing attendees to flow from poster to poster. Find one you like? Stop by, listen in on the conversation, and chime in with your questions and comments. Not interested in one? Grab a snack and check out another poster. (The delicious daily snack stations usually run near the poster room.)

Whether handwritten or printed, you'll have a chance to share your work with a great community. You can even bring a costume if you want.

What we're looking for in a poster

Posters are a relatively new concept for PyCon, making their third appearance on the schedule in 2012 after two successful runs in Atlanta. Chaired by Vern Ceder, the event has gotten better each time around, and we're expecting another hit in Santa Clara.

A good poster proposal follows all of the usual suggestions. Showing the ability to take a topic in a number of directions is likely of importance, as that's exactly what your audience will do. A solid outline of your topic is probably helpful to show that you're well versed in the topic.

Posters are really an event anyone can be a part of, especially given Python and PyCon's dynamic community. It's a place where beginners can mix it up with experts, and everyone can learn a thing or two. No matter your level of experience, if you've got something to share, there's an audience for you.

A great platform for demos

Tutorials and conference talks are generally the wrong place for demos. Those platforms are usually reserved for established topics and projects. Posters, on the other hand, are an excellent place for demos, especially hands-on ones. In fact, last year there were several demos, including one that caught many people's attention, myself included.

Robbie Clemons brought his Xbox Kinect and demoed an assistive technology project he created to track exercises for those with disabilities. Using several open source libraries, he was able to produce a really cool interactive application that he packed up and brought with him from South Carolina.

His poster does a great job of listing everything you'd want to know about the surface of the topic. He covers the use of Kinect, Python, PyOSCeleton, how those things work, what's wrong with the current tools, what their potential is, and where the work is going. From there, he was open to explain more as attendees asked questions, and he provided a bunch of demos.

I had a chance to ask Robbie a few questions about his experience, and here's what he had to say.

B: Why did you choose a poster for your presentation?

R: I felt like a poster was ideal for a first time presenter (and attendee) at PyCon, because instead of giving a talk for 30 or 45 minutes I could talk more one-on-one with people that were interested in the project. Plus, since the project involved a Kinect I wanted people to be able to come and try it for themselves, and a poster presentation seemed like the best way to get that much interaction.

B: How was the audience reception for your poster?

R: A lot of people really seemed interested and were asking all kinds of questions. People were constantly coming and going, and some would wait until the crowd had thinned out to come back and talk some more or try the demo.

B: How was your overall feeling of the poster session?

R: I thought it was great. I got to talk to a lot of people about a topic I am interested in, show that Python can be used for Kinect hacking, and let some of them try out my project on the spot.

B: Any other thoughts on your poster or the poster session in general, or the conference in general?

R: I think that a poster presentation is a great choice for anyone that doesn't have enough to talk about for a 30 minute presentation, isn't sure how many people would be interested in the topic, would like to let people try a demo, or is looking for a good way to make the transition from attendee to presenter.

Thanks a lot to Robbie -- hopefully we'll see you in Santa Clara.

---

We hope to receive your proposals soon, especially for the poster session. October 12, 2011 is the deadline for talk and tutorial proposals, which is right around the corner. January 15, 2012 is the deadline for posters, so you still have some time. Even if your proposal isn't 100% complete, you can still submit it. The program committee will start the review process after browsing all of the proposals, and they'll be giving you feedback and asking questions, all in the name of a better conference.

Suggest Speakers for PyCon 2012

2011-10-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

As we step within one week of the PyCon proposal deadline, we're hoping the community can help make sure we put together the best conference possible. We've been reaching out to plenty of groups and people we know around the world, and Doug Hellmann recently posted about another approach: having you, the community, reaching out to the speakers you want to see.

His post, titled Choose Your Own (PyCon) Adventure, explains his experience as editor of Python Magazine and how he went about getting writers. One of his most successful ways was to win over potential writers was contacting them directly as individuals.

With that said, suggest away. Got a speaker you want to see? Contact them and see if they'll submit a proposal. Don't know how to get a hold of them? We'll try and track them down and see if they'll propose a talk.

Feel free to leave a comment here on the blog, use the #pycontalksiwant tag on Twitter, or email the program committee. We'll see what we can do.

Even if you can't join us March 7-15 in Santa Clara, CA, you'll probably catch the talks on the web, so everyone is the audience, and everyone is welcomed to suggest the topics and people they want to see at PyCon.

If you already have ideas for a tutorial, talk, or a proposal, October 12, 2011 is your deadline. As long as it's October 12 somewhere in the world, we'll take your submissions. A perfect proposal is always ideal, but don't fret if you're not there yet. We always work with submitters to tweak and finalize their proposals before the review process starts.

PyCon DE 2011 - Three Keynotes: From the Outside, From the Inside, and Scientific

2011-09-29T14:16:00.001-04:00

There will be three keynotes with different perspectives on software development
and Python.

Jan Lehnardt, a CouchDB developer, looks at Python from the outside and analyzes why some people tend to be religious about programming languages and what could be done about it for the benefit of the whole programming community.

Paul Everitt of Zope and Plone fame provides a deep inside into the development of Zope and other long-running, successful Python projects in general.

Andreas Schreiber from the German Aerospace Center sees the future of software engineering in the field of science and engineering in Python-based solutions. Examples from high performance computing demonstrate the power of Python in this field.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial and barcamp day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints.

More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

PyCon DE 2011 - Only 25 Tickets Left

2011-09-28T19:02:00.000-04:00

There are only 25 Tickets left. Online ticket sales will close September 30.
So hurry to get yours now.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial and barcamp day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints.

More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

PyCon DE 2011 - Program as App

2011-09-28T03:26:00.000-04:00

The conference program is now available as an App.

There are 54 talks plus three keynotes and three lightning
talk sessions spread over three days. The topics cover a wide
range. There should be something interesting for everybody
interested in Python.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial and barcamp day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints.

More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

Need Tutorial Ideas?

2011-09-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

To follow-up with last week's post on talk ideas, we've done some digging into what topics would make for good tutorials. The resulting lists contain a lot of the same topics as talk ideas, with a few interesting requests, including "anything from [plenary speaker] David Beazley".

We're now 15 days away from the October 12 deadline for proposals, and we don't want to start the review process without your proposal. PyCon's success depends on you, the community, to keep cranking out the great presentations you're known for. Tutorials are an especially great time at PyCon, as they're an excellent chance to expand your skill set thanks to the great educators of the community presenting their three-hour sessions at a bargain price.

If you're interested in flexing your teaching skills but need help narrowing down a topic, we recently polled the Python community to find out what they want. When asked, "Are there any particular subjects that you would like to see more tutorials about?", we found the following.

Desktop Software

Dabo framework
OS integration
Packaging and deployment
Python on Windows
PyQt, PyGTK, wxPython and other GUI frameworks

Language Integration

Advanced ctypes usage
Wrapping C, C++, and Fortran libraries
Python's C-API
Cython and Shedskin
Writing C/C++ for Python programmers

Performance

Profiling and analysis
Designing for speed
Writing optimal Python code

Web

Frameworks: Django, web2py, Pylons, Pyramid
Templating
WSGI - past, present, and future
Servers: Tornado, Hookbox

Concurrency and Parallelism

Celery, RabbitMQ, AMQP
multiprocessing and multithreading
gevent, eventlet, Twisted
microthreads, coroutines, generators
greenlet, Stackless

Entertainment

pygame, nodebox
2D and 3D graphics programming

Software Engineering

All forms of testing
Library design
Building applications from the ground up

Python Implementations

PyPy, IronPython, Jython
Writing a Python compiler

Others

Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning
Devops tools
Robotics
Processing large amounts of data
SimPy

As with our previous post, note that this information isn't the canonical list of everything everyone wants to see, and any lack of a given topic just means our small sampling didn't request it. As with last time, we noticed some glaring omissions, including no requests for "cloud computing", a generally hot topic at PyCon. For comparison, last year's tutorial schedule included two cloud tutorials. Hopefully the list helps as a brainstorm session if you're looking for that last push to fill out a proposal.

You have 15 days to get your proposals in at http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/, and remember, you can still clean up and edit your proposals after the October 12, 2011 due date. In fact, we expect that most proposals will see changes as the review process begins. PyCon's program committee is tasked with putting together the best tutorial, talk, and poster lineups available, so they'll act as another set of eyes to help you out. From assisting in organization to helping flesh out an idea, the program committee is there to provide constructive criticism and make sure you get the most out of your proposal. Together, we can make PyCon 2012 a success for all.

Need Talk Ideas?

2011-09-22T09:38:00.000-04:00

As you may know, the deadline for PyCon proposals is approaching. We're within 20 days of the October 12 deadline, so start finalizing your drafts, or for some of you procrastinators in the group, start thinking about what you want to submit! If you're just getting started, have a look at our call for proposals.

We're accepting proposals for tutorials, talks, and posters, so think about where your ideas fit in and submit away. For 2012, we've imposed a limit of two accepted proposals per person, but there's no limit to how many you can submit. We want to hear all of your ideas, but realize that we all need to share the stage.

If you're looking for ideas, we recently ran a survey of the Python community and found some interesting results which we've curated below. We've done some massaging of the data to pick out the core ideas and come up with what we feel is an accurate list of topics that people were asking for.

When asked, "Are there any particular subjects that you would like to see more talks about?", the respondents listed the following.

Web

Frameworks: Django, web2py, Pyramid, Flask, Plone, AppEngine
General web development, API development
Servers: Tornado
Technologies: web sockets

Entertainment

Game and graphics programming, 2D and 3D

Networking

Libraries: twisted, ZeroMQ, Celery, gevent, pipelines
General network programming, using plain sockets

Infrastructure

Performance and Scalability techniques, tools
Cloud technologies
Sysadmin/devops tools
Memory profiling: controlling memory use of python VM

Databases

NoSQL databases
Object Relational Mapers: SQLAlchemy, SQLObject
SQLite
DB API

Software Engineering

Best practices: design patterns, idioms, avoiding code smells, and NIH
Distributed systems
Concurrent and Parallel programming
Testing: unit testing, continuous integration
Data mining and visualization
Documentation
Internationalization and Localization
Parsers and code generators
Metaclasses

Science and Engineering

SciPy and NumPy
Scientific computing and data analytics
Bioinformatics, Genetics
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Computer Vision

Python Implementations

PyPy, IronPython, Jython
How to contribute
Python 3 progress
Embedded Python
The language: internals, improvements, design strategies
The status of the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)
Targeting other languages through the CPython VM
Python on Windows

Working with other languages

C for Python programmers
PyObjC
IronPython, Jython

Project Distribution

Packaging and distribution
Deployment
PyPI mirroring
Windows - compiling to single executable

Desktop

Interactive application building
PyGTK, PyQT, PySide, Dabo
Large-scale desktop applications

Others

Community Management
GIS
Natural Language Processing
Python in education, law, business, design, every-day problems
Python for non-programmers
ERP
Health and Medical technologies
Comparing to Ruby, Java, C++, and others

When looking at the list, keep in mind that the appearance or disappearance of a topic doesn't mean a whole lot. The fact that people tend to answer to their strengths, e.g., web programmers want web stuff and desktop programmers want desktop stuff, coupled with a limited number of responses, means we may not have heard from a perfect sample of the community. You might notice that you don't see "security" in there, yet it's an important topic that we know for sure a lot of people are interested in. Take the suggestions above as a brainstorm, not the be-all end-all list of what we want at PyCon 2012.

If you think you have an idea for a talk, and we hope you do, sign up and submit it at http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/. You have until October 12, 2011 to submit your proposals, and keep in mind that your proposal is not set in stone when you hit submit. You're able to edit your proposals after submission, and the PyCon program committee will be providing feedback to help submitters fine-tune the details of each proposal before talk selection begins.

We're going to do a follow-up post with the same information on tutorials, so stay tuned.

Thanks to Mathieu Agopian and Ken Whitesell for contributing to this.

Announcing the first PyCon 2012 Plenary Talk - David Beazley, Mad Genius

2011-09-13T12:28:00.001-04:00

I am very pleased to announce our first Plenary talk for PyCon 2012 - David Beazley. David should be very familiar to everyone in the Python community - he's a prolific trainer, developer, author and, well - mad genius. He is the brain behind the mind blowing Python GIL talk at Chicago Chipy meeting and the followup PyCon 2010 talk on understanding the Python GIL as well as his diabolical PyCon 2011 "Using Python 3 to Build a Cloud Computing Service for my Superboard II".

David is an independent software developer and book author living in the city of Chicago. Primarily working on programming tools, provide custom software development, and teach practical programming courses for software developers, scientists, and engineers. He is best known for his work with the Python programming language where he have created several open-source packages (e.g., Swig and PLY) and authored the acclaimed Python Essential Reference.

I've written David a blank check on subject matter - I think what I proposed to him was "technical - and diabolical". Given David's skill and track record, I am sure we're going to be far from disappointed.

You can see more about David at his website, or on twitter.

Announcing the first PyCon 2012 Keynote speaker: Paul Graham

2011-09-07T10:34:00.001-04:00

I am pleased to announce the first keynote speaker for PyCon 2012 - Paul Graham of Y Combinator and Lisp/Arc fame. PyCon 2012 represents the 10th annual PyCon US - and on this special occasion, I am proud to have Paul back as a keynote speaker (he did the keynote at PyCon 2003).

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and investor, and recently well-known as one of the founders of Y Combinator. With PyCon held right in the heart of Silicon Valley, it seemed fitting to welcome Paul back for not just that it is the 10th anniversary, but also to celebrate the many startups and entrepreneurs that have come out of PyCon.

One of Paul’s signature essays is “The Python Paradox” - describing his experience that people doing interesting and innovative things are frequently attracted to Python. Paul’s insight has proven true, as Y Combinator has funded and advised numerous Python-using companies, from Dropbox to Disqus, to Reddit, Justin.tv and Convore. The list is sure to expand as Y Combinator is currently accepting applications for their winter cycle.

In addition to this, I am also pleased to announce that we will be "bringing back" the "Startup Row" we had at PyCon 2011 - we heard the feedback from the companies we showcased, and the attendees and based on that - Startup Row 2011 was a smashing success which we want to once again bring to PyCon.

Applications for Startup Row 2011 will open in mid October.

Currently, our Call for Proposals is in full swing - and we encourage everyone to submit talks, tutorials and posters for PyCon 2012; right now we're on target for a no-holds-barred-break-all-the-records conference, and we want everyone to be part of it.

Finally, if you missed it - we've also announced the new PyCon 2012 Jobs Fair page featuring job listing from PyCon sponsors - keep an eye on it, sponsors are adding jobs every day - this is a free add-on benefit for all silver level and above sponsors. Interested in being a sponsor? See the PyCon sponsors page and prospectus.

Feel free to also discuss at Reddit, and Hacker News!

- Jesse Noller, PyCon 2012 Chair

PyCon DE 2011 - Talks Timetable Published

2011-09-02T11:33:00.000-04:00

The timetable of talks is online.

There are 54 talks plus three keynotes and three lightning
talk sessions spread over three days. The topics cover a wide
range. There should be something interesting for everybody
interested in Python.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial and barcamp day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints.

More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

Announcing the PyCon 2012 "Jobs Fair" page, sponsor benefit.

2011-09-01T07:35:00.001-04:00

One of the things that the PyCon team struggles with each year is how to maximize the visibility of our sponsors - not only do they financially support PyCon, but many of them contribute back to our open source community, hire you - members of the community - and overall help lift all of us up. Maximizing visibility though, can be difficult. There are lines we should not cross due to the community and people focus of PyCon - it is a fine line to walk between maximizing sponsors' return on investment, and the needs and interests of attendees, and the community.

This is why I am happy to announce today, we, the PyCon team feel that we have found another great way to both showcase our sponsors, without whom the conference would not be possible, and also provide something of need and interest to the Python/PyCon community. Today, we're unveiling the "PyCon Jobs Fair" page. This is a new page on the PyCon website dedicated to job listings from our sponsors and will list open, active job openings from PyCon sponsors, in as much detail as the sponsors desire.

Starting today, all Silver (and above) sponsor packages include this benefit free of charge. (So if you aren't a sponsor yet - come join us!) All existing sponsors have already begun uploading jobs that they have open. We continue to encourage companies looking to hire Python talent to leverage the Python Jobs Board - but PyCon in and of itself represents a unique ability for those people looking for jobs to not just apply over the internet, but to also meet face to face with potential employers at the conference.

Time and time again, we hear stories of friends hiring, or being hired at PyCon, or due to work at PyCon (such as a giving a talk, or tutorial) - we hear from you, the community that you wish you had more visibility - in advance - to those companies who will be at PyCon, and actively hiring.

In the same breath, we have spoken to many sponsors and once again, we hear a common statement "We come to PyCon to pick up the best talent." - PyCon, with its potential 1500+ attendees represents a unique and special recruitment location for sponsors. A good recruiter could cost you tens of thousands of dollars to help you find, meet and woo potential candidates, while a PyCon sponsorship not only gets you that recruitment venue, but also provides to you community good will, name recognition and much more.

We feel that this makes an excellent addition to the set of community and sponsor features we offer - not to mention an amazing conference. Our sponsors are hiring - and we want you to know!

I'm very happy to be releasing this for both the sponsors and the community. Our goal as a team is to make sure that this is the best PyCon for both groups than ever before. We will continually strive to achieve this through increased involvement with our sponsors and increased, continual dialog with the community on what they want to see at the conference.

I encourage all of you to keep a close eye on the main sponsors page - new ones are popping up quickly, and now also on the new jobs page, I expect more positions to be added over the upcoming weeks and the entries to be changing with some frequency. Existing sponsors can log into their accounts on the site and upload descriptions immediately (we've put up help and guidelines here).

I'm also looking forward to carry this idea forward - and begin work on planning a "jobs fair" focused portion/session for the conference in addition to our existing Expo Hall.

Thank You.

Jesse Noller - Chair, Python 2012

Writing a Good Proposal

2011-08-30T09:46:00.003-04:00

As you may know, the call for proposals for PyCon 2012 is open, and we're waiting for you to submit your best talk, tutorial, and poster ideas at http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/. If you haven't submitted yet, don't worry, you have 42 days and we'll give you some tips along the way. If you already submitted, take a chance to fine tune your proposal with some tips on each section of the proposal form.

Title

The first and sometimes last thing your prospective audience will see is the title. With PyCon being a multi-track conference, no matter what kind of proposal you're writing, you're going to be up against others when it comes time for the big show. Tutorials usually run two at a time, talks run five at a time, and posters run all at once. If you want to attract attendees, you'll need to hook them with a solid title.

Kind

With this year's call for proposals being a unified format, we're using a unified proposal page for all types. Each type occurs in a different setting and has different attributes, so be sure to submit the right kind of proposal.

Tutorial
Tutorials open up the conference on Wednesday March 7, 2012 with a two day series of classroom-style education. Presenters have three hours to teach 20-60 students on their topic, and receive compensation for their work. Most tutorials include interactive examples, relevant source code, and printed course materials.
Talk
Talks are the main feature of PyCon and start on Friday March 9, 2012 and run through Sunday. In 2011, we had 95 talks spread over the three days, with five talks running at the same time. Durations run either 30 or 45 minutes, and we've brought back the "extreme" track.
Panel
Panels are multi-speaker talks on a certain topic. In the past we've had panels on IDEs, Python implementations, educational use, and many more. If you're planning a panel, make sure you have other speakers on board, as you'll want to add their speaker profile at the end.
Poster
Posters are a great way to show your latest project, organization, or anything you want to display to the community. You get a 4'x4' space to show your work, and many past presentations have also included interactive demos. It's a great event to be a part of, and allows for a more intimate experience with attendees over a traditional talk.

Audience

Like the past PyCon schedules we've put together, 2012 is likely to provide quite the exercise in scheduling on the attendee side. Five options at any given time on five topics by five speakers. It's a lot to choose from, and our usual range of first timers to 20 year vets want a peek into what level you'll be speaking at.

You don't want a beginner expecting a beginner talk and leaving your experienced talk without understanding a thing, do you? For every-one's sake, try to be as accurate as possible in your assessment of the target audience. The organizers will likely use it to ensure the proposed talk matches the level. The attendees will use it to figure out if they want to attend or not.

Extreme

Want to skip the appetizer and dig right into the main course? Extreme talks skip the introductory parts of a presentation and get right to the topic at hand. If you're looking to pack a punch with your talk, going the extreme route might be for you. For more details, see http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/extreme/.

Duration

At PyCon 2011 we had room for 95 talks, 20 of which were of the 45 minute variety, leaving the remaining 75 talks to be 30 minutes in length. We try to be accommodating to duration requests, but keep in mind that we only have a limited amount of extended time slots. If you can fill a 45 minute slot, by all means, request it and we'll see what we can do.

Description

The description is your chance to reel in a prospective attendee that your talk is for them. Keep it short and sweet -- you only get 400 words and they'll be printed in the conference program, featured on the website, and likely used for video uploads.

A good description leads the reader right into their seat without asking for it. Introduce your topic, share a few important pieces of information, and sell your conclusion. A good title paired with a good description leaves no doubt in an attendee's mind that your talk is the one they want to see.

Abstract

The abstract is your way to show us what exactly you're working with. There's no limit on the content here, and you're able to use Markdown to jazz it up. Add as much or as little detail as you feel you need in order for the program committee to judge your talk on. Pro tip: we're judging your talk exactly as you have submitted it. We can't assume you will cover anything you haven't submitted. In fact, we try to make as few assumptions as possible, so try to be thorough.

We've seen several abstract formats, with one of the more popular being an outline-style. Previous submitters have broken down into two or three level deep outlines, sometimes including time estimates on how long each section will take. The more conversational paragraph-style has also been popular, summarizing the submitter's story similar to a blog post.

No matter how you write your abstract, know that it's your canvas to show us that you have a topic that PyCon attendees and the worldwide online audience want to see. We want to put together the best conference available, so please join in helping us to do that.

For more details, check out the call for proposals and the speaker pages on our site. Proposals are due in 42 days, so get to work. We're looking forward to receiving your submissions and working with you to tweak them and create the best conference ever.

PyCon DE 2011 - Only two Days for Early Birds

2011-08-29T03:18:00.000-04:00

There are only two days left to take advantage of the early bird rate for
PyCon DE 2011. Don't forget to register for the conference and for tutorials
by August 31, 2011.

There is a very interesting program with a variety of talks.
The talk schedule will be announced in a few days.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints. The program will be announced in a few days.
More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

PyCon Finland Registration Is Now Open

2011-08-28T07:07:00.004-04:00

from community import awesomeness

PYCON FINLAND 2011 Mon - Tue October 17th to 18th @ ICT Building, Turku!

Python Finland association welcomes you to the second annual PyCon Finland conference! The coolest Finnish PyCon is to be held at ICT Building, Turku on October 17th and 18th!

At PyCon Finland you’ll find out what’s going on in the Python world right now. The conference spans two days: first day is for talks and the second day for tutorials and sprints. There will be great speakers from Finland as well as from abroad, and you’ll have an excellent chance to get to know the Finnish Python scene! Conference is both for people new to Python as well as for people with superior Python skills!

Go to http://fi.pycon.org and enroll now!

PROGRAM

Monday October 17th
Two tracks of of talks, lightning talks and keynote by Mike Bradshaw (see details on web page)
Tuesday October 18th
Sprints & Tutorials on various topics and the bi-annual meeting of Python Finland organization

The detailed program is available on our website at http://fi.pycon.org/2011/#schedule

PRICING AND ENROLLMENT

All tickets cover all the sessions on both days and coffee on both days.

100 EUR – For corporate attendees, whos attendance fee is paid by their employer. Includes the conference dinner, lunch on monday and coffees on both days.
50 EUR – For regular attendee. Does not include dinner.
10 EUR – For students. Does not include dinner or lunch.

Enrollment closes two weeks prior to the conference (3rd of September). All prices are VAT exempt

CANCELLATION POLICY

25 EUR cancellation fee until September 15th.
No return after September 15th.

We're Ready for Your Proposals

2011-08-19T09:17:00.002-04:00

Maybe you’ve been to PyCon before, maybe you’ve seen the videos online, maybe you’ve even seen our Call for Proposals for PyCon 2012. Maybe you asked your boss for time off March 7-15, 2012 to join us in Santa Clara, CA for PyCon. Well, maybe you’re not that far along, but maybe you’re thinking about it. Here’s one thing you should think about: You should propose a talk. Yes, I said it. You, the reader, should propose a talk at PyCon.

You’re probably thinking, “I don’t even know this guy and he thinks I should propose a talk?” Nope, I probably don’t know you, but you probably know something I don’t know. You’ve probably had experiences I haven’t had. You probably work on some really cool stuff that I don’t work on. You’re what PyCon needs. We’re looking for members of the Python community to talk about what they’re up to. New or old, beginner or expert, the conference starts and ends with you.

Each year, PyCon’s schedule is not only made up of a wide array of topics, but of approaches. There’s always plenty of “how” talks: how to use a library, how to write documentation, how to bring Python into your organization. We get a number of “why” talks: why you should test, why you should look at alternative implementations, why you should look at Python 3. There’s always a few “status” talks: status of Unicode in Python 3, status of packaging, status of various projects. There’s also panels, investigations, crazy demos, and a lot more. You certainly know some how’s and why’s, might have some status to show, could chip in to a panel, share your best practices on a topic, or present a deep dive on a problem. You could also do something totally new. In fact, we’d love that. We need that.

If you’re short on topic ideas, the #pycontalksiwant tag on Twitter is starting to fill up with some good ones. @nedbat wants to know what Python could learn from other languages. @doughellmann wants to know some devops tips and tricks. @BigJasonWebb wants to know how to get an organization to use Python 3, and @johnmarshall is wondering how people are upgrading to Python 3.

Take a look and see if you can contribute to any of those topics -- the talks aren’t going to write themselves. Any contribution here helps, especially in adding the topics you’d be interested in seeing, since we haven’t yet figured out mind reading.

If you’re ready to submit a talk, check out http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/ and our Call for Proposals. You’ve got 53 days to submit your proposals, and you can follow along here or on twitter for regular updates. We have a lot of surprises up our sleeves!

ConFoo 2012 in Montreal: Python charmers wanted

2011-08-17T07:30:00.002-04:00

ConFoo is a conference on several aspects of the Web held from Feb 29th to March 2nd in Montréal, the host city of PyCon 2014-2015.

Do you have Python solutions for real world problems? Are you the author of a framework? Do you want to share your cutting-edge approach part of today's technology vanguard? Are you summoning Quetzalcoatl to tame your server farm before your first cup of coffee? ConFoo wants to learn from you.

ConFoo 2012 is looking for talk proposals by September 2nd.

More on:
http://confoo.ca/en/news/confoo-2012-call-for-papers-is-now-open

La 3è édition de ConFoo, conférence internationale sur les technologies Web, se tiendra à Montréal du 29 février au 2 mars 2012. http://confoo.ca/fr

ConFoo aborde diverses problématiques liées aux technologies Web et couvre de nombreux langages (PHP, Python, Ruby, .Net, Java). ConFoo est une conférence pour développeurs, gestionnaires et tout intervenant dans l’industrie des technologies web.

Vous avez des solutions Python qui règlent des problèmes réels? Vous êtes l’auteur d’un framework? Vous voulez partagez votre approche à la fine pointe de l’avant-garde technologique? Vous domptez des fermes de serveurs avec un fouet en cuir de Python?

Révélez aux Montréalais toute la puissance de Python en déposant votre proposition de conférence d’ici le 2 septembre 2011. Pour plus d’information: http://confoo.ca/fr/news/confoo-2012-call-for-papers-is-now-open

Pycon 2012 Official Call for Proposals!

2011-08-15T07:57:00.001-04:00

PyCon 2012, the tenth annual Python conference, is now accepting proposals! We’re looking for proposals for tutorials, sessions, and posters. PyCon 2012 will run March 7th - 15th.

The proposal deadline is October 12, 2011. Please submit proposals at the PyCon speaker page.

About PyCon 2012

PyCon 2012 is the tenth annual Python Conference. It will be held in Santa Clara, California, from March 7th to March 15th. The conference itself runs March 9th - 11th; two days of tutorials precede the conference, and four days of sprints follow.

Last year’s PyCon set records for attendance and talk submissions, and we’re looking forward to an even bigger and better conference this year!

Who should submit a proposal?

Anyone! We’re looking for as broad a cross-section of the Python community as possible.

We’re looking for both experienced conference speakers and people new to technical conferences; industry professionals and hobbyists; entrepreneurs, researchers, and system administrators. You’ve probably learned something that other Python users could benefit from, so come to PyCon and share your story. Maybe you’ve written the next great data mining package, or you have a case study to share, or you’ve learned something about how to start a Python users’ group, or you just want to help novices learn how to choose a Python web framework.

If you have something to tell your fellow Python programmers, PyCon 2012 is your chance.

You don’t have to be a professional speaker to give a talk at PyCon. Presenters are volunteers from all walks of life and all levels of experience. From hardcore hackers to educators to hobbyists, anyone with something to say and the desire to say it is welcome.

If you have a topic idea but you’re not sure exactly how to turn it into a killer session, let us know! The program committee is happy to work with you to help your session shine.

What kind of sessions can I give?

PyCon 2012 will feature three types of talks:

Talks: Traditional sessions during the main conference. Most sessions are 30 minutes long; a few are 45. All levels of talks from from novice-level overviews to advanced topics are welcome. By popular demand, we’re bringing back the “extreme” track featuring advanced, in-depth, “details only” technical talks.
For videos of talks from previous years, see: The Python Miro Community
For more information on "Extreme Talks" see: http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/extreme/.
Tutorials: Tutorials are 3-hour classes given on the two days (Wednesday and Thursday) preceding the conference. Any topic related to Python will be considered. The selectioncommittee strives to offer a wide range of topics and skill levels. Leading a tutorial gives you extra time to cover material and present it to a roomful of people who have paid extra to learn from you. Tutorials take extra preparation, usually including class handouts, but you will be paid (modestly) for your efforts; in 2011, teachers were paid $1500 per class. More importantly, you will help others advance their knowledge of Python. You may submit multiple tutorial proposals, but there is a limit of two classes per teacher.
For more detailed information including topic ideas see: http://us.pycon.org/2012/tutorials/proposals.
Posters: The poster session provides another way of presenting that encourages more one-on-one communication between the presenter and the audience. Poster sessions are particularly suited for topics of interest to a subset of the community, and we anticipate these sessions will provide an "incubator" for further discussions.
The presentation space is one side of a standalone poster board that you can tack posters or individual pages onto. A poster is a 4' x 4' graphical summary of the key points about your project which forms the starting point for a brief and interactive presentation to interested viewers.
For more information, see http://us.pycon.org/2012/posters or check out this informal video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dyzaZjwdfE.
Posters will be accepted on a rolling basis until the limit is reached or January 15. We expect that the limit for the poster session will be 35-40, but this may change depending on space available.
For a list of last year's posters, check out: http://us.pycon.org/2011/schedule/lists/posters/

Conference registration and travel

PyCon is entirely volunteer-organized and run, and works hard to keep costs as low as possible. This includes having an “everyone pays” policy: everyone, from the conference chair on down, pays for their own ticket and travel expenses. That said, we do appreciate those who share their knowledge at the conference: Speakers with accepted proposals will receive early bird pricing and have a guaranteed spot at the conference even if we hit the attendance cap. For more details on registration pricing, see: http://us.pycon.org/2012/registration/

If early bird pricing and travel would still be a burden, PyCon also has a large financial aid program to help those who can’t afford to attend PyCon. Speakers will be prioritized in the financial aid program. For more details, see http://us.pycon.org/2012/assistance/.

Timeline and deadlines

Please don’t delay! The proposal window is long, but the sooner you submit a proposal, the more time we'll have to help you put forward the best proposal. The program committee will begin reviewing proposals and giving feedback as talks are submitted This means early proposals will get more feedback, and you’ll have a better chance of getting accepted.

Proposals for talks and tutorials will be accepted until October 12th. The list of selected talks and tutorials will be finalized by the end of November. Posters will be accepted until January 15th.

Other important dates:

October 12, 2012: Talk and tutorial proposals due.
December 1, 2012: Selected talks and tutorials announced.
December 11, 2012: Conference schedule announced; early bird registration opens.
January 15, 2012: Poster proposals due.
January 20, 2012: Early-bird registration closes.
February 1, 2012: Posters announced.
March 7-8, 2012: Tutorial days at PyCon.
March 9-11, 2012: PyCon main conference.
March 12-15, 2011: PyCon sprint days.

Thank you!

Submit your proposal at http://us.pycon.org/2012/speaker/ and thanks for helping us make PyCon 2012 the best one yet!

For additional contact information, see: http://us.pycon.org/2012/about/

PyCon Australia 2011: Registration Closing Soon!

2011-08-10T23:34:00.001-04:00

Registrations for PyCon Australia 2011 are closing soon!

The conference is just over a week away, so we need final numbers in the next few days. If you're planning to attend, please register now!

PyCon Australia is Australia's only conference dedicated exclusively to the Python programming language, and will be held at the Sydney Masonic Center over the weekend of August 20 and 21. See below for more information and updates on:

1. Registration Closing Soon
2. Coffee
3. Hosting Panel
4. More Sponsors Announced

Please pass this message on to those you feel may be interested.

Registration Closing Soon

Full Registrations for the conference will be closing on:

Monday 15th August: Full Registrations close

That's only five days away, so register now to be sure you don't miss out.

By request, we will still allow latecomers to register until just before the conference. However, since it's after the deadline for catering and printing, you won't be entitled to a T-shirt or a seat at the conference dinner:

Thursday 18th August: Last-Minute Registrations close

Please note that we will not accept registrations at the door.

So don't delay, register now at:

http://pycon-au.org/reg

Coffee

Thanks to gold sponsors Arclight, we will be able to provide one of the most requested additions to this year's conference: Coffee!

Yes, Arclight have generously agreed to provide a free coffee cart for the duration of the conference. And there was much rejoicing.

Hosting Panel

Saturday evening will feature an informal panel discussion with several hosting providers. Come and hear from our hosting panel about why their services are right for hosting your next Python project! Each group will give a quick 5 minute spiel, to be followed by a casual drink before the conference dinner.

This event is happening in a private area at Mr B's pub, across the street from the SMC. As this is a licensed venue anyone under 18 will have to be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

More Sponsors Announced

We are delighted to confirm that the Django Software Foundation and Ninefold have joined as Silver sponsors. In addition, Arclight have upgraded to Gold Sponsorship, Anchor have agreed to sponsor video production, and GitHub will be sponsoring internet access.

Thanks once again to the following companies for their continuing support of Python and for helping to make PyCon Australia 2011 a reality:

Gold: Google
Gold: ComOps
Gold: Arclight

Video: Anchor

Silver: Enthought
Silver: Python Software Foundation
Silver: WingWare
Silver: Bitbucket by Atlassian
Silver: Microsoft
Silver: Django Software Foundation
Silver: Ninefold

Internet: GitHub

Thanks also to Linux Australia, who provide the overarching legal and organisational structure for PyCon Australia.

PyCon DE 2011 - List of Talks Published

2011-08-08T16:45:00.000-04:00

Now you can have a look at the list of talks that will be presented at PyCon DE 2011.

We had lots of proposals and went through a thorough review process to
to find the best talks representing a wide range of Python topics.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints. The program will be announced in a few days.
More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Registration is now open. You can register for the conference and for tutorials.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

PyCon US 2012 Guidance Survey

2011-08-08T11:52:00.001-04:00

On behalf of the PyCon US 2012 staff, I am pleased to announce that we have put up a Guidance Survey for PyCon 2012. It was universally agreed amongst the PyCon staff that we wanted to hear from you - all the people out there in the community - and that we wanted to garner as much feedback about your PyCon experiences and suggestions as we could.

Your feedback will help us make PyCon 2012 - and 2013, and all the other future PyCon "US" (Remember, we're in Montreal Canada in 2014!) that much better. Your opinion counts.

All results are anonymous - please take a moment to help us help the community, and make PyCon 2012 a knockout success!

The survey can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/pycon2012_launch_survey.

Thank you.

- Jesse Noller - Chair, PyCon 2012

Barcamp at PyCon DE 2011

2011-08-05T08:42:00.000-04:00

There is a Barcamp on October 4 embedded into the PyCon DE.

You are invited to participate in the event. Please register using this Etherpad.
You can also help to organize and shape the barcamp using the Etherpad.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints. The program will be announced in a few days.
More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

PyCon US 2012 Official Launch!

2011-08-03T07:59:00.001-04:00

Today the PyCon staff and the Python Software Foundation are happy to officially kick off PyCon 2012, the 10th annual PyCon US conference, happening in Santa Clara, March 7th-15th. We are very proud to launch with a vibrant, refreshed site, updating the overall look and feel and reflecting the energy of the conference and community.

PyCon 2012 is going to pull out all the stops! We want to host the best community conference in the Python community, bar none. Holding the conference in California, so near the biggest technology hub in the United States and with easy access to international travel, means that we expect to break our previous records for attendance.

We’ve completely overhauled all the aspects of the conference web site - including the design, organization, and content. We have added a diversity statement, which we feel is in keeping with the spirit that PyCon has always held, as well as an official code of conduct for participants.

We will send out the call for talks, tutorials, and poster sessions very soon. We are starting the review process much earlier than in years past, and with more documentation to make it easier to prepare a winning proposal. We also have a bigger team handling talk, tutorial, and poster reviews than ever before, to provide you with more feedback and guidance during the review process.

We are extremely proud to be launching with an amazing array of (24!) sponsors as well. Google and Dropbox are our first top Diamond Sponsors, followed by Microsoft, Nasuni Corporation and Gondor (by Eldarion) at the Platinum level. Walt Disney Animation Studios, Bitly, Revsys, Canonical, Loggly, CCP Games, Linode, DotCloud, ZeOmega and Snoball.com are all Gold sponsors.

American Greetings Interactive, Github, Accense Technology, Cox Media Group, myYearBook, Wingware, 10Gen/MongoDB, net-ng and The Open Bastion have signed on as Silver level sponsors. We are also pleased to have OSU/OSL and OpenHatch.org as F/OSS partners.

With these, and the sponsors to come - and the amazing array of talks, tutorials, poster sessions, lightning talks, open spaces and sprints we are going to have, this will surely be a landmark 10th PyCon.

You can read more, and see a list of all of our sponsors at: http://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors. If you or your company are interested in being sponsors, please see http://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors/info/. We welcome sponsor of any size and in any industry - Python is a wide, diverse, and amazing community.

You can find out more about the location and conference location on the excellent venue page, track our progress on the official PyCon blog and on twitter via the #pycon hashtag, and by following the @pycon user or @jessenoller. You can also see who else is attending on Lanyrd, and catch us on IRC at irc.freenode.net - #pycon.

If you have any comments, concerns - or want to get involved, please contact me (Jesse Noller, PyCon Chair) at jnoller@python.org or the pycon-organizers@python.org mailing list.

Thank you.

Jesse Noller, Chair - PyCon 2012

PyCon DE 2011 - Registration is Open

2011-08-02T15:25:00.002-04:00

Registration is now open. You can register for the conference and for tutorials.

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

A tutorial day is followed by three days with talks in three parallel tracks and
two days of sprints. The program will be announced in a few days.
More details can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

PyCon JP 2011 - Registration is Open

2011-08-01T05:31:00.000-04:00

The registration of PyCon JP 2011 is now open!

PyCon JP 2011 will be held at Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology University in Tokyo, 27th(Sat.) August.

The Program are 3 tracks, single English track and 2 Japanese tracks.

The fee is 2,000 JPY. For participants coming from outside of Japan: Payment is available via PayPal. Please go to the PayPal section below and follow the instructions, then fill the form in section 2. Do not forget to provide your transaction ID in the "Serial No." field.

Registration (and payment): Click here to jump to the registration page

Additionally, the next day 28th(Sun.) August, it will be held Sprint event at the same place.

For more information on http://2011.pycon.jp/english-information, please write us via email (contact at pycon dot jp).

PyCon Australia 2011: Registration Back Online

2011-07-27T21:27:00.000-04:00

After a brief hiatus, registrations for PyCon Australia 2011 are back online! We have extended some registration deadlines to compensate for the outage.

PyCon Australia is Australia's only conference dedicated exclusively to the Python programming language, and will be held at the Sydney Masonic Center over the weekend of August 20 and 21. See below for more information and updates on:

1. Registration Back Online
2. Call for Volunteers
3. Convore Group
4. Thanks to our Sponsors

Please pass this post on to those you feel may be interested.

Registration Back Online

Registrations are back online after a brief PayPal outage:

http://pycon-au.org/reg

Our apologies to those inconvenienced. PayPal put a temporary lock on our account while they were reviewing our status as a non-profit. Many thanks to the hard-working folks at Linux Australia for following up with all the necessary paperwork.

To compensate for the outage we have adjusted some of our registration deadlines. The new dates are:

1st August: T-Shirt order finalised
8th August: Special dietary needs finalised
15th August: Last chance to get tickets!

Remember, registrations must close on Monday the 15th of August, and we will not be accepting registrations at the door.

So don't delay, register now at:

http://pycon-au.org/reg

Call for Volunteers

A community conference such as PyCon just can't run without the work of
many generous volunteers. If you're interested in helping out, please
send us an email at:

pycon-reg@pycon-au.org

We're currently looking for people to help with the following:

Session Staff
(see http://pycon-au.org/2011/helping/session_staff/)

Bag Packers
(Friday afternoon; also just general setup of the venue)

Registration Desk

Convore Group

We've set up a group on Convore for anyone wanting to chat about the conference:

https://convore.com/pycon-au-2011/

There are already some good tips from Sydney-siders who know the area around the venue. If you have any more, please share!

Don't forget, you can also follow us on Twitter for the latest updates:

https://twitter.com/pyconau
https://twitter.com/#!/search/pyconau

Thanks to our Sponsors

Thanks once again to the following companies for their continuing support of Python and for helping to make PyCon Australia 2011 a reality:

Gold: Google <http://www.google.com.au/>
Gold: ComOps <http://www.comops.com.au/>

Silver: Anchor <http://anchor.com.au/>
Silver: Enthought <http://www.enthought.com/>
Silver: Python Software Foundation <http://www.python.org/psf/>
Silver: WingWare <http://www.wingware.com/>
Silver: Arclight <http://www.arclight.com.au/>
Silver: Bitbucket by Atlassian <http://bitbucket.org/>
Silver: Microsoft <http://www.microsoft.com/>

Thanks also to Linux Australia, who provide the overarching legal and organisational structure for PyCon Australia.

PyCon Australia 2011: Schedule Announced

2011-07-15T02:26:00.003-04:00

The official schedule for PyCon Australia 2011 has been announced!

This year's conference will feature 3 fantastic keynotes, 7 introductory classroom sessions, and 26 presentations on topics as diverse as web programming, benchmarking, social issues and API design.

PyCon Australia is Australia's only conference dedicated exclusively to the Python programming language, and will be held at the Sydney Masonic Center over the weekend of August 20 and 21. See below for more information and updates on:

1. Conference Schedule Announced
2. More Sponsors Announced

Please pass this message on to those you feel may be interested.

Conference Schedule Announced

The detailed conference schedule has been completed and can now be viewed at the following URL:

http://pycon-au.org/2011/conference/schedule/

There's even an iCal version for you to plug the schedule straight into your calendar of choice:

http://pycon-au.org/2011/conference/schedule/ical/

Thanks again to all our presenters for some outstanding talk proposals this year.

Standard Talks:

A Python on the Couch (Mark Rees)
Behaviour Driven Development (Malcolm Tredinnick)
Benchmarking stuff made ridiculously easy (Tennessee Leeuwenburg)
Bytecode: What, Why, and How to Hack it (Ryan Kelly)
Developing Scientific Software in Python (Duncan Gray)
Fun with App Engine 1.5.0 (Greg Darke)
Hosting Python Web Applications (Graham Dumpleton)
How Python Evolves (and How You Can Help Make It Happen) (Nick Coghlan)
Infinite 8-bit Platformer (Chris McCormick)
Networking Libraries in Python. (Senthil Kumaran)
Pants - Network Programming Made Easy (Evan Davis)
Say What You Mean: Meta-Programming a Declarative API (Ryan Kelly)
State of CPython and Python Ecosystem (Senthil Kumaran)
Sysadmins vs Developers, a take from the other side of the fence (Benjamin Smith)
Teaching Python to the young and impressionable (Katie Bell)
The NCSS Challenge: teaching programming via automated testing (Tim Dawborn)
Weather field warping using Python. (Nathan Faggian)
Zookeepr: Home-grown conference management software (Brianna Laugher)

In-Depth Talks:

Ah! I see you have the machine that goes "BING"! (Graeme Cross)
Easy site migration using Diazo and Funnelweb (Adam Terrey)
How to maintain big app stacks without losing your mind (Dylan Jay)
Introduction to the Geospatial Web with GeoDjango (Javier Candeira)
Pyramid: Lighter, faster, better web apps (Dylan Jay)
Web micro-framework battle (Richard Jones)

Discussion Panels:

Panel: Python 3 (Nick Coghlan, Raymond Hettinger, Richard Jones)
Panel: Python in the webs (Malcolm Tredinnick, Russell Keith-Magee, Dylan Jay, Richard Jones)

Classroom Track:

Python 101+ (Peter Lovett)
Python's dark corners - the bad bits in Python and how to avoid them (Peter Lovett)
Confessions of Joe Developer (Danny Greenfeld)
Meta-matters: using decorators for better Python programming (Graeme Cross)
Python for Science and Engineering, Part 1 (Edward Schofield)
Python for Science and Engineering, Part 2 (Edward Schofield)
The Zen of Python (Richard Jones)

More Sponsors Announced

We are delighted to announce that Bitbucket by Atlassian has joined us as a Silver Sponsor. Thanks once again to the following companies for their continuing support of Python and for helping to make PyCon Australia 2011 a reality:

Gold: Google <http://www.google.com.au/>
Gold: ComOps <http://www.comops.com.au/>

Silver: Anchor <http://anchor.com.au/>
Silver: Enthought <http://www.enthought.com/>
Silver: Python Software Foundation <http://www.python.org/psf/>
Silver: WingWare <http://www.wingware.com/>
Silver: Arclight <http://www.arclight.com.au/>
Silver: Bitbucket by Atlassian <http://bitbucket.org/>

Thanks also to Linux Australia, who provide the overarching legal and organisational structure for PyCon Australia.

PyCon DE 2011 - Only Four Days Left to Submit your Proposal

2011-07-11T09:57:00.002-04:00

The deadline for talk proposals ends July 15, 2011. That is only four days.

Don't miss the chance to become actively involved in the first PyCon DE.

You would like to talk about your Python project to the German-speaking Python community? Just submit your proposal.

About PyCon DE 2011

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

The conference language will be German. Talks in English are possible. Please
contact us for details.

The call for proposals is now open. Please submit your talk by July 15, 2011
online. There are two types of talks: standard talks (20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A) and long talks (45 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A).

More details about the call can be found on the PyCon DE website.

PyCon DE 2011 - Deadline for Proposals extended to July 15, 2011

2011-07-01T16:13:00.005-04:00

The deadline for talk proposals is extended to July 15, 2011.

You would like to talk about your Python project to the German-speaking Python community?
Just submit your proposal within the next two weeks.

About PyCon DE 2011

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

The conference language will be German. Talks in English are possible. Please
contact us for details.

The call for proposals is now open. Please submit your talk by July 15, 2011
online.
There are two types of talks: standard talks (20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A) and
long talks (45 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A).

More details about the call can be found on the PyCon DE website.

Registrations are open for Pycon India 2011

2011-07-01T04:35:00.002-04:00

We, the organizers of Pycon India 2011 are happy to announce that delegate registrations for the conference are open from today. Early-bird registrations are open till August 1 2011, so please register early to save money.

We are providing the facility for online payments this year as well.

Go to http://in.pycon.org/2011/register to register for Pycon India 2011, today.

Pycon India - Call for Proposals extended to July 10

2011-06-29T06:09:00.002-04:00

The last date for the Call for Proposals for Pycon India 2011, has been extended to July 10, 2011, in order to provide more time for authors to prepare and submit talk and tutorial proposals.

If you haven't submitted a talk proposal, go over to Pycon India 2011 CFP page to submit your proposal today!

Pycon India is scheduled to be conducted at Pune, India from September 16-18 2011.

PyCon Australia 2011: Sprints

2011-06-29T02:36:00.001-04:00

We have confirmed arrangements for two days of Sprints following PyCon Au this year. This will be a great opportunity to contribute to the Python ecosystem under the guidance of experienced developers, so bring your laptops!

PyCon Australia is Australia's only conference dedicated exclusively to the Python programming language, and will be held at the Sydney Masonic Center over the weekend of August 20 and 21. See below for more information and updates on:

1. Post-Conference Sprints
2. Thanks to our Sponsors

Please pass this message on to those you feel may be interested.

Post-Conference Sprints

We are taking up the global PyCon tradition of post-conference sprints this year at PyCon Au.

A Sprint is an opportunity for people to get together and do focussed development on a project in a fun and welcoming atmosphere. Experienced developers will be on hand to help newcomers get started, so bring your laptops and take this opportunity to contribute to the Python ecosystem!

The sprints will be held on the 22nd and 23rd of August at the Sydney Masonic Center. Sprint leaders and topics so far include:

Nick Coghlan:: Python core development
Audrey Roy/Danny Greenfeld:: Django and/or Packaginator
Richard Jones:: Python Package Index

For more information and updates see: http://www.pycon-au.org/2011/sprints/
Please register your interest by emailing pycon-reg@pycon-au.org.

Thanks to our Sponsors

Thanks once again to the following companies for their continuing support of Python and for helping to make PyCon Australia 2011 a reality:

Gold: Google <http://www.google.com.au/>
Gold: ComOps <http://www.comops.com.au/>

Silver: Anchor <http://anchor.com.au/>
Silver: Enthought <http://www.enthought.com/>
Silver: Python Software Foundation <http://www.python.org/psf/>
Silver: WingWare <http://www.wingware.com/>
Silver: Superior Recruitment <http://superiorrecruitment.com.au/>

Thanks also to Linux Australia, who provide the overarching legal and organisational structure for PyCon Australia.

PyCon AU gender diversity grants for women in Python!

2011-06-27T20:23:00.002-04:00

PyCon AU is pleased to announce that it will be offering two gender diversity delegate grants to women who wish to attend PyCon AU in 2011. These grants will both cover full registration costs; in addition, one of the grants will cover up to $AUD500 of travel and accommodation costs for a woman living outside of the Sydney region to attend.

These grants aim to reduce the financial barriers to attending PyCon AU 2011, by subsidising the registration and travel costs of people from diverse groups, who contribute in important ways to the Python community.

More information can be found at http://pycon-au.org/2011/grants/

Eligibility

In order to be eligible for one of the grants, you must be:

a woman, aged 18 or older
professional, hobbyist or student interested in, or currently working in Python-related fields or projects
planning to attend both days of PyCon AU 2011

In order to be eligible for the travel and accommodation grant, you must additionally:

live further than 150 km from the conference venue.

(If you are unsure, please visit http://maps.google.com.au/maps/place?q=66+Goulburn+St,+Sydney,+NSW+2000 and use the "Get Directions" link in the upper left-hand corner to calculate the driving distance from your place of residence to the venue.)

More information can be found at http://pycon-au.org/2011/grants/

Award Amount

Both selected grant recipients will receive a free Full registration to PyCon AU (including a seat at the conference dinner on Saturday night), worth $198.

In addition, the recipient of the travel and accommodation grant will be reimbursed up to $500 in travel and accommodation costs.

More information can be found at http://pycon-au.org/2011/grants/

Timeline

Applications for the gender diversity delegates grants are open now, and will close on 8th of July. We will notify all successful recipients of their award by 15th of July so that you can have ample time to complete your travel plans.

More information can be found at http://pycon-au.org/2011/grants/

EuroSciPy 2011 - Early Bird Registration is Open

2011-06-27T18:11:00.003-04:00

The registration for the EuroSciPy conference August 25 - 28, 2011 in Paris is open.

The early bird rate will be available until Sunday July 24, 2011.
The standard fee is 100 euros. Speakers, individuals and people from academia
get a reduced fee of 50 euros. The tutorials over two days cost the same
(100 euros standard, 50 euros reduced).

After Sunday July 24, 2011 fees will double. So hurry to register and
take advantage of the early bird rate.

PyCon DE 2011 - Tutorial-Program

2011-06-27T06:54:00.000-04:00

The program of tutorials at PyCon DE 2011 is finalized.
There are 12 three-hour tutorials covering a wide range of Python topics such
as Python for newbies, web development, algorithms, tests, data analysis,
databases or Cython.

The instructors are all experienced Python developers with profound
knowledge in Python as well as their special domain. They can answer
even challenging questions. The tutorial day is an amazing opportunity to
deepen your Python knowledge.

PyCon India 2011 - Seeking Sponsors

2011-06-24T07:50:00.002-04:00

PyCon India 2011, the one and only conference for Python programming enthusiasts in India, is seeking sponsors from India and abroad. The conference is scheduled to be conducted in Pune, India from Sep 16-18 2011.

Interested parties can reach out on the Pycon India mailing list or email the organizers directly.

PyCon Finland 2011 Call For Proposals

2011-06-23T07:24:00.003-04:00

PyCon Finland will take place October 17-18 in Turku. The first day will feature presentations and the second is reserved for sprints.

We are currently accepting proposals for both talks and sprints. If you would like to give a presentation, organize a sprint or see presentations on a particular topic, please see instructions at http://www.python.fi/pyconfi. The deadline for proposals is the 1st of August. The organizers will notify accepted presenters and sprint coordinators by 14th of August.

The presentation slots will be 40 minutes + 10 minutes of discussion at the end. Shared sessions are also possible. The language for the presentations should be English to encourage international participation.

We are also looking for sponsors for the event. If you are interested in sponsoring, please contact Python Finland at hallitus@python.fi for details about sponsorship packages.

EuroSciPy 2011 - Program Published

2011-06-20T15:33:00.004-04:00

The 4th EuroSciPy will be held August 25 - 28, 2011 in Paris, France.

It is a cross-disciplinary gathering focused on the use and development of the Python language in scientific research. This event strives to bring together both users and developers of scientific tools, as well as academic research and state of the art industry.

The program of tutorials, talks and poster presentations has been published. There will be 11 tutorials, 18 talks and 25 poster presentations as well as lightning talks. The topics include quantum physics, CFD simulations, computational chemistry, climate change, biology, machine learning, geostatistics and many more.

PyCon DE 2011 - Call For Proposals

2011-06-06T19:57:00.002-04:00

The first PyCon DE will be held October 4-9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany.

The conference language will be German. Talks in English are possible. Please
contact us for details.

The call for proposals is now open. Please submit your talk by June 30, 2011
online.
There are two types of talks: standard talks (20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A) and
long talks (45 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A).

More details about the call can be found on the PyCon DE website.

PyCon JP 2011 - Call For Proposals

2011-05-31T00:55:00.004-04:00

The first challenge in Japan, PyCon JP 2011 will be held at Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology University in Tokyo, 27th(Sat.) August. It will be for 1 day and feature 3 tracks.

Now, we're accepting your proposal. If you would like to participate, visit the PyCon JP 2011 CFP page for more information. Submission deadline is 30th June 11:59 JST.

Main sessions will be in Japanese in order to increase accessibility of local audience, however any proposal in English are equally accepted.
(This conference can be a good chance for local developers to communicate with developers in the world.)

For more information on http://2011.pycon.jp/english-information, please write us via email (contact at pycon dot jp).

WE ARE WAITING YOUR PROPOSAL NOW!

PyTexas 2011 Call For Proposals

2011-05-30T22:24:00.000-04:00

PyTexas 2011, the fourth annual Python programming conference for Texas and the surrounding region, will take place Saturday September 10 and Sunday September 11, 2011 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

Last year with 94 attendees, PyTexas 2010 reached critical mass to achieve an exciting event akin to a small taste of PyCon, and this year we're want to further boost participation and sponsor support. In order to succeed, we need you to step forward and commit to giving a presentation, a tutorial, or perhaps organize a panel discussion...go ahead and propose your idea, whether serious or silly, we want to consider it.

Standard presentation slots will be 40 minutes plus a 10 minute question-and-answer period.

We are also looking for proposals for keynote speakers, and are working toward obtaining sponsor pledges to bring in funding to pay travel expenses for speakers willing to travel. If you are outside the Texas area, and want to give a presentation, please contact BradAllen to discuss reimbursement options.

PyTexas is especially interested in hosting a Beginner's Track for those new to Python. If your proposal would be suitable for inclusion in a Beginner's Track, please indicate so. Organizers will work with speakers and instructors in the Beginner's Track to help them coordinate their talks/tutorials into a coherent learning curve for new Python users.

If you want to give a talk, and but need help coming up with ideas ideas, check out TalkIdeas on the PyTexas wiki.

To ensure that you provide all necessary information, please download and fill out the proposal submission template. If organizing a panel, please confirm all panelists' intention to participate before submitting your proposal.

PyTexas may record presentations for later release over the web. Presenters will need to sign a release of recording rights to PyTexas.

All proposals should be emailed to Brad Allen. Please submit proposals by end of day (23:59 CST) July 16, 2011. Accepted speakers will be notified by August 1.

If you have questions about proposals, please contact Brad Allen. If you'd like to engage in discussion with the organizers, please join the Texas Python mailing list.

Pycon India 2011 - Call For Proposals

2011-05-10T23:01:00.003-04:00

The third edition of PyCon India, the premier conference related to Python programming language in India, is being held in Pune this year from 16th to 18th September 2011.

This year PyCon India will be conducting a full-fledged tutorial track, separate from the presentation/talk track.

PyCon India invites proposals from interested authors for the scheduled talks and tutorials. You can base your talk or tutorial session on any topic related to Python programming.

For more information on how to submit a proposal, visit the Pycon India 2011 CFP page.

Kindly note that the proposal submission deadline is June 30 2011. Proposal acceptance will be completed and authors informed, by July 18 2011.

Please participate and spread the word to make PyCon India 2011, a success!

PyCon APAC 2011 - Early Bird Registration is Open

2011-05-04T05:35:00.001-04:00

From Liew Beng Keat and APAC PyCon Organizers

On behalf of the organizing committee, this email is to inform you that early bird registration for PyCon APAC 2011 in Singapore is now open! And we hope you can help us inform your local groups abt the opening of the registration.

This year, PyCon APAC will be held from 9th - 11th June. For details on all matters related to the conference, our Keynote speakers, list of talks and tutorials, pls go to http://apac.pycon.org.

Early Bird Registration is on and we have attractive student discounts. So, go ahead and Register Now !

Looking forward to seeing you and others in June for PyCon APAC.

PyOhio (July 30-31) Call for Proposals

2011-04-28T20:57:00.000-04:00

PyOhio 2011, the fourth annual Python programming conference for Ohio and the surrounding region, will take place Saturday-Sunday, July 30-31, 2011 at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. A variety of activities are planned, including tutorials, scheduled talks, Lightning Talks, Open Spaces and Sprints.

PyOhio invites all interested people to submit proposals for scheduled talks, tutorials, and panels. All topics of interest to Python programmers will be considered. Standard presentation slots will be 40 minutes plus a 10 minute question-and-answer period.

PyOhio is a great venue to get word out about your favorite Python library and how you use it, talk about how Python is used in your company, or practice your speaking in front of a welcoming audience.

PyOhio is especially interested in hosting a Beginner’s Track for those new to Python or new to programming in general. If your proposal would be suitable for inclusion in a Beginner’s Track, please indicate so. Organizers will work with speakers and instructors in the Beginner’s Track to help them coordinate their talks/tutorials into a smooth, coherent learning curve for new Python users.

To ensure that you provide all necessary information, please use the submission template provided below. If organizing a panel, please confirm all panelists’ intention to participate before submitting your proposal.

PyOhio may record presentations for later release over the web. Presenters will need to sign a release of recording rights to PyOhio; see http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyOhio/RecordingRelease

All proposals should be emailed to cfp@pyohio.org for review. Please submit proposals by Friday, June 3, 2011. Accepted speakers will be notified by June 17.

You can read more about the conference at http://pyohio.org. If you have questions about proposals, please email cfp@pyohio.org. You can also contact the PyOhio organizers at pyohio-organizers@python.org.

The template can be downloaded here.

PyCon Asia-Pacific

2011-03-15T09:21:00.000-04:00

Invitation by Liew Beng Keat & PyCon Asia Pacific Organizing committee.

On behalf of the organizing committee of the Python language conference, PyCon APAC 2011, we invite you to submit Proposals/Abstracts to the 2nd PyCon Asia Pacific Conference 2011 (http://apac.pycon.org), to be held in Singapore on June 9th - June 11th, 2011.

The submissions deadline for this Call For Proposal (CFP) is 1st April, 2011. We have improved/simplified our proposal submission for 2011 so moving forward, we are looking for even more quality submission. For details, please refer to the web site or the attached pdf.

The best proposals/presentations will also be invited to adapt their presentations for publication in The Python Papers Anthology (http://pythonpapers.org/).

PS : You will be pleased to know that, as of now, we have confirmed the attendance of Jacob Kaplan-Moss (of Django) and Dr. Prabhu Ramachandran as keynotes. And with other notable pythonistas expected.

We are also informing on a Call for Tutorials. Please check the web site for details if you can conduct a tutorial.

So start sending us your proposals! And support your ‘local’ Python conference and help us spread the word.

Best regards,

PyCon Asia-Pacific 2011 Organizing Committee

PyCon 2011: Outside the Talks: Poster Session

2011-03-09T22:18:00.001-05:00

By Brian Curtin

Back for a second year is the Poster Session, a more intimate approach to presentation in the form of a poster on the wall. Attendees are welcome to the session to peruse around, check out what people are doing, view demos, trade experiences, and talk one-on-one with the presenter.

With twice as many posters as last year, the session is packed with such a wide variety of topics that there’s no easy way to classify it. Education, games, medical, government, scientific, web; there’s a lot to show and learn.

What do you use for all of your Hydro-Geo-Chemical Modeling problems? I know I use Python, and so do Mike Müller and Fei Luo. It’s a staple of their sub-surface environmental research. They make use of matplotlib, so get ready for some fancy diagrams. Thanks to Python, they say “nearly impossible tasks become simple.”

Every time I run a neutron scattering experiment, I do it with Python. Same with Piotr Adam Zolnierczuk. Thankfully he made a poster to show you what it’s about. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has the world’s most powerful pulsed spallation neutron source, and the PyDAS package makes it easy to integrate the many parts of the system. Piotr plans to show an overview of the system along with examples of its use.

We all know that cloud computing is all the rage, but Gökhan Sever is working with literal cloud computing as an atmospheric scientist. Python with Cython, NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib all come together to support Gökhan’s cloud modelling application. From the processing to analysis to visualization, he does it all with the open source tools we all use. Yay cloud.

If you were wondering how one might solve hyperbolic partial differential equations and work with computational fluid dynamics, Python is a correct answer. Yung-Yu Chen put together a poster showing why Python and C is a viable replacement for the venerable FORTRAN, as commonly seen in the science world. Yung-Yu’s SOLVCON framework shows that Python is on its way to becoming a mainstream tool in this field.

Be sure to check out the Poster Session Sunday at 10:05!

PyCon 2011: Program Guide on iOS and Android Devices

2011-03-07T22:44:00.001-05:00

We are proud to announce that the PyCon Program Guide is available on your Apple iOS and Android devices, via the Conventionist app from Proxima Labs (Conventionist). This app is free of charge, commercial free, and once the program is downloaded, will not require your data plan or wireless.

To install, follow the following link: Conventionist - Get It! or search the App Store or Android Market for 'conventionist' from Proxima Labs. Once the application is installed, run it and select 'Download Guides'. Look for and select the "PyCon US '11" guide.

The entire schedule, including tutorials, with detailed information is available, as well as information on all our sponsors and exhibitors. Maps of the conference area, exhibitors room, and poster session are included. You can create a personal schedules with reminders naively; this is not connected to the personal schedule feature on our website.

Very special thanks to Jeff Lewis, Peter Lada, and the entire Proxima Labs team for providing such a fantastic service!

PyCon 2011: Live on Startup Row

2011-03-07T10:59:00.004-05:00

We had a torrent of interest when we announced Startup Row for PyCon 2011. At that time, we only had six or seven companies to start. Well, due to the immense interest, we are happy to announce the final slate of entrants for Startup Row at PyCon 2011 - fifteen different startups that are making it happen with Python.

It is worth quoting just a little from the original post introducing Startup Row:

"""Since the beginning, Python has always been strongly associated with startups and entrepreneurs.... For Startup Row, we wanted to look toward the future - companies that are just starting today, but may become household names in the future."""

The founders of these companies will be at PyCon for the mail conference days, and for one day they will be participating in the Expo Hall. The other days they will be participating at PyCon with everyone else, so look around - the person next to you may have just started a company.

So without further ado, here are the fifteen Startup Row Finalists:

Friday

CollectorDASH: One of the things that make us unique is that we collect things - stamps, dishes, pennies, blue glass vases, art, everything. This is a vibrant part of our culture, but the tools to empower collectors are stuck back in the last century. CollectorDASH builds applications and marketplaces for collectors, applying modern technologies to make collecting more efficient, fun and affordable.

CrowdBooster: Everything is social these days - and Twitter is the fastest-moving social platform of all. Crowdbooster gives you twitter analytics that let you understand who is talking about you in real time.

Stormpulse: Are you tired of watching the news only to find out where a thunderstorm was 20 minutes ago? It is especially important to have up-to-date information if your business depends on the weather. Stormpulse delivers high-fidelity weather intelligence to a broad range of industries including energy, manufacturing, transportation, defense, healthcare, and retail. Businesses and government agencies subscribe to this intelligence to improve their long-range planning and daily decision-making surrounding the arrival and impact of significant weather events in the continental United States and Caribbean.

AppNest: AppNest is a distribution platform for mobile applications. Specifically, they are making the installation of private applications really simple. Ad-hoc distribution is the current technique used by iOS developers - but the publication and distribution process for ad-hoc applications is byzantine and difficult. AppNest makes this process a lot simpler. With AppNest, users can install the application using nothing more than a web browser and a native iOS application. No iTunes required, everything can be done on the mobile device.

Saaspire: Saaspire is building a suite of products based around "behavioral data": the data that you create when you say or do things on the Internet. Saaspire is launching their first product, FocusLab, right now. It's a behavioral data analysis tool. They are also rolling out a SaaS platform that will allow developers to easily add personalization and other behavioral data services to their apps.

Olark: One of the most frustrating things for any business is having people come into your store, put items in their carts, and then... leave. Olark helps businesses engage with customers before they leave the site, increasing the numbers of visitors that become customers.

Ep.io: Ep.io is a smart Python hosting platform. Not only do they take care of your load balancing, database configuration, redundancy, backups and code pushes for you, they support any WSGI-compatable framework or application, and any Python library we can install from PyPi. By running things in their secure, shared environment, they can keep costs down. Within their free resource limits, if you have a small site you just want people to see, just throw it up - a few minutes, and it'll be up and running at no cost. Above that, they bill you only by the amount of resources you actually use.

Saturday

DotCloud: DotCloud takes Platform-as-a-Service to the next level by allowing you to choose your /own/ platform that will be supported by DotCloud. DotCloud allows developers to be developers and not system administrators. DotCloud has recently received 800K in Angel Funding and is growing like mad.

Mailgun: Email is an essential part of doing business today - but building proper email interfaces can be tricky and error-prone. Mailgun provides an email interface for your app, allowing you to integrate email into your existing processes in a simple and easy way.

Glancely: Just one look at Glancely and you get it - instant product search. Not thousands of clicks through various confusing catalogs - just see what you want, click it, its yours.

NodeRabbit: NodeRabbit is all about it easier to build and deploy web applications. Our first product is DjangoZoom, a Heroku-like platform-as-a-service that radically speeds up the deployment of Django apps. Early adopters have described DjangoZoom as "magical" and a service that they can't live without.

ACL Systems: ACL Systems is a new startup focusing on the next wave in education - online education. For some aspects of education, there is nothing like being in class with a teacher. For everything else, the cost and availability advantages of online education are disrupting this established business. ACL System's online education platform makes online education effective and affordable.

MBA Sciences: MBA Sciences is a self-funded startup focused on allowing programmers to exploit parallelism and rapidly create scalable, fault-tolerant distributed applications that are rock solid from day one. MBA Sciences was highlighted by the Supercomputing 2010 Conference as a Disruptive Technology due to the ability of SPM.Python to perform the non-differentiating heavy lifting by removing the pain typically associated with authoring, testing and maintaining parallel capabilities.

Eldarion: Eldarion builds and runs great websites like Quisition and Typewar and helps you do the same. They get you from idea to launch sooner by developing custom and open source components for Django/Pinax and providing hosting on the Gondor platform.
Beautylish: Beauty products is not where you would necessarily expect to find Python - but it is there. Beautylish is a social network for beauty, cosmetics, and brands. They focus on video tutorials, candid product reviews, and conversations amongst users. The service actually launched in beta form this past January, and has already accumulated a small but loyal user base. They have already raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of prominent angel investors, including Ron Conway's SV Angel.

Edit: Hacker News Discussion Link.

PyCon 2011: Session Staff Needed

2011-03-04T13:35:00.001-05:00

The PyCon USA 2011 site has finally gotten its schedule up this week and in the last couple of days, they have added the ability to sign up to be a Session Chair or Session Runner. These are fairly important roles that need to be filled to make the conference flow smoothly.

Basically, a Session Chair will chair a block of talks. What that means is he or she will introduce the speakers and help to stay on time. They can also help organize an open space, although I don’t think that’s mentioned in the job description this year. Finally, they help take questions from the audience.

The Session Runner will help the speaker get from the green room to the appropriate stage. They help in any way needed to make the session run smoothly. In other words, they assist the Session Chair.

You can meet fun people and make new friends by signing up for one or both of these positions. Just go to the schedule page and click on the “S” symbol next to a talk to sign up. Just remember that you’re signing up for a 2 or 3 talk session in one room. Be sure to check in at the green room to get your gear probably 15-30 minutes before the first talk in your session.

Welcome to QNX, and thanks to all our sponsors

2011-03-03T15:35:00.001-05:00

You might not have noticed a subtle, yet significant change on the front page of the PyCon 2011 site - but earlier this week, we were honored to add a new Diamond Level sponsor - QNX Software Systems. For those that aren't familiar with them, they're an operating systems development company - most recently it was announced they would be producing the OS for the RIM BlackBerry Playbook, RIM's entrant into the tablet world (QNX is a subsidiary of RIM).

When Van and I were initially approached about the sponsorship, we were incredibly happy - first, of course, we have a new sponsor - second, Python in QNX? We were pretty amazed, stunned actually. Then we also found out today that QNX will sponsor R. David Murray's email6 module work as well - QNX is certainly entering the Python community's consciousness with a bang.

QNX is pretty mum on what they're using Python for (exciting!) - but QNX’s Andy Gryc, who will attend PyCon 2011, had this to say:

QNX as a company really appreciates clean and elegant designs. Good software architecture is one of the key principles that drives our engineering, and Python makes a great addition to our toolkit for that reason. However, a big reason we’re using Python is because of the amazing developer productivity that it enables.

I asked them a bit about what role Python is playing - or going to play - strategically for them in the future - but they're staying pretty mum - but if this is any indication:

QNX will directly support Python in future products. Similarly to how we have participated in open source tooling with Eclipse, we plan to invest in developing Python, both for utilization within QNX products and in open source contributions back to the Python community. To that end, we’re interested in hiring Python developers and working with companies who do Python work.

Python looks to have gained itself a pretty significant contributor to its community. We're very appreciative of QNX’s sponsorship of PyCon - say hello to their team members when you see them in less than a week!

I also wanted to take a moment to thank all of our sponsors - Google, whose continued support of PyCon and the Python Software foundation - and Python community as a whole - has been stunning. They’ve consistently been a Diamond level sponsor for the conference, and have given the community as a whole a lot.

There’s also Microsoft - our one platinum sponsor this year, who once again continues to support PyCon as they have for a few years now. Their continued support is awesome, and their work (for example, open sourcing IronPython under the Apache license, and doing amazing Visual Studio Python support work) for the community is greatly appreciated.

Then there is the list of all of our Gold Sponsors, who also help make PyCon viable and accessible to all of us:

As well as our Silver Sponsors, businesses who really step up and help us out as much as they can, and also contribute a great deal to both the conference and community:

Without these sponsors - PyCon couldn't happen. They help keep the conference affordable and afloat in many ways - not to mention, most, if not all of them are going to be actively hiring at PyCon 2011.

So, our hats go off in thanks to QNX, our latest sponsor, and all of our amazing and generous sponsors we have. We encourage you to check out what they have to offer - and to pack your resume along with you to PyCon next week!

Last Chance for Regular Registration at PyCon 2011

2011-03-02T14:55:00.000-05:00

Today, March 2, is the last day for regular registration and booking of any kind of hotel room through the PyCon registration bureau. In order to get the best rate, register for PyCon and book your room now!

This is in some ways a follow-up post to the earlier "Behind the Scenes" post. Today we are a week out from PyCon, and we are reaching the critical stage where we need to make our final commitments to the hotel for catering, for rooms, for everything.

Unfortunately, that means that it becomes more difficult (and more expensive) for us to change anything. That is why we have an on-site rate to allow for us to handle these last-minute changes. The on-site rates will start tomorrow, March 3, and run through the conference.

Accordingly, RIGHT NOW is the last day we can provide PyCon registration at the regular rates, and we are in the last hours of being able to provide any help at all for the hotel.

You should go right now and register for PyCon!

PyCon 2011: Interview with Carl Karsten

2011-03-02T12:44:00.001-05:00

Another Chicagoan making the drive to Atlanta is the man behind the PyCon videos, Carl Karsten of Next Day Video. After a discovery in 2008 at a Debian conference, he found a more productive video process that he took to every Chicago-area user group that would let him try it out, which got him to where he is with today’s PyCon video team.

The Chicago Python Users Group is one of those groups that Carl gets his experience with every month, along with local Java, Hadoop, Erlang, and Android groups. While local meetings like these are dwarfed by the three day conference that is PyCon, it’s a good proving ground. After a half-hour setup, all of the talks, then a half-hour teardown, it’s an encoding and checking party after that.

He’ll spend 30 minutes to encode one video to one format, multiplied by however many is necessary. “I am currently encoding to flv (because as flash is still king of Internet video), ogv (because html5 is the future king), m4v for iPhones and maybe other mobile devices, and mp3 for those that like to learn Python while they work out,” says Carl. On the difficulty, he quips, “it's quick ‘n easy, except when it isn't.”

As for a conference like PyCon, he’s looking at getting around 1.2 TB of footage to bring home. His record is to have a video online three hours after the talk was given, but it doesn’t look like that’ll be the case with 5 tracks and three days worth of footage.

While I knew Carl was a big proponent of open source, it was great news to me that he does 100% of his work with open technologies. DVSwitch from Debian developer Ben Hutchings handles much of the recording and produces the hundreds of raw files they take to post-production. That work is then passed onto Carl’s Veyepar library, which handles the various video metadata and uploading capabilities.

Use of a frame grabber allows Carl and the team to get a stream of the speaker’s screen, not just their presentation slides. Any code, examples, pictures, or video gets taken and mixed with a camera view of the speaker on stage. Since the grabber works off of the video feed, there’s no need for the speaker to submit talk slides in any specific format -- it’s all just video coming out of their own computer.

The whole post-production system is wrapped up with a Django app. From there he makes any of the necessary corrections like missing titles, incorrect scheduling, or any of the hundreds of little things that can go wrong in the process. “Most are recoverable, it just takes time,” he says of any hiccups.

For samples of what to expect for the PyCon 2011 videos, take a look at what the crew came up with in 2009 and 2010 at pycon.blip.tv, or take a look at any of his user group talks on carlfk.blip.tv. If you can’t make PyCon, hopefully the videos keep you in the loop!

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 4)

2011-03-01T19:48:00.001-05:00

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. See the first post for an introduction to the series and a description of the Django virtual track. The second post focused on the web working virtual track. The third post focused on the Python and NoSQL virtual track. This post focuses on the fourth virtual track, Networking and Concurrency.

Networking and Concurrency

Moving away from specific web frameworks and data stores, dealing with concurrency and high-volume networking is always a challenge. When you are serving three users, you don't stress your code the same way you do when you are serving 30,000 users (all concurrently).

It is also worth pointing out that it is not just networking that is the issue; it is concurrency. Concurrency is a common problem across many programming languages, and high-traffic networking is just a natural testing ground for constructs that make it easier to handle high concurrency. Nevertheless, the principles discussed in this track are applicable to any high-throughput process.

There are eight different talks in this track:

Extreme Network Programming with Python and Linux by Rob Ludwick ( Extreme ). Traditionally, C is the preferred language for low level network programming and works well for those who have the time and patience to work with it. As it turns out, Python is very capable for prototyping low level network code, collecting data, and testing ideas quickly without getting lost in the land of C. Obscure topics such as raw sockets, multicast, network bridging, rolling your own vpn, and disruption tolerant networking will be covered. This talk will show how you can use Python to build custom protocols, debug a network, fix broken nets, implement custom logging and processing, and simulate network traffic.

Jython Concurrency by Jim Baker (Extreme). One of the persistent troubles with concurrency in Python is the GIL - the Global Interpreter Lock used to simplify the implementation of CPython... but not all Python implementations include a GIL. Jython implements the Python language, but Jython leverages the underlying Java platform to provide an opinionated alternative to CPython in its support of concurrency. Jython instead embraces threads, provides extensive support for managing their execution and coordination through standard Java platform functionality (java.util.concurrent), and works well with Jython's implementation of {ython's standard mutable collection types. The underlying JVM provides also extensive instrumentation as well as the ability to set a variety of parameters, including choice of GC. This talk will go into a detailed discussion of some of the interesting ramifications of these design points and how they can be effectively applied to write concurrent code, as illustrated through a variety of short examples.

Ten Years of Twisted by Glyph Lefkowitz. Twisted is one of the oldest event-driven architectures for Python, and it is the oldest one still being actively maintained and extended with new functionality. The maturity that Twisted brings to event-based networking is essential - they have found and fixed bugs that other asynchronous architectures may not hit for a couple years. Despite this pedigree, however, many aspects of Twisted remain misunderstood or simply unrealized. This talk will present a brief conceptual introduction to Twisted, followed by a survey of its features, their status, and how development has been proceeding over the years, with a special focus on the last two years of sponsored development.

Using Coroutines to Create Efficient, High-Concurrency Web Applications by Matt Spitz ( Extreme ). Many people don't know that the popular web-based instant messaging service Meebo is delivered using Python. At Meebo, they have settled on using gunicorn, a lightweight WSGI server, which supports gevent, a coroutine-based network library for python. Gevent monkeypatches python's system modules to make network requests asynchronous using an event loop based on libevent. This trick allows the developer to use a simple blocking CGI as a non-blocking web application that can handle many concurrent requests. In this in-depth review, Matt discusses how Meebo worked through the various approaches to building web applications, why they ended up choosing gunicorn+gevent, the challenges this new framework presents, and how they've dealt with them.

Prototyping Go's Select with stackless.py for Stackless Python by Andrew Francis (Extreme). Google’s introduction of the Go language raised eyebrows in the Stackless Python community. Although very different languages, Go and Stackless Python’s concurrency model share a common ancestor: the Bell Labs family of languages (i.e., Newsqueak, Limbo). The common feature are channels: a synchronous message passing mechanism based on Tony Hoare’s Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).

Both Go and Stackless Python have channels - but the select language built into Go gives it the ability to wait on multiple channels simultaneously. This talk explores the prototyping potential of stackless.py, the PyPy's framework's implementation of Stackless Python. This talk will present a brain-bending "case study" involving prototyping Go's select in stackless.py before reimplementing select in C based Stackless Python.

An Introduction to Tornado by Gavin Roy. Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. It is not only a web server but it is a light-weight, use only what you need, web development framework. This talk will review the current state of the Tornado project, review the features Tornado provides and give examples of how to implement asynchronous web applications in Tornado.

Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ by Zed Shaw (Extreme). Zed Shaw has raised a lot of interest with his recent work on Mongrel2, a "language agnostic" webserver that uses ZeroMQ to handle all the plumbing. This talk builds on Zed's experience with Mongrel2 to demonstrate how to use ZeroMQ with Python (and others) to do really advanced or even weird network architectures. Zed will show Python talking to other languages, handling HTTP, JSON, XML, WebSockets, encoding videos, handling chat messaging, etc. This is an extreme talk, so it will be in code, not in diagrams. This talk will assume you know ZeroMQ and Python, but if you don't know ZeroMQ you can probably still keep up.

An outsider's look at co-routines by Peter Portante. This talk is designed to take an interested beginner from a hazy understanding of coroutines up to the point where they can understand the essential concepts (and the essential differences!) associated with the different implementations of coroutines for Python.

Is this the conference you want to see? Then, register for PyCon and book your room now! We have picked up a few more rooms - including a few at a lower rate a block away. You can email (pycon4-reg@cteusa.com), or phone (847-759-4277). We have very few spots left.

Links:

Go to Part 1 of this series
Go to Part 2 of this series
Go to Part 3 of this series
Go to this post on the PyCon site.

Edit: Discussion link on Hacker News.

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 3)

2011-03-01T15:21:00.002-05:00

This is the third in a series of posts about the schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. The first post introduced the series and discussed the Django virtual track. The second post focused on the web working virtual track. This post focuses on the third virtual track, Python and NoSQL.

Python and NoSQL

One of the more interesting developments in the past couple years is the use of NoSQL databases. FOr many years, the default answer to any kind of persistence problem was simply to put it in a (relational) database. If you had problems scaling, then you would shard or pay lots of money for clustered/big iron solutions. NoSQL developed in part as a reaction to the overuse of RDBMSes for all sorts of problems.

Of course, it can be hard to say exactly what NoSQL is - but I like to define it as a resurgence of "the right tool for the job," just applied to the storage and persistence space. It can be graph-based, document-based, column-based, or object based -- or even just a data structures server.

It is not surprising, though, that Python is able to talk to them all. In this track we have four different talks, giving the inside scoop on production-level use of various NoSQL stores.

ZODB: A Python Persistence System by Chris McDonough. The ZODB is the granddaddy of the various NoSQL options for Python, having been developed when such things were "object databases" and not "NoSQL." Nevertheless, the ZODB is a standalone persistence system uniquely integrated into Python that remains astoundingly buzzword-compliant despite its age. This talk will provide a high-level overview of ZODB useful to a novice or intermediate Python programmer. At the end of the talk, an attendee should have a basic understanding of how to create an application which depends on ZODB persistence.

CouchDB and Python in practice by Luke Gotszling. CouchDB has a unique document-centric model with automatic clustering and replication. It is gaining a lot of traction, and has recently been seen both up in the clouds and as a data store on Android phones. This talk will introduce CouchDB and will show how to get it to play well with Python. Luke will continue by showing a python ORM for CouchDB, easing development and object-document interoperability. Finally, Luke will cover parsing CouchDB documents within python, writing view functions in python, map/reduce functions on CouchDB from python, and some lessons learned from managing and distributing a live deployment at scale under high load.

Scaling Python past 100 by Mark Ramm. Those with eagle eyes will spot this as a repeat from the "web working" track. That is because this talk is a twofer - describing both the development of the modern Python codebase as well as the use of MongoDB to address the scaling issues associated with a top 100 site.

MongoDB + Pylons at Catch.com: Scalable Web Apps with Python and NoSQL by Niall O'Higgins. The Catch.com backend provides an API for publishing and querying your personal data - used by many hugely popular Android, iOS and Web clients. Faced with the limits of the initial Catch.com Java/BDB backend implemention, they evaluated various alternative technologies including Amazon SimpleDB, MySQL, Cassandra and MongoDB. They found Python and MongoDB gave them unique flexibility with our data model, allowed them to scale for increased reliability and performance and decreased feature development time - and in this talk they'll describe exactly how.

Edit: Wesley Chun points out that Running Django Apps on Google App Engine is also designed to deal with NoSQL datastores - and that the principles covered in his talk apply both to GAE and to MongoDB. ed.

Links:

Go to Part 1 of this series
Go to Part 2 of this series
Go to this post on the PyCon site.

Edit: Discussion link on Hacker News.

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 2)

2011-02-28T20:19:00.004-05:00

This is the second in a series of posts about the schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. The first post introduced the series and discussed the Django virtual track. This post focuses on the second virtual track, web working.

Web Working

The first virtual track was about Django, but there is much more to Python on the web than just Django. This second track is focused on the many ways in which Python works to enable the world wide web.

In this track we have nine different talks:

State of Pylons/TurboGears 2/repoze.bfg by Chris McDonough, Ben Bangert, and Mark Ramm. The past couple of years have seen some amazing consolidation around a core set of libraries and best practices in the Python web world. As a result, Pylons, TurboGears, and Repoze.bfg now share an underlying base of best-of-breed components, while maintaining their unique outlook on how to quickly get from zero to working code. This three-for-one talk by the main developers of these three popular Python web frameworks will (very!) briefly cover the state of each of our individual frameworks and communities, followed by a discussion of their efforts to work together and share code.

Opening the Flask by Armin Ronacher. Flask has an unusual history - it started out as the joke framework Denied, but was morphed into a small, reusable microframework when there was an unexpected surge of interest. Based on the powerful foundation of Werkzeug and Jinja2 it's one of the most popular microframeworks for Python.

This talk will start with a very quick introduction into Flask, where it all started and why people like it. Armin will take people into the design of Flask and explain why it works the way it works. Furthermore it will look into the Flask ecosystem and how extensions work and have a brief look in what is planned for the future, especially regarding Python 3.

WSGI: Working together to solve the web's problems by Christopher Perkins. WSGI has been around for quite a few years now, and has progressed somewhat into a movement in the web development world, having inspired a number of similar libraries in other languages. WSGI is moving forward in the Python space, with a new, Python-3-compatible specification just approved. The purpose of this panel is to get the experts developing the spec together in a public domain to talk about the past, present, and future of WSGI.

Hookbox: All Python web-frameworks, now real-time. Batteries Included by Michael Carter. Hookbox is a Python and Eventlet-based Comet-server/message-queue which tightly integrates with existing web application infrastructure via web hooks and a REST interface; Hookbox’s purpose is to ease the development of real-time web applications, with an emphasis on tight integration with existing web technology. Put simply, Hookbox is a web-enabled message queue. It doesn't matter if you are using Django, Pylons, TurboGears, Google App Engine, or Werkzeug; Hookbox is made to integrate with your framework of choice. If you pay attention for at least half of this talk, you'll leave confident and ready to take advantage of WebSockets, Comet, and the world.

HTSQL - an insanely good WSGI / REST interface to your favorite database by Clark C. Evans. One of the most common needs for companies is an ad-hoc reporting tool for their databases. The most common product within this space is Crystal Reports - with the open source alternative Jasper Reports. The problem with both Crystal and Jasper, though, is that they require significant programmer/DBA time to set up and administer the reporting infrastructure. This is inefficient and expensive. Another problem with existing solutions is that they don't make the data from your databases available for web applications.

HTSQL takes it away from hard "reports" by exposing databases as full-fledged entities on the web by mapping a graph-based URL language to the structure of your database. No setting up the report needed - just craft the right URL and your ad-hoc reports are done. Live dashboards become easy - and your data can easily be consumed by other web services in XML or JSON format.

An (biased) survey of the python web by Mark Ramm. Mark Ramm is the BDFL of one framework - but that's also why he pays attention to the whole ecosystem. From the release of Plone 4, TurboGears 2, Django 1.2 and Pylons 1, it's been an interesting year. And things like html5lib, an updated WSGI spec, and a contender for the next generation WSGI have all made things interesting.

This talk is not about teach people to use python to make websites. It's to teach people who already use python, that there are lots of different tools out there, and to help us all get some perspective on what Mark calls the "python web toolkit." This talk won't be about throwing Twisted into a cage match with Zope3, or setting Flask up in a fight to the death against web.py. Instead, it attempt to survey the full landscape of the python web world and to see how far we've come in the last 5 years.

HTTP in Python: which library for what task?/ by Augie Fackler. HTTP is the lingua franca of the web, and many things done in Python depend on it - but unfortunately the implementations of HTTP in Python can be a mixed bag of available technology. What's implemented mostly works well, but there are some frustrating gaps in different libraries that are poorly documented. This talk goes through the nuts and bolts (and warts) of every HTTP library Augie could find for Python. Finally, Augie decided to write his own. This talk will cover what's available today and why it made sense to start from scratch with a completely new implementation.

Scaling Python past 100 by Mark Ramm. This talk takes a dive into one of the most-trafficked sites on the web, the venerable Sourceforge.net. Sourceforge is in the midst of a complete exorcism of the old codebase - but the path from legacy PHP to modern python tools has been long and bumpy. This is the inside story of how Sourceforge took Python from a single prototype site, to the core technology driving SourceForge.net. Mark will discuss the mistakes they made along the way, the benefits that sold python, and the real secret behind Sourceforge's python transformation.

The Pyramid FAQ by Carlos de la Guardia. Every development project has a few questions and doubts that seem to come up on its support channels every now and then. The Pyramid framework is no exception. For Pyramid, the #pylons IRC channel is the most common way of giving support to users of the Pyramid framework. This talk will take some of the most often discussed topics in the channel and give detailed answers to them.

See Part 1 of this series, or go to this post on the PyCon site.

Edit: See the discussion link on Hacker News.

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 1)

2011-02-28T16:11:00.004-05:00

After weeks of work, we have finalized a schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. We are going to tell you about them all.

In our earlier blog post, I mentioned that part of the fun of each conference is discovering the themes inherent in what the Python community is doing. We then try to schedule the talks in "virtual tracks" so that people with different interests can attend and see the conference that is personalized to their particular interests, without having all the talks on the same topic scheduled against each other.

This year, we organized the talks in ten different virtual tracks. For the most part, the talks in each track should be sequential, so that each person can see most or all of the talks in one virtual track.

For this year, the virtual tracks are:

Django
Web working
Python and NoSQL
Networking and Concurrency
Community
Python Implementations
Deep Voodoo
Testing, Debugging, and Documentation
Algorithms, Big Data, and Cloud Computing
Working with Python

Virtual Track #1: Django

Django is the best-known and most widely used web framework for Python. Coming out of the Lawrence-Journal World's internal development efforts, it has evolved from a news-focused system to a full-fledged web development environment in use all over the web. It is not by mistake that one of our Startup Stories focuses on the use of Django at DISQUS.

In this track we have six different talks:

Distributed Tasks with Celery by Ryan Petrello. Celery is an open source task queueing system based on distributed message passing, especially using the AMQP protocol. Celery is usable for all sorts of things, but it has become prominent as the go-to backend queuing system for use with Django. This talk will focus on the need for task distribution, the tools celery provides to meet those needs, and an in-depth discussion of how they have used celery at ShootQ to improve the efficiency and reliability of their background processes. [ShootQ doesn't use Django - showing how this is applicable across the web working space. Nevertheless, it is best known for its easy-to-use Django integration - ed.]

Django Packages: A Case Study by Daniel Greenfeld. Since launch Django Packages has become the place to find and compare apps, frameworks and projects produced by the Django Community. Through the use of public APIs, Django Packages constantly fetches hard data from PyPI, Github, and Bitbucket, aproviding a powerful mash-up of real-world data on the volume of usage of a particular package. At a glance you can see which package is the most downloaded, which is the most used, and which has seen ongoing development. This talk is for everyone, including non-Django users, and covers everything from architecture, API development, to interacting with PyPI, Github, Bitbucket, etc. It will include tools, lessons learned, and projects that fork the code to save the world and will finish with an overview of the forthcoming pypackages.com.

Pluggable Django Patterns by Corey Oordt. (Extreme) Pluggable or reusable applications are a key feature of Django, but there is little guidance on writing them well. This talk will dig into the different types of Django applications and coding patterns that make writing a reusable application easier. This talk also covers ways to avoid common implementation gotchas.

Best Practices for Impossible Deadlines by Christopher Groskopf. Django's tagline is "The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines." Christopher Groskopf takes that to the next level with this talk. At the Chicago Tribune he helps develop, test, and deploy production web applications on schedules that range from two hours to two months. This talk will discuss the tools and techniques that allow us to make our deadlines, including automated deployments, frameworks, just-in-time testing, and more. Attention will be paid to the projects in their Github repository and the problems they solve.

Django: Pitfalls I Encountered and How to Avoid Them by Luke Sneeringer. This talk helps those who are new to the Django framework by helping them gently up the learning curve. Are you starting a moderate to large sized Django project? Do you need to plan ahead and build an application that will react to unanticipated needs? This talk covers some techniques and pitfalls Luke encountered in writing his first reasonably large Django site, and what he did differently the second time he started a project.

Running Django Apps on Google App Engine by Wesley Chun. In the past, Django users couldn't run apps unmodified on Google App Engine. Some tools helped with integration but required you to change your data models. Django-nonrel removes this requirement letting you run native Django apps on App Engine with only config changes if you bear in mind its restrictions like no JOINs. This talk will discuss Django-nonrel and porting App Engine apps to Django.

Edit: Blogger Link and Hacker News discussion link.

Edit 2: Go to part 2 of this series on the PyCon site or on Blogger.

Remember to submit and vote on questions for the fireside chat with Guido Van Rossum!

2011-02-26T09:36:00.001-05:00

PyCon 2011 is rapidly coming up on us (10 days) - remember to submit and vote on questions for the delightful fireside chat (featuring a comfy chair) with Guido Van Rossum, BDFL and Creator of Python! Check out the google moderator here: http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=5615c

Pycon 2011: Interview with Michael Foord

2011-02-25T09:44:00.001-05:00

By Mike Driscoll

PyCon is only a few weeks away, so I decided to interview one of the speakers for this year’s convention. In this discourse you can learn about Michael Foord’s talk about mock and what he likes about PyCon in general. Michael Foord is probably best known for his work in the IronPython community and for writing a book on IronPython. He is also the author of the mock library.

1) What do you want the attendees to take away from this talk?

My talk is on mock, which is a mocking and patching library for testing with Python. It grew out of a very simple, 30 line, proof of concept I developed for Resolver Systems to replace the myriad stubs we were creating throughout our test suite. It has since grown to become one of the most popular mocking libraries, out of the many available. The main reason for this is because it's very *simple* to use. It *isn't* a framework and it isn't opinionated about how you write your tests. mock aims to simplify many of the common patterns for mocking and monkey patching when testing with Python.

This talk is an introduction to mock, so it isn't an advanced talk but will show people how mock solves the common problems for which it is designed. There are also some really interesting features coming in mock 0.7.0 (which you can use right now - the beta is up on PyPI). This includes the much demanded support for mocking objects that have "magic methods" (protocol methods) including context managers and so on.

So I guess I'd like to showcase the new features (Python 3 support - yay!) and hopefully show people who aren't familiar with mock not just why they should use mock but how.

One of the other topics I'll talk about, perhaps surprisingly, is when *not* to mock. There are certain streams of thought in the testing world that you should mock absolutely everything. This can make your tests fragile and mean that you end up testing against implementation (and are therefore subject to every implementation detail) rather than testing the purpose of your code. I'm a believer in testing units of behaviour rather than units of implementation. I'll talk a little bit about *minimising* the use of mocking within your tests and not straying into over-mocking that is going to make your tests painful to maintain.

2) What made you decide to speak on this topic?

Despite mock being pretty popular I've never spoken about it at conferences before. I like to contribute to PyCon by talking about *something* (if I'm wanted of course) so it seemed an obvious topic. Not only that, but mock is something I'm using daily (thankfully my team at Canonical were using mock even before I arrived) and seems to be proving useful to other people.

One of the reasons people sometimes don't test is because it can look like some things are harder to test than they really are. Certainly if you're not doing any mocking, and even possibly if you are, mock can make writing tests easier and remove another barrier (excuse) for not testing.

I'd also like to speak up in favour of the much maligned monkey-patch. Monkey patching (changing behaviour of objects at runtime by replacing members - usually methods) has a bad reputation in the Python world, and certainly for production code it is a great way to confuse people trying to read your code. For testing though it is a very useful technique for analysing the behaviour of your code, especially where certain code paths are "expensive" (hit the network, filesystem or database for example) or are complex to configure.

Some people religiously avoid monkey patching and advocate techniques like dependency injection or inversion of control. Whilst these can be very useful architectural decisions in their own right they are rarely needed in Python *purely for testability* (whereas in languages like Java and C# they absolutely are) and I'll be showing why.

3) Why did you write the mock module?

I kind of answered that already. Many of the existing mocking libraries are really framework; they encourage or force you to write your tests in a particular way. For mocking frameworks that follow the expect -> verify (or record -> replay) this puts the tests what feels like the wrong way round; you effectively make your assertions and then execute your code. They also force you to jump through hoops where you *aren't* interested in how some mock is used (or some aspect of it is used) but a particular test is really just about one small part of the behaviour of the code under test.

I thought we could do better and wrote a small Mock class that could replace pretty much all of the many stub objects we were using in our tests at Resolver Systems. Functionality grew as we and other people started to use it more and more.

4) What are you most looking forward to at PyCon this year?

I always look forward to meeting people and the hallway track. There are many people I interact with daily on IRC, twitter and mailing lists and only get to see in person at PyCon. The Python community is full of great people and I enjoy spending time with them. The talks are a nice bonus of course and now that I'm working daily with django (which I wasn't this time last year) I'll be seeing what new tricks and tools I can pick up on. Hearing about how the other implementations are doing, particularly pypy, is always fascinating too.

There are a whole lot of other great speakers that are coming to PyCon this year as well. This is just a very small taste of what you can see while you’re there. Also note that there will be lots of folks who don’t speak but who are quite possibly just as interesting. PyCon is creeping up on its attendance cap, so sign up now before it’s too late!

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