The PyCon US Blog

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...

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 P...

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

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...

By Rich Leland The master of one-handed cartwheels takes time to answer a few questions about his talks at PyCon this year. Daniel has been selected to give a tutorial, a talks and moderate a panel at PyCon 2011: Pinax Solutions Django Packages: A Case Study How to sell Python About the speaker Tell us a little bit about yourself. Since summer of 2004 I’ve had this weird compulsion to read Wikipedia’s recent death page every day. I didn’t get my driver’s license until 2010. And thanks to my mother’s keen parenting skills I suspect that oatmeal doesn’t stop growing. I’ve been doing Python for nearly 6 years, 5 of them professionally. I started professionally on Django 2.5 years ago. I live in Los Angeles and am a co-founder of cartwheelweb.com , a consulting/training firm that specializes in Python and Django. The talks Why did you decide to submit a tutorial, talk and panel for PyCon this year? I figured that if I submitted enough things then maybe one would be accepted....

Github (one of our sponsors) are raffling off two free conference registration passes! Check it out over on their official blog .

Sean Reifschneider of Tummy.com - official networking provider of PyCon 2011 (and past PyCons) has posted a good read for PyCon attendees who want to use the network (wired and wireless) at PyCon 2011. I've quoted the post here, but you can also subscribe/read it from the tummy.com blog here . He's also looking for volunteers to help set things up - check it out here . If you are planning to attend PyCon 2011 and use the network, please read this. And if you are thinking of going and haven't signed up, please do so soon, it is expected to sell out. In a good way. Executive Summary: Please bring 5.2GHz gear if at all possible (A.K.A. 802.11a). There will be a few hundred wired ports but they are highly concentrated. Please leave your 100+mW cards at home. Read this full message for all the details. Configuration You should see several networks available, including "pycon", "pycon2" and "pycon5". The latter two indicate that they are operatin...

by Brian Curtin Putting together two talks for a conference like PyCon is certainly no easy task, nor is it easy to pile on a lightning talk and the organization of a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session or two. That’s Geremy Condra’s plan for March 11 through March 13 at PyCon. The security researcher from the University of Washington heads to Atlanta for a second time, looking forward to an even better conference compared to last year’s blast. “My favorite part is definitely the degree of accessibility the conference offers - between the lightning talks, poster sessions, BoF sessions, etc.,” he says. Although the PyCon talk schedule may have you believe the day is over by dinner time, that’s only half of it. As Geremy mentions, “PyCon's enormous strength is in its ability to connect diverse parts of the Python community.” One of the ways this happens is through the many Open Space and BoF sessions in the evening. Add to that all of the thrown together hallway events, ad hoc spr...

Speaking and teaching for the first time at PyCon is Learn Python The Hard Way author and software developer Zed Shaw . As the author of numerous open source projects involving a number of languages such as Lamson (Python) , Mongrel (Ruby), Mongrel2 (C) , and Tir (Lua) , I asked what brought him to his involvement with Python. He began in 2003 with a server that interacted with fingerprint scanners, complete with a web front end to manage them. “My interest in Python is now more as an educational tool. It's really the only language with the right balance of not too much punctuation or ‘syntax junk’ and not too little,” he says. Python seems to hit the sweet spot for him in terms of the amount of punctuation needed to build structure, “but not so much that you're filling out forms in triplicate just to get something printed to the screen.” The idea for his Learn Python The Hard Way book came from his experience with Mickey Baker’s “Complete Course in Jazz Guitar.” “I learned ...

The PyCon Organizing Committee will have a planning meeting at PyCon 2011 to begin the process of selecting the location for the 2014 and 2015 conferences. Any local or regional user group interested in proposing their city to host the conference should plan to have a representative at the meeting, if possible. Email PyCon 2011 Chair Van Lindberg if you are interested in attending. More details will be announced as soon as the time and location are decided, and a notice will be posted on the open space board at the conference in case you decide to come at the last minute.

People are asking about the cap for PyCon this year. The answer is that we have approximately three hundred and fifty spaces left. So no, we are not sold out at PyCon yet - but things are moving so fast (and we are receiving so many questions) that we thought it was worth opening our kimono a little bit and letting you see into the underbelly of planning for an event like PyCon. Hotel Negotiations The first and most important part of hosting a conference is negotiating with the hotel or convention center to get a place to stay. Some of that negotiation took place a couple years ago - we signed on to be at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta a couple years ago - but big parts of that contract are contingent on a conference attracting enough attendees to fill hotel rooms to make the hassle worth it for the hotel. For those who are working with the hotel numbers, we measure what are called room-nights - booked hotel rooms. These are not the same as individuals attending PyCon, because people sha...

It’s not the first time Dave Beazley made the drive from Chicago to PyCon, but it’s the first time he buckled up a piece of history to join him on the trip. After giving two tutorials on Python 3, Dave brings out his 1979 OSI Superboard II for an old school meets new school mashup which is sure to raise a few eyebrows and bring back memories for some. “The Superboard II was the first computer on which I learned to program back in the late 70s,” said Dave when asked how he came about the machine. It sat in his parents’ basement until Eric Floehr mentioned it at a recent SciPy conference. From there he called his brother who brought it out to Chicago, and “much to our amazement, it still worked.” After figuring out the cassette audio interface, his concurrency and distributed computing interests had to find a way in. He decided to use ZeroMQ and Redis . Just for good measure, he went with Python 3 for the project. Because of that, he did have to spend a few hours porting Py65 . ...

We want to let everyone know, that as of this upcoming Friday, 2/18/11 the ability to book and reserve your room online via the PyCon registration system will end. We have to provide a list of booked rooms to the hotel on that date. Note however, we will continue taking additional reservations and changes via email ( pycon4-reg@cteusa.com ) and phone (847-759-4277), but after Friday they are not guaranteed and will be based on availability with the hotel itself. The website will have this information after the online housing system is "closed" online Friday around 3PM EDT. This does not change PyCon conference registration, which will stay as-is until the cutoff date. We obviously recommend that you register for the conference , and book your rooms this week though!

By Mike Driscoll As PyCon approaches, the blogger community was invited to interview the speakers that are coming to the event. I chose Wesley Chun, writer of “Core Python Programming” and co-author of “Python Web Development with Django”. In this interview, I ask Wesley about his talk, Running Django Apps on Google App Engine and about PyCon in general. Let’s see what he has to say: 1) What do you want the attendees to take away from this talk? I'd like all attendees to come away from this talk with a greater sense of optimism they can take their Django apps and run them with little or no modification on Google App Engine, taking advantage of the scalability they need and is so difficult to achieve on your own. Part of this talk is pseudo-marketing to bring more awareness to Django-nonrel, which is the foundation of how to get Django apps to run on App Engine. For the past several years since App Engine debuted in 2008, there have been several tools, called the Helper an...

By Brian Curtin The Python world has come a long way since December 2008 when 3.0 was first released. Books have been released, blogs have been written, and most importantly, projects have been ported. Recently, NumPy and SciPy checked in their porting work. We’ve heard rumblings of Django on 3.x, possibly as early as this summer. Python 3.1.3 was released in the fall and 3.2 final is around a week away, and with 2.7 being the end of the 2.x line, all core hands are on Python 3. Lennart Regebro knows all about this. He’s the author of a new book, Porting to Python 3 , and he’s giving a talk by the same name . The idea to write the book came from a lack of published material on the topic and an interest in writing for the now defunct Python Magazine. “The lack of documentation has been the biggest hurdle, [so] if you want to port to Python 3 you have been stepping into the dark. Since I had been using Python 3 and porting to it on my free time since early 2008 I had a bit of exper...

Feel like helping promote, get the word out - or just show that you're going or speaking at PyCon 2011 ? Well - we encourage presenters and everyone to post blog entries to anywhere they can - if you have one you see, or think especially deserves notice - drop an email to pycon-organizers and we'll feature it here, and elsewhere for PyCon 2011! Second - Simon Willison, co-creator of Lanyrd a newly minted YCombinator startup designed around promoting and  says: ...one of the best ways we (Lanyrd) can help is if you get as many of your attendees to mark themselves as attending on Lanyrd as possible. This has a couple of knock-on effects: most importantly, if anyone signs in to Lanyrd who follows at least one of PyCon's attendees they'll get a conference recommendation. Secondly, we're about to set it up so e-mail alerts go out to users telling them of conferences their contacts are attending, with an emphasis on conferences with multiple contacts already going....

By Brian Curtin Coming over from France for his 4th PyCon is packaging and distribution guru, Tarek Ziadé . When he’s not spending his time on Mozilla work, he’s leading the Distutils2 project, maintains the shutil and sysconfig standard libraries, and organizes PyCon France. On top of all of that, he found time to put together two talks: an extreme talk on packaging , and one on the Firefox Sync project. Getting right into the question most people have, I started by asking what’s up with Distutils2? “Distutils2 is almost ready to be used in projects, and a first beta release will be published before PyCon,” claims Tarek. Additionally, re-integration to the standard library is in the plans as soon as Python 3.2 final goes out. They made the necessary adjustments to PyPI and also plan to distribute a standalone package supporting versions as far back as Python 2.4. His “ Packaging, from Distutils to Distutils2 ” talk gets right to the heart of Distutils new features and their u...

By Brian Curtin It’s not often that “April Fools” jokes go past the joke stage, especially in the Python community. PEP-3117 didn’t make it, and Uncle Barry’s PEP-401 takeover hasn’t yet occurred. However, we’re still seeing the work of an April 1, 2010 joke in the form of Flask , Armin Ronacher’s micro-framework. For a fake project, it certainly got a lot of attention. Within days after announcing the joke Denied micro-framework, 10,000 people downloaded the fake screencast, 50,000 people viewed the website, and the project had 50 followers and 6 forks on github. “The great thing about being part of a vibrant open source community like the Python one is that you learn a lot more about people and yourself than you do about the project itself,” said Ronacher. The joke was an exercise in project judgment, and people seemed to like the idea and bought into it right away, many without noticing the quality of the code or lack of documentation, but the flashiness of a screencast. Hi...

(Little of this is news to faithful readers of the PyCon blog... but we wanted to gather some of the exciting developments in a press-release style format.) ATLANTA - February 10, 2011 PyCon 2011 has broken all existing PyCon records for content submitted by the Python community. Since its beginning in 2003, PyCon has been a community conference, relying on Python-loving volunteers for its speakers and organizers. For PyCon 2011, over 250 submissions to present talks and tutorials poured in - far more than in any previous year. From these, a rich conference has been created for Python users of every level - from novice-level talks and tutorials to the new Extreme PyCon track for the fearless. The program topics span the range of Python programming: PyCon 2011 Talks: http://us.pycon.org/2011/schedule/lists/talks/ PyCon 2011 Tutorials: http://us.pycon.org/2011/schedule/tutorials/ PyCon 2010's poster session packed the poster hall with enthusiastic attendees. This year the poster ...

Each year, PyCon has a focus that arises fairly naturally from the activities of the Python community. Whether it is Python moving from niche to mainstream (as in PyCon 2008), new implementations of Python (as in PyCon 2009), or shipping quality software (PyCon 2010), PyCon has reflected the tech space in general and Python's place within it. By now, you all know about our focus on the startup ecosystem for PyCon 2011. Startups - especially successful ones - can provide us with unique perspectives, insights and most of all inspiration to go out and perform the impossible. In evaluating the available speakers - everyone from VCs, Angels - and many more, we were taken by a suggestion provided by Y Combinator's Paul Graham and Union Square Venture's Fred Wilson: Why not shine a light on some startups that had "made it" or are going to shortly -- all on top of Python? Thus, we want to announce a set of plenary talks for PyCon 2011: Startup stories. These are t...

I'm really happy to announce the most recent addition to our keynote/plenary talk lineup - " A Fireside Chat with Guido van Rossum " - in this interview style keynote, we will explore the mind of Python's creator and benevolent dictator - subjecting him to the "comfy chair" as well as questions from the community (picked and voted on by the community) as well as questions from the audience. This will be a guided, but informal talk. I'm really excited by this (not just because I might be the interviewer - move over anchor news!) but also because I think it will strike a good balance between a formal, and informal talk style that will allow us to ask open, candid questions from the founder of our community and the Python language! You can submit questions for the BDFL here: http://goo.gl/mod/qSW7 And comfy chairs will be used.