The PyCon US Blog

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 p...

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...

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 La...

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...

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...

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 c...

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 registe...

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 mob...

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-tr...

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 ...