Need Talk Ideas?

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.