The PyCon US Blog

I'd like to hold the inaugural organizers' meeting for PyCon 2008 on Tuesday, July 17, at 2PM Eastern/1PM Central/11AM Pacific (6PM UTC). Further meetings will be every other week. The meetings will be held via Google Talk/Jabber (group chat). We'll use the 'pycon' room on conference.jabber.org. Agenda: Staff roles Keynote speakers PyCon tech Chicago visit Please send any further agenda items to me, or edit the wiki page . See you there! David Goodger PyCon 2008 Chair

2007 marked the second year that 3-hour paid tutorials were offered at PyCon, and going by the feedback forms the result was an unqualified success. There were 13 tutorials (7 in the morning, 6 in the afternoon) offered by 11 instructors. Links to tutorial descriptions can be found here: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/Tutorials . One of the hats I wore for PyCon 2007 was "Tutorial Coordinator", and one of my duties was to collect feedback. We handed out feedback forms during the tutorials, and most attendees filled them out (thanks!). I transcribed the data from the feedback forms into a database, and present the overall results here. (I designed the tutorial feedback forms with some helpful input from others, but I take sole responsibility for ambiguities, omissions, and any errors.) 183 people registered for tutorials, 155 for morning sessions and 167 for afternoon sessions. 139 people registered for two tutorials. Most of the tutorials filled up; all of the afternoon tu...

A few weeks ago Andrew Kuchling put the 2007 feedback results (from paper & web forms) into the python.org wiki. I noticed that this was never announced anywhere, so here goes: The feedback results available at < http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyCon2007/Feedback >, and essay-type comments are at < http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyCon2007/Feedback/Comments >.

Doug Napoleone is managing work on the 2 terabytes of video and audio recorded at PyCon. Today he posted the current plans: The hope is to get everything done (including a professionally produced DVD of at least the r0ml keynote) by the end of June. We were thinking of doing weekly releases of material (9 tracks, one track a week, ~6 hours of video per track). That equates to ~2 talks a night for 4 nights, 1 day of re-encoding runs, and 1 night of uploading, for 9 weeks.

Robert M. Lefkowitz, Sunday's keynote speaker, has posted the slides for his presentation, "The Importance of Programming Literacy" .

Sean Reifschneider of tummy.com set up and administered the wireless network for PyCon 2007. He's now written a report about the networking that describes the wireless set-up and gives some statistics about network usage.

Dr. Goldberg has now posted the slides and text from her keynote presentation at PyCon 2007 at Rogue Mountain's web site .

Fast work from Ed Leafe of Dabo , who's posted the first video from PyCon, his presentation "Developing Desktop Applications with Dabo" .

If you attended PyCon 2007 and didn't hand in a completed feedback form, you can now complete the form online . The conference organizers would love to hear your opinions.

PyCon 2007 is now over. At-the-door registration was surprisingly stronger than we had been expecting, and the final attendance figure was 593 registered attendees, a 44% increase from 2006. The conference ran smoothly -- there were no disasters, only the odd oversight on our part or minor glitches. I personally heard from many attendees who really liked the balance of this year's conference: the daily lightning talk sessions, the selection of keynote speakers, and the featured talks. The rooms mostly didn't seem overly crowded to me, though we'll have to see what the feedback form results say. Jeff Rush and I are both very pleased with the conference, and are glad that the attendees seem to agree. And now for the sprints...

Sean Reifschneider, who's handling the wireless network this year, has created a Network Info wiki page with configuration info and usage tips for the wireless network.

To encourage people to take pictures at PyCon, we're holding a little photography contest to choose the best pictures taken at PyCon 2007, selected by whim of the organizers. Photos might show conference activities, be a portrait or candid shot of someone, or anything else you can think of. Prizes: First prize will be a free registration for a future PyCon of the winner's choice. Second prize will be 1 or 2 free tutorials at a future PyCon of the winner's choice. How to enter : post your photos on Flickr , and tag them with "pycon2007". If you don't use Flickr, post the picture to some other photo-sharing web site or to your own site, and e-mail the URL to (pycon at python dot org). All entries must be received by noon on Sunday the 25th. We're planning to announce the winners at the Sunday lightning talk session.

At PyCon this year we are having a significant number of activities besides the keynotes and talks. One group of those are the birds-of-a-feather gatherings being held in the evenings. The Python community consists of a number of smaller communities and we're encouraging them to hold meetings, dinners and other activities at PyCon this year. The organizers have tried to leave room in the busy schedule for these to happen and of course for some non-Python social BoFs as well. Here are the BoFs with which you have the opportunity to get involved: Python in Education Python in Science Healthcare and Python A Content Repository Standard for Python Jython Development Django Pylons Web Framework Trac Users and Developers Keysigning Party Tech that Runs the Python Conference Users of Bazaar Version Control/Launchpad Buildbot Users and Developers Python Advocacy Community Forum Texas Regional Unconference Dinner Meet PyGame Programming/Playing...

At PyCon this year we're going to have a multi-day game programming clinic and challenge. This is a first-time event and an experiment to find those in the Python community who enjoy playing and creating games. Python has several powerful modules for the creation of games among which are PyGame and PyOpenGL . On Friday evening, Phil Hassey will give an introduction to his game Galcon , an awesome high-paced multi-player galactic action-strategy game. You send swarms of ships from planet to planet to take over the galaxy. Phil will be handing out free limited-time licenses to those present. He will also be glad to talk about the development of Galcon using PyGame. After the Friday PSF Members meeting lets out around 8:40pm, Richard Jones will give his 30-60 minute introduction to the PyGame framework so you too can get started writing games. On Saturday evening, Lucio Torre and Alejandro J. Cura, who have come from Argentina to give the talk "pyweek: making games in 7 da...

Online registration for PyCon has now closed. We have 567 566 people registered, a 38% increase from last year's number of 410 attendees. Update : A duplicated registration was removed.

We received notice from the hotel that they're overbooked for Thursday evening. This means that some people will be forced to stay in a different nearby hotel. Here's an excerpt from the hotel's message: Our hotel is currently over sold on this night. We will need to relocate 50 individuals within the PyCon group block. We will be relocating these individuals to the Spring Hill Suites and Quorum Courtyard. These two hotels are located about .5 miles from our hotel. We will be providing shuttle transportation from these two hotels to our property for the days and times needed. Manny Soto, our Director of Event Planning and Operations and [Heather Halsted] will be calling the 50 Individuals directly to let them know which hotel they will be staying at. Unfortunately there's nothing the PyCon organizers can do about this. If you're one of the relocated individuals and relocation would be difficult for you, please call the Marriott Quorum (sales: 1-972-855-5785; toll-...

The birds-of-a-feather (BoF) wiki page is being nicely filled in. If you'd like to attend a particular BoF, please add your name to the attendee list for that session. If you're organizing a BoF and haven't nailed down a time slot yet, take a look at the available room and time slots.

Friday is the last day for online registration for PyCon . The clock is ticking...

If you're giving a presentation at PyCon, please remember to upload your slides before the conference. Having the slides available gives attendees more information in selecting talks to attend, and they can follow along on their own laptops. To upload files: Log in to the PyCon conference application . View the conference schedule . Display the tooltip for your presentation. Click on 'Upload File' and complete the form. Click 'Upload'.

The February 11 Python411 podcast is an interview with PyCon co-chair Jeff Rush. Enjoy this preview of the conference!