The PyCon US Blog

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 [email protected] for details about sponsorship packages.

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!

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...