PyCon 2011 Atlanta Blog: General

PyCon 2011: Outside the Talks: Poster Session

2011-03-09T22:14:18Z

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 what it’s about. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has the world’s most powerful pulsed spallation neutron source, and the PyDAS package makes it easy to integrate the many parts of the system. Piotr plans to show an overview of the system along with examples of its use.

We all know that cloud computing is all the rage, but Gökhan Sever is working with literal cloud computing as an atmospheric scientist. Python with Cython, NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib all come together to support Gökhan’s cloud modelling application. From the processing to analysis to visualization, he does it all with the open source tools we all use. Yay cloud.

If you were wondering how one might solve hyperbolic partial differential equations and work with computational fluid dynamics, Python is a correct answer. Yung-Yu Chen put together a poster showing why Python and C is a viable replacement for the venerable FORTRAN, as commonly seen in the science world. Yung-Yu’s SOLVCON framework shows that Python is on its way to becoming a mainstream tool in this field.

Be sure to check out the Poster Session Sunday at 10:05!

PyCon Program Guide for your iOS and Android Devices

2011-03-07T22:34:05Z

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 Lada, and the entire Proxima Labs team for providing such a fantastic service!

PyCon 2011: Live on Startup Row

2011-03-07T11:40:45Z

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 fifteen Startup Row Finalists:

Friday

CollectorDASH: One of the things that make us unique is that we collect things - stamps, dishes, pennies, blue glass vases, art, everything. This is a vibrant part of our culture, but the tools to empower collectors are stuck back in the last century. CollectorDASH builds applications and marketplaces for collectors, applying modern technologies to make collecting more efficient, fun and affordable.

CrowdBooster: Everything is social these days - and Twitter is the fastest-moving social platform of all. Crowdbooster gives you twitter analytics that let you understand who is talking about you in real time.

Stormpulse: Are you tired of watching the news only to find out where a thunderstorm was 20 minutes ago? It is especially important to have up-to-date information if your business depends on the weather. Stormpulse delivers high-fidelity weather intelligence to a broad range of industries including energy, manufacturing, transportation, defense, healthcare, and retail. Businesses and government agencies subscribe to this intelligence to improve their long-range planning and daily decision-making surrounding the arrival and impact of significant weather events in the continental United States and Caribbean.

AppNest: AppNest is a distribution platform for mobile applications. Specifically, they are making the installation of private applications really simple. Ad-hoc distribution is the current technique used by iOS developers - but the publication and distribution process for ad-hoc applications is byzantine and difficult. AppNest makes this process a lot simpler. With AppNest, users can install the application using nothing more than a web browser and a native iOS application. No iTunes required, everything can be done on the mobile device.

Saaspire: Saaspire is building a suite of products based around "behavioral data": the data that you create when you say or do things on the Internet. Saaspire is launching their first product, FocusLab, right now. It's a behavioral data analysis tool. They are also rolling out a SaaS platform that will allow developers to easily add personalization and other behavioral data services to their apps.

Olark: One of the most frustrating things for any business is having people come into your store, put items in their carts, and then... leave. Olark helps businesses engage with customers before they leave the site, increasing the numbers of visitors that become customers.

Ep.io: Ep.io is a smart Python hosting platform. Not only do they take care of your load balancing, database configuration, redundancy, backups and code pushes for you, they support any WSGI-compatable framework or application, and any Python library we can install from PyPi. By running things in their secure, shared environment, they can keep costs down. Within their free resource limits, if you have a small site you just want people to see, just throw it up - a few minutes, and it'll be up and running at no cost. Above that, they bill you only by the amount of resources you actually use.

Saturday

DotCloud: DotCloud takes Platform-as-a-Service to the next level by allowing you to choose your /own/ platform that will be supported by DotCloud. DotCloud allows developers to be developers and not system administrators. DotCloud has recently received 800K in Angel Funding and is growing like mad.

Mailgun: Email is an essential part of doing business today - but building proper email interfaces can be tricky and error-prone. Mailgun provides an email interface for your app, allowing you to integrate email into your existing processes in a simple and easy way.

Glancely: Just one look at Glancely and you get it - instant product search. Not thousands of clicks through various confusing catalogs - just see what you want, click it, its yours.

NodeRabbit: NodeRabbit is all about it easier to build and deploy web applications. Our first product is DjangoZoom, a Heroku-like platform-as-a-service that radically speeds up the deployment of Django apps. Early adopters have described DjangoZoom as "magical" and a service that they can't live without.

ACL Systems: ACL Systems is a new startup focusing on the next wave in education - online education. For some aspects of education, there is nothing like being in class with a teacher. For everything else, the cost and availability advantages of online education are disrupting this established business. ACL System's online education platform makes online education effective and affordable.

MBA Sciences: MBA Sciences is a self-funded startup focused on allowing programmers to exploit parallelism and rapidly create scalable, fault-tolerant distributed applications that are rock solid from day one. MBA Sciences was highlighted by the Supercomputing 2010 Conference as a Disruptive Technology due to the ability of SPM.Python to perform the non-differentiating heavy lifting by removing the pain typically associated with authoring, testing and maintaining parallel capabilities.

Eldarion: Eldarion builds and runs great websites like Quisition and Typewar and helps you do the same. They get you from idea to launch sooner by developing custom and open source components for Django/Pinax and providing hosting on the Gondor platform.

Beautylish: Beauty products is not where you would necessarily expect to find Python - but it is there. Beautylish is a social network for beauty, cosmetics, and brands. They focus on video tutorials, candid product reviews, and conversations amongst users. The service actually launched in beta form this past January, and has already accumulated a small but loyal user base. They have already raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of prominent angel investors, including Ron Conway's SV Angel.

Edit: Hacker News Discussion Link.

Call for Session Volunteers

2011-03-04T13:54:36Z

We’re a week away from PyCon and need a little help from you, the community. The conference doesn’t run itself, so we need a team of volunteers to act as a support staff to keep each session on track. The duties are simple yet vital to the success of the conference. You’ll help keep an eye on the clock, make sure everyone is in the right place, give the audience a voice, and get a front seat.

Here’s what we need help with: Session Chairs and Session Runners. One thing in common to both is that you have to be present for the entire session, and a session is the group of talks in between breaks (usually 2-3 talks).

Session Chairs take charge for a session. They start by hopping up on stage to introduce the speaker. Keep the into simple -- something like their name, where they’re from, and talk title, then head back and close the doors to keep it quiet. Then they watch the clock and let the speaker know when it’s time to stop for questions. If there are multiple questions, they juggle who gets the microphone, pass it around, then let the speaker know when it’s time to wrap it all up. After that, help them disconnect the microphone equipment and make any last announcements (open spaces, BoF, etc).

Session Runners are the shepherd of the session. They start in the elusive Green Room fifteen minutes before each talk and help the speaker get ready. The first step is doing a test run of the speaker’s laptop on a the projector system to make sure they can walk up and get started immediately. After everything is alright, they show the speaker where to upload their slides -- attendees like a copy for later, and everyone following along with the videos online does too. Five minutes before talk time, the runner and speaker will head to the session and get situated. Assuming everything gets connected and ready to roll, the runner hands it off to the chair to do their introduction (tip off the chair to any name pronunciation if needed).

Are you willing to help? If so, signing up is as easy as viewing the schedule and finding an open time slot. This year’s schedule has a nifty way of handling this, as shown below.

First login to the site, then find a time slot, then click the blue S in one of the talk slots for the session (the entire session is outlined in black).

From here, click to volunteer for one of the available positions. As shown below, the Session Chair spot has already been filled.

Thanks a lot for your help, and we look forward to seeing you at the conference!Title: Call for Session Volunteers

Welcome to QNX, and thanks to all our sponsor

2011-03-03T15:30:10Z

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 company really appreciates clean and elegant designs. Good software architecture is one of the key principles that drives our engineering, and Python makes a great addition to our toolkit for that reason. However, a big reason we’re using Python is because of the amazing developer productivity that it enables.

I asked them a bit about what role Python is playing - or going to play - strategically for them in the future - but they're staying pretty mum - but if this is any indication:

QNX will directly support Python in future products. Similarly to how we have participated in open source tooling with Eclipse, we plan to invest in developing Python, both for utilization within QNX products and in open source contributions back to the Python community. To that end, we’re interested in hiring Python developers and working with companies who do Python work.

Python looks to have gained itself a pretty significant contributor to its community. We're very appreciative of QNX’s sponsorship of PyCon - say hello to their team members when you see them in less than a week!

I also wanted to take a moment to thank all of our sponsors - Google, whose continued support of PyCon and the Python Software foundation - and Python community as a whole - has been stunning. They’ve consistently been a Diamond level sponsor for the conference, and have given the community as a whole a lot.

There’s also Microsoft - our one platinum sponsor this year, who once again continues to support PyCon as they have for a few years now. Their continued support is awesome, and their work (for example, open sourcing IronPython under the Apache license, and doing amazing Visual Studio Python support work) for the community is greatly appreciated.

Then there is the list of all of our Gold Sponsors, who also help make PyCon viable and accessible to all of us:

As well as our Silver Sponsors, businesses who really step up and help us out as much as they can, and also contribute a great deal to both the conference and community:

Without these sponsors - PyCon couldn't happen. They help keep the conference affordable and afloat in many ways - not to mention, most, if not all of them are going to be actively hiring at PyCon 2011.

So, our hats go off in thanks to QNX, our latest sponsor, and all of our amazing and generous sponsors we have. We encourage you to check out what they have to offer - and to pack your resume along with you to PyCon next week!

Last Chance for Regular Registration

2011-03-02T14:52:41Z

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 register for PyCon!

PyCon 2011: Interview with Carl Karsten

2011-03-02T12:40:46Z

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 mobile devices, and mp3 for those that like to learn Python while they work out,” says Carl. On the difficulty, he quips, “it's quick ‘n easy, except when it isn't.”

As for a conference like PyCon, he’s looking at getting around 1.2 TB of footage to bring home. His record is to have a video online three hours after the talk was given, but it doesn’t look like that’ll be the case with 5 tracks and three days worth of footage.

While I knew Carl was a big proponent of open source, it was great news to me that he does 100% of his work with open technologies. DVSwitch from Debian developer Ben Hutchings handles much of the recording and produces the hundreds of raw files they take to post-production. That work is then passed onto Carl’s Veyepar library, which handles the various video metadata and uploading capabilities.

Use of a frame grabber allows Carl and the team to get a stream of the speaker’s screen, not just their presentation slides. Any code, examples, pictures, or video gets taken and mixed with a camera view of the speaker on stage. Since the grabber works off of the video feed, there’s no need for the speaker to submit talk slides in any specific format -- it’s all just video coming out of their own computer.

The whole post-production system is wrapped up with a Django app. From there he makes any of the necessary corrections like missing titles, incorrect scheduling, or any of the hundreds of little things that can go wrong in the process. “Most are recoverable, it just takes time,” he says of any hiccups.

For samples of what to expect for the PyCon 2011 videos, take a look at what the crew came up with in 2009 and 2010 at pycon.blip.tv, or take a look at any of his user group talks on carlfk.blip.tv. If you can’t make PyCon, hopefully the videos keep you in the loop!

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 4)

2011-03-01T19:50:42Z

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-traffic networking is just a natural testing ground for constructs that make it easier to handle high concurrency. Nevertheless, the principles discussed in this track are applicable to any high-throughput process.

There are eight different talks in this track:

Extreme Network Programming with Python and Linux by Rob Ludwick ( Extreme ). Traditionally, C is the preferred language for low level network programming and works well for those who have the time and patience to work with it. As it turns out, Python is very capable for prototyping low level network code, collecting data, and testing ideas quickly without getting lost in the land of C. Obscure topics such as raw sockets, multicast, network bridging, rolling your own vpn, and disruption tolerant networking will be covered. This talk will show how you can use Python to build custom protocols, debug a network, fix broken nets, implement custom logging and processing, and simulate network traffic.

Jython Concurrency by Jim Baker (Extreme). One of the persistent troubles with concurrency in Python is the GIL - the Global Interpreter Lock used to simplify the implementation of CPython... but not all Python implementations include a GIL. Jython implements the Python language, but Jython leverages the underlying Java platform to provide an opinionated alternative to CPython in its support of concurrency. Jython instead embraces threads, provides extensive support for managing their execution and coordination through standard Java platform functionality (java.util.concurrent), and works well with Jython's implementation of {ython's standard mutable collection types. The underlying JVM provides also extensive instrumentation as well as the ability to set a variety of parameters, including choice of GC. This talk will go into a detailed discussion of some of the interesting ramifications of these design points and how they can be effectively applied to write concurrent code, as illustrated through a variety of short examples.

Ten Years of Twisted by Glyph Lefkowitz. Twisted is one of the oldest event-driven architectures for Python, and it is the oldest one still being actively maintained and extended with new functionality. The maturity that Twisted brings to event-based networking is essential - they have found and fixed bugs that other asynchronous architectures may not hit for a couple years. Despite this pedigree, however, many aspects of Twisted remain misunderstood or simply unrealized. This talk will present a brief conceptual introduction to Twisted, followed by a survey of its features, their status, and how development has been proceeding over the years, with a special focus on the last two years of sponsored development.

Using Coroutines to Create Efficient, High-Concurrency Web Applications by Matt Spitz ( Extreme ). Many people don't know that the popular web-based instant messaging service Meebo is delivered using Python. At Meebo, they have settled on using gunicorn, a lightweight WSGI server, which supports gevent, a coroutine-based network library for python. Gevent monkeypatches python's system modules to make network requests asynchronous using an event loop based on libevent. This trick allows the developer to use a simple blocking CGI as a non-blocking web application that can handle many concurrent requests. In this in-depth review, Matt discusses how Meebo worked through the various approaches to building web applications, why they ended up choosing gunicorn+gevent, the challenges this new framework presents, and how they've dealt with them.

Prototyping Go's Select with stackless.py for Stackless Python by Andrew Francis (Extreme). Google’s introduction of the Go language raised eyebrows in the Stackless Python community. Although very different languages, Go and Stackless Python’s concurrency model share a common ancestor: the Bell Labs family of languages (i.e., Newsqueak, Limbo). The common feature are channels: a synchronous message passing mechanism based on Tony Hoare’s Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).

Both Go and Stackless Python have channels - but the select language built into Go gives it the ability to wait on multiple channels simultaneously. This talk explores the prototyping potential of stackless.py, the PyPy's framework's implementation of Stackless Python. This talk will present a brain-bending "case study" involving prototyping Go's select in stackless.py before reimplementing select in C based Stackless Python.

An Introduction to Tornado by Gavin Roy. Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. It is not only a web server but it is a light-weight, use only what you need, web development framework. This talk will review the current state of the Tornado project, review the features Tornado provides and give examples of how to implement asynchronous web applications in Tornado.

Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ by Zed Shaw (Extreme). Zed Shaw has raised a lot of interest with his recent work on Mongrel2, a "language agnostic" webserver that uses ZeroMQ to handle all the plumbing. This talk builds on Zed's experience with Mongrel2 to demonstrate how to use ZeroMQ with Python (and others) to do really advanced or even weird network architectures. Zed will show Python talking to other languages, handling HTTP, JSON, XML, WebSockets, encoding videos, handling chat messaging, etc. This is an extreme talk, so it will be in code, not in diagrams. This talk will assume you know ZeroMQ and Python, but if you don't know ZeroMQ you can probably still keep up.

An outsider's look at co-routines by Peter Portante. This talk is designed to take an interested beginner from a hazy understanding of coroutines up to the point where they can understand the essential concepts (and the essential differences!) associated with the different implementations of coroutines for Python.

Is this the conference you want to see? Then, register for PyCon and book your room now! We have picked up a few more rooms - including a few at a lower rate a block away. You can email (pycon4-reg@cteusa.com), or phone (847-759-4277). We have very few spots left.

Links:

Go to Part 1 of this series
Go to Part 2 of this series
Go to Part 3 of this series
Go to this post on Blogspot.

Edit: Discussion link on Hacker News.

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 3)

2011-03-01T18:53:51Z

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 applied to the storage and persistence space. It can be graph-based, document-based, column-based, or object based -- or even just a data structures server.

It is not surprising, though, that Python is able to talk to them all. In this track we have four different talks, giving the inside scoop on production-level use of various NoSQL stores.

ZODB: A Python Persistence System by Chris McDonough. The ZODB is the granddaddy of the various NoSQL options for Python, having been developed when such things were "object databases" and not "NoSQL." Nevertheless, the ZODB is a standalone persistence system uniquely integrated into Python that remains astoundingly buzzword-compliant despite its age. This talk will provide a high-level overview of ZODB useful to a novice or intermediate Python programmer. At the end of the talk, an attendee should have a basic understanding of how to create an application which depends on ZODB persistence.

CouchDB and Python in practice by Luke Gotszling. CouchDB has a unique document-centric model with automatic clustering and replication. It is gaining a lot of traction, and has recently been seen both up in the clouds and as a data store on Android phones. This talk will introduce CouchDB and will show how to get it to play well with Python. Luke will continue by showing a python ORM for CouchDB, easing development and object-document interoperability. Finally, Luke will cover parsing CouchDB documents within python, writing view functions in python, map/reduce functions on CouchDB from python, and some lessons learned from managing and distributing a live deployment at scale under high load.

Scaling Python past 100 by Mark Ramm. Those with eagle eyes will spot this as a repeat from the "web working" track. That is because this talk is a twofer - describing both the development of the modern Python codebase as well as the use of MongoDB to address the scaling issues associated with a top 100 site.

MongoDB + Pylons at Catch.com: Scalable Web Apps with Python and NoSQL by Niall O'Higgins. The Catch.com backend provides an API for publishing and querying your personal data - used by many hugely popular Android, iOS and Web clients. Faced with the limits of the initial Catch.com Java/BDB backend implemention, they evaluated various alternative technologies including Amazon SimpleDB, MySQL, Cassandra and MongoDB. They found Python and MongoDB gave them unique flexibility with our data model, allowed them to scale for increased reliability and performance and decreased feature development time - and in this talk they'll describe exactly how.

Edit: Wesley Chun points out that Running Django Apps on Google App Engine is also designed to deal with NoSQL datastores - and that the principles covered in his talk apply both to GAE and to MongoDB. ed.

Links:

Go to Part 1 of this series
Go to Part 2 of this series
Go to this post on Blogspot.

Edit: Discussion link on Hacker News.

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 2)

2011-02-28T20:39:34Z

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 how to quickly get from zero to working code. This three-for-one talk by the main developers of these three popular Python web frameworks will (very!) briefly cover the state of each of our individual frameworks and communities, followed by a discussion of their efforts to work together and share code.

Opening the Flask by Armin Ronacher. Flask has an unusual history - it started out as the joke framework Denied, but was morphed into a small, reusable microframework when there was an unexpected surge of interest. Based on the powerful foundation of Werkzeug and Jinja2 it's one of the most popular microframeworks for Python.

This talk will start with a very quick introduction into Flask, where it all started and why people like it. Armin will take people into the design of Flask and explain why it works the way it works. Furthermore it will look into the Flask ecosystem and how extensions work and have a brief look in what is planned for the future, especially regarding Python 3.

WSGI: Working together to solve the web's problems by Christopher Perkins. WSGI has been around for quite a few years now, and has progressed somewhat into a movement in the web development world, having inspired a number of similar libraries in other languages. WSGI is moving forward in the Python space, with a new, Python-3-compatible specification just approved. The purpose of this panel is to get the experts developing the spec together in a public domain to talk about the past, present, and future of WSGI.

Hookbox: All Python web-frameworks, now real-time. Batteries Included by Michael Carter. Hookbox is a Python and Eventlet-based Comet-server/message-queue which tightly integrates with existing web application infrastructure via web hooks and a REST interface; Hookbox’s purpose is to ease the development of real-time web applications, with an emphasis on tight integration with existing web technology. Put simply, Hookbox is a web-enabled message queue. It doesn't matter if you are using Django, Pylons, TurboGears, Google App Engine, or Werkzeug; Hookbox is made to integrate with your framework of choice. If you pay attention for at least half of this talk, you'll leave confident and ready to take advantage of WebSockets, Comet, and the world.

HTSQL - an insanely good WSGI / REST interface to your favorite database by Clark C. Evans. One of the most common needs for companies is an ad-hoc reporting tool for their databases. The most common product within this space is Crystal Reports - with the open source alternative Jasper Reports. The problem with both Crystal and Jasper, though, is that they require significant programmer/DBA time to set up and administer the reporting infrastructure. This is inefficient and expensive. Another problem with existing solutions is that they don't make the data from your databases available for web applications.

HTSQL takes it away from hard "reports" by exposing databases as full-fledged entities on the web by mapping a graph-based URL language to the structure of your database. No setting up the report needed - just craft the right URL and your ad-hoc reports are done. Live dashboards become easy - and your data can easily be consumed by other web services in XML or JSON format.

An (biased) survey of the python web by Mark Ramm. Mark Ramm is the BDFL of one framework - but that's also why he pays attention to the whole ecosystem. From the release of Plone 4, TurboGears 2, Django 1.2 and Pylons 1, it's been an interesting year. And things like html5lib, an updated WSGI spec, and a contender for the next generation WSGI have all made things interesting.

This talk is not about teach people to use python to make websites. It's to teach people who already use python, that there are lots of different tools out there, and to help us all get some perspective on what Mark calls the "python web toolkit." This talk won't be about throwing Twisted into a cage match with Zope3, or setting Flask up in a fight to the death against web.py. Instead, it attempt to survey the full landscape of the python web world and to see how far we've come in the last 5 years.

HTTP in Python: which library for what task?/ by Augie Fackler. HTTP is the lingua franca of the web, and many things done in Python depend on it - but unfortunately the implementations of HTTP in Python can be a mixed bag of available technology. What's implemented mostly works well, but there are some frustrating gaps in different libraries that are poorly documented. This talk goes through the nuts and bolts (and warts) of every HTTP library Augie could find for Python. Finally, Augie decided to write his own. This talk will cover what's available today and why it made sense to start from scratch with a completely new implementation.

Scaling Python past 100 by Mark Ramm. This talk takes a dive into one of the most-trafficked sites on the web, the venerable Sourceforge.net. Sourceforge is in the midst of a complete exorcism of the old codebase - but the path from legacy PHP to modern python tools has been long and bumpy. This is the inside story of how Sourceforge took Python from a single prototype site, to the core technology driving SourceForge.net. Mark will discuss the mistakes they made along the way, the benefits that sold python, and the real secret behind Sourceforge's python transformation.

The Pyramid FAQ by Carlos de la Guardia. Every development project has a few questions and doubts that seem to come up on its support channels every now and then. The Pyramid framework is no exception. For Pyramid, the #pylons IRC channel is the most common way of giving support to users of the Pyramid framework. This talk will take some of the most often discussed topics in the channel and give detailed answers to them.

See Part 1 of this series, or go to this post on Blogspot.

Edit: Discussion link on Hacker News.

The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 1)

2011-02-28T20:37:52Z

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
Python Implementations
Deep Voodoo
Testing, Debugging, and Documentation
Algorithms, Big Data, and Cloud Computing
Working with Python

Virtual Track #1: Django

Django is the best-known and most widely used web framework for Python. Coming out of the Lawrence-Journal World's internal development efforts, it has evolved from a news-focused system to a full-fledged web development environment in use all over the web. It is not by mistake that one of our Startup Stories focuses on the use of Django at DISQUS.

In this track we have six different talks:

Distributed Tasks with Celery by Ryan Petrello. Celery is an open source task queueing system based on distributed message passing, especially using the AMQP protocol. Celery is usable for all sorts of things, but it has become prominent as the go-to backend queuing system for use with Django. This talk will focus on the need for task distribution, the tools celery provides to meet those needs, and an in-depth discussion of how they have used celery at ShootQ to improve the efficiency and reliability of their background processes. [ShootQ doesn't use Django - showing how this is applicable across the web working space. Nevertheless, it is best known for its easy-to-use Django integration - ed.]

Django Packages: A Case Study by Daniel Greenfeld. Since launch Django Packages has become the place to find and compare apps, frameworks and projects produced by the Django Community. Through the use of public APIs, Django Packages constantly fetches hard data from PyPI, Github, and Bitbucket, aproviding a powerful mash-up of real-world data on the volume of usage of a particular package. At a glance you can see which package is the most downloaded, which is the most used, and which has seen ongoing development. This talk is for everyone, including non-Django users, and covers everything from architecture, API development, to interacting with PyPI, Github, Bitbucket, etc. It will include tools, lessons learned, and projects that fork the code to save the world and will finish with an overview of the forthcoming pypackages.com.

Pluggable Django Patterns by Corey Oordt. (Extreme) Pluggable or reusable applications are a key feature of Django, but there is little guidance on writing them well. This talk will dig into the different types of Django applications and coding patterns that make writing a reusable application easier. This talk also covers ways to avoid common implementation gotchas.

Best Practices for Impossible Deadlines by Christopher Groskopf. Django's tagline is "The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines." Christopher Groskopf takes that to the next level with this talk. At the Chicago Tribune he helps develop, test, and deploy production web applications on schedules that range from two hours to two months. This talk will discuss the tools and techniques that allow us to make our deadlines, including automated deployments, frameworks, just-in-time testing, and more. Attention will be paid to the projects in their Github repository and the problems they solve.

Django: Pitfalls I Encountered and How to Avoid Them by Luke Sneeringer. This talk helps those who are new to the Django framework by helping them gently up the learning curve. Are you starting a moderate to large sized Django project? Do you need to plan ahead and build an application that will react to unanticipated needs? This talk covers some techniques and pitfalls Luke encountered in writing his first reasonably large Django site, and what he did differently the second time he started a project.

Running Django Apps on Google App Engine by Wesley Chun. In the past, Django users couldn't run apps unmodified on Google App Engine. Some tools helped with integration but required you to change your data models. Django-nonrel removes this requirement letting you run native Django apps on App Engine with only config changes if you bear in mind its restrictions like no JOINs. This talk will discuss Django-nonrel and porting App Engine apps to Django.

Edit: Blogger Link and Hacker News discussion link.

Edit 2: Go to part 2 of this series on the PyCon site or on Blogger.

PyCon 2011: Interview with Michael Foord

2011-02-25T09:41:16Z

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 patterns for mocking and monkey patching when testing with Python.

This talk is an introduction to mock, so it isn't an advanced talk but will show people how mock solves the common problems for which it is designed. There are also some really interesting features coming in mock 0.7.0 (which you can use right now - the beta is up on PyPI). This includes the much demanded support for mocking objects that have "magic methods" (protocol methods) including context managers and so on.

So I guess I'd like to showcase the new features (Python 3 support - yay!) and hopefully show people who aren't familiar with mock not just why they should use mock but how.

One of the other topics I'll talk about, perhaps surprisingly, is when *not* to mock. There are certain streams of thought in the testing world that you should mock absolutely everything. This can make your tests fragile and mean that you end up testing against implementation (and are therefore subject to every implementation detail) rather than testing the purpose of your code. I'm a believer in testing units of behaviour rather than units of implementation. I'll talk a little bit about *minimising* the use of mocking within your tests and not straying into over-mocking that is going to make your tests painful to maintain.

2) What made you decide to speak on this topic?

Despite mock being pretty popular I've never spoken about it at conferences before. I like to contribute to PyCon by talking about *something* (if I'm wanted of course) so it seemed an obvious topic. Not only that, but mock is something I'm using daily (thankfully my team at Canonical were using mock even before I arrived) and seems to be proving useful to other people.

One of the reasons people sometimes don't test is because it can look like some things are harder to test than they really are. Certainly if you're not doing any mocking, and even possibly if you are, mock can make writing tests easier and remove another barrier (excuse) for not testing.

I'd also like to speak up in favour of the much maligned monkey-patch. Monkey patching (changing behaviour of objects at runtime by replacing members - usually methods) has a bad reputation in the Python world, and certainly for production code it is a great way to confuse people trying to read your code. For testing though it is a very useful technique for analysing the behaviour of your code, especially where certain code paths are "expensive" (hit the network, filesystem or database for example) or are complex to configure.

Some people religiously avoid monkey patching and advocate techniques like dependency injection or inversion of control. Whilst these can be very useful architectural decisions in their own right they are rarely needed in Python *purely for testability* (whereas in languages like Java and C# they absolutely are) and I'll be showing why.

3) Why did you write the mock module?

I kind of answered that already. Many of the existing mocking libraries are really framework; they encourage or force you to write your tests in a particular way. For mocking frameworks that follow the expect -> verify (or record -> replay) this puts the tests what feels like the wrong way round; you effectively make your assertions and then execute your code. They also force you to jump through hoops where you *aren't* interested in how some mock is used (or some aspect of it is used) but a particular test is really just about one small part of the behaviour of the code under test.

I thought we could do better and wrote a small Mock class that could replace pretty much all of the many stub objects we were using in our tests at Resolver Systems. Functionality grew as we and other people started to use it more and more.

4) What are you most looking forward to at PyCon this year?

I always look forward to meeting people and the hallway track. There are many people I interact with daily on IRC, twitter and mailing lists and only get to see in person at PyCon. The Python community is full of great people and I enjoy spending time with them. The talks are a nice bonus of course and now that I'm working daily with django (which I wasn't this time last year) I'll be seeing what new tricks and tools I can pick up on. Hearing about how the other implementations are doing, particularly pypy, is always fascinating too.

There are a whole lot of other great speakers that are coming to PyCon this year as well. This is just a very small taste of what you can see while you’re there. Also note that there will be lots of folks who don’t speak but who are quite possibly just as interesting. PyCon is creeping up on its attendance cap, so sign up now before it’s too late!

PyCon 2011 Interview: Daniel Greenfeld

2011-02-24T23:02:34Z

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:

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. I took a shotgun approach and expected to miss the target completely. I put my heart into the submissions and I guess that paid off.

How did it feel to learn that your submissions were accepted?

Terrified.

I expected to miss. I didn’t expect to hit the bullseye.

PyCon is full of brilliant people who I respect and admire. You can’t walk into a room at PyCon and not meet people who don’t know more than you do on just about everything. Now the pressure is on to make a good impression on all these people who I consider role models and inspirations.

If I had hair on my head it would have turned white by now.

What should one expect to learn from your Pinax Solutions tutorial?

A better question would be “what should one expect to get from the Pinax Solutions tutorial?”

And the answer to that is “Lots of technical details and a lot of practice.”

We’ll go over the nuts and bolts of setting up a Pinax project. Then we’ll go over solutions that myself, Brian Rosner, and others use to solve project requirements. Basically, it will be a dump of some of the patterns and tools that work best in our day-to-day work. Even if you are using django-cms, Satchmo, or plain Django, there is material in it for you.

Then we’ll go into workshop mode for the rest of the tutorial. That means we help you build our project, and if a question you ask could benefit everyone, we’ll show everyone what you are trying to do. After the tutorial officially ends I’ll still be around to help out that afternoon and the next day’s afternoon.

What will you cover in your talk about [[http://djangopackages.com|djangopackages.com]]?

That it wasn’t just me.

I didn’t work in a vacuum, I had literally thousands of people helping me out. Django Packages was created by myself and my business partner, Audrey Roy, by combining a lot of packages into a single system. Which means I also had the open source Django and Python communities helping me out.

Besides that I’ll get into the Zen of Python, lessons learned, and the wildlife of Kansas.

Give us an overview of what to expect from the How to sell Python panel.

Five brilliant minds discussing how to get Python into the places where we want it to be. I think its safe to assume that people wanting to attend PyCon believe that Python makes a difference. My hope is that at PyCon 2012 someone will come up to me and say, “Hey Danny, that panel help me get Python into our organization and everyone is delight with what it’s done for us!”

PyCon 2011

As someone who has attended PyCon in the past, what keeps you coming back?

Discovering ideas and technology that takes my breath away. The chance to meet with old friends and make new ones. Finally, I always look forward to gushing over Guido van Rossum like a adolescent over Justin Bieber.

What talks are you looking forward to attending this year at PyCon?

Greasing the Wheels of Exploration with Python by Michael Sims. NASA + Python by a guy who works on Mars exploration!!!

Javascript for people who know Python by Ian Bicking. Not Python but its Ian Bicking giving a technical talk!

Python and Robots: Teaching Programming in High School by Vern Cedar. How can you go wrong with robots and python?

Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ by Zed Shaw. How can I miss a talk from the man who taught me Argentine Tango?

Through the Side Channel: Timing and Implementation Attacks in Python by Geremy Condra. Security is hard. I need to know more.

Porting to Python 3 by Lennart Regebro. After this summer this is going to become even more important.

Testing with mock by Michael Foord. I’m trying to keep my testing talks to just one and this seems like the can’t-miss-talk.

An Introduction to Tornado by Gavin Roy. I keep running into use cases this would address.

Opening the Flask by Armin Ronacher. Sometimes all I need is something sweet and simple. Flask seems perfect in that role.

Anything by Tarek Ziade, Alex Martelli, Alex Gaynor, Corey Oordt, Mark Ramm, Chris McDonough, and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Cause they rock.

See Daniel present

I’ve seen Daniel speak on a number of occasions, whether it was at previous PyCons or in Washington, DC before he moved to Los Angeles. I would encourage you to attend one of his accepted talks.

If you haven’t already, register for PyCon! If you’re on the fence, check out the full list of talks, tutorials and other general information. It’s bound to be another great year.

PyCon 2011: Interview with Geremy Condra

2011-02-19T10:29:46Z

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 sprints, games, and much more, and it quickly becomes a 24-hour gathering.

During the day you’ll have a chance to hear Geremy’s take on TUF, a library for secure software updates in Python. Asked what common security issues developers are facing, Geremy answers, “Most devs make their security mistakes when they try to figure out who the adversary is - misplacing trust, assuming that adversaries are weaker (or just differently capable) than they actually are, that sort of thing. This seems to happen a lot with client side code, especially when it comes to downloading files.” Rollback and mix-and-match attacks like this are some of the topics of this talk, including a demonstration of the vulnerability followed by what TUF can do to protect against it.

“The other big issue is with trusting untrustworthy code,” he claims. “Thinking that urllib will automatically check certs for you, that your cryptographic routines are secure because you can't figure out what they do,” are some of these issues. Fortunately, these are more easily fixed than others, and also make up a lot of what he plans to speak about at PyCon.

His second talk, Through the Side Channel: Timing and Implementation Attacks in Python dives into some of the great things about Python that can also introduce security risks. Part of the talk is to raise awareness using some Python projects that are in wide use. Additionally, he plans to educate attendees on the methods of defense, leaving them with a better sense of what’s out there and giving them a better chance at spotting and correcting the flaws that leave one’s project open.

I had a chance to ask Geremy about some of his work and his use of Python, and found that almost everything he does uses it. “I build simulations using Fabric, display data using Matplotlib, use Sage to model problems, and of course implement solutions in Python where possible,” he says, also mentioning occasional Haskell use.

Additionally, he’s the creator of several open tools that he uses on the job. The Graphine library, an easy to use graph library for Python 3, is one of his projects. He’s also responsible for EVPy, a set of bindings for OpenSSL’s EVP interface, supporting both Python 2 and 3.

We look forward to the security knowledge Geremy brings to this year’s conference, along with his upcoming book titled “Cryptography and Network Security with Python 3.” If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, get them before all 1,500 are sold out!

PyCon 2011: Interview with Zed Shaw

2011-02-18T08:57:47Z

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 a lot from it because a trainer sort of inverts how you're taught by having you do exercises, then explain them, then apply them,” says Zed. “It's easier to explain something that someone has already experienced,” he claims, which explains his “Do Not Copy-Paste” introduction. Readers are encouraged to manually type all examples, as copy-paste defeats the purpose of learning. “The point of these exercises is to train your hands, your brain, and your mind in how to read, write, and see code,” he says in the book.

Zed’s Python For Total Beginners tutorial uses his book to give a lab-style introduction to the language. Along with the tutorial comes a bonus offer from Zed: if enough people are interested, he’ll keep going and teach the whole book throughout the conference.

He has also offered to be somewhat of a guide to new Python users in the group. “I thought that if there was a cadre of folks who helped newbies at least understand the culture then they'd have more fun. This year I decided to give it a shot and see how well it'd work,” says Zed. The plan is to mix in Learn Python The Hard Way lessons with talks, including post-talk discussion to dive in further. If you’re interested in this, contact Zed and let him know.

Along with the beginner material, Zed plans to kick it up a notch with an extreme talk on ZeroMQ. The talk, titled Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ, jumps right into the swimming pool of messaging and heads quickly for the deep end. He starts with pub/sub, works through distributed queues, inter-language communication, and onto whatever other deep things he can get through “all in a short talk with only code, no diagrams.”

He’s pretty well invested in ZeroMQ, choosing it as the messaging platform for his Mongrel2 web server, which hit a major release three months after starting. “My favorite thing about ZeroMQ is not having to care about it. It just works and I can do all the stuff I generally do with raw sockets,” he said when asked what he liked the most. He goes on to say, “I just love that it's easy to use it for various architectures that would be a huge pain to create otherwise.”

We welcome Zed back for another PyCon and hope to see him and his extended tutorial group around the conference. Check out his talk, tutorial, and get your tickets soon. They are running out. Seriously.

PyCon 2014-2015 site selection meeting at PyCon 2011

2011-02-17T09:09:09Z

The time for location selection for PyCon 2014 and 2015 has begun!

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.

PyCon 2011: Behind the Scenes

2011-02-16T11:48:20Z

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 share rooms, drive in, stay at other hotels,etc. They are, however, a good comparative indicator of how many people are going to be someplace.

Last year (our biggest PyCon to date), PyCon generated a total of 2406 room-nights. At this level we didn't sell out our reserved block, but we had enough of our block filled (the contract specified over 80%) that we didn't have any penalties.

This year, PyCon attendees have already registered 2647 room-nights - 96% of our allocated block. The hotel always keeps a little in reserve above our block, but we may not only sell out PyCon, we may sell out the hotel, too.

A Public Service Announcement

Especially in light of the above, please note that online booking of hotel rooms at the PyCon rate will close this upcoming Friday, February 18. We have to provide a list of booked rooms to the hotel on that date.

In short, register for PyCon and book your room now!

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.

Catering

Another aspect of holding an event like PyCon is catering. It is not something that most people think about, but getting good food to 1500 people efficiently is really hard - and doing it on a budget so that it is affordable is even harder.

The hotels build in the price for their services into the cost of the food. That means that sodas are about $4.00 each; coffee costs from $75-$100 a gallon; and that croissant you just ate for breakfast was only $6.00. A nice plated lunch like the ones that we give at PyCon? Only $35-$40. A bargain!

When I first saw these prices, I nearly fell over - being much more frugal myself - but I have come to understand that there is much more to feeding 1500 people than there is to feeding 10, 20, or even 200. The operational complexity of preparing, serving, and cleaning up that much food all at once makes it a specialty operation. It is a lot like the principle that dealing with 1000 requests/second is much easier than dealing with 10K requests/second. Scale matters - in software and in food.

As an aside, if you are going to PyCon, we would love to get a response from you about dietary restrictions and PyCon. If you could answer the one question on our survey, we can use that information to better tailor what we are making to what people will be eating.

Tutorials

We are very excited about our tutorials this year. We were excited to get so much feedback about what people are interested in seeing. We changed some of the offerings in response to that feedback - and the response has been immense.

The tutorials at PyCon have always been something special - but I think this the tutorial days are one of the underrated gems of PyCon. PyCon attracts some of the very best instructors in the US (and in the world!) to give instruction, and the cost per tutorial is far below what other conferences and commercial services cost.

In fact, it is such a good value that we have had more than one company that have adopted the PyCon tutorials as their employee training in Python. That is ok too - that is part of growing the community. The tutorials are an example of us putting our money where our mouth is to make PyCon a community-oriented conference.

The tutorials always sell out first - though - and a few have already sold out - so register for any tutorials that you want now before they are all gone.

Themes - Data and Startups

One of the hardest but most interesting parts of PyCon involves discovering the theme for each year. Yes, I said "discovering," not "inventing." For the past several years, we haven't had a theme in mind when we have called for talks, tutorials, and sponsors -- but each year, the submissions and discussion around PyCon have converged to give us a focus for the conference. We don't usually make a big deal of these themes, because it can be so overdone, but once we discover it, it helps guide our thinking about how we will use the conference to build up and reflect what people are naturally doing.

This year, we had a lot of interest and submissions centered around using Python in the big data/natural language processing space. Python is becoming one of the favored tools for doing data hacking - and that is why we are so excited that Hilary Mason will be giving our first keynote. Looking across all of the submissions, though, we saw a second theme - the use of Python not only to make sense of data, but also - with apologies to Perl - to be the swiss army chainsaw of a growing number of startups. With this perspective, we were able to find our second set of keynote addresses - "Startup Stories" about companies that made it (and are making it) with Python.

Some of those same Python startups are helping get the word out about PyCon. We are using Convore for some conversations about PyCon and Lanyrd is tracking conference attendees who tweet "@lanyrd attending #pycon."

Recruiting at PyCon

One side-effect of having so many great companies involved with Python is that there is a lot of demand for Python programmers. If you are looking for work - either a new job or an upgrade - a lot of the companies at PyCon will be hiring. It doesn't matter if you are a data hacker, web slinger, sysadmin, or game programmer, we will probably have someone at PyCon that wants to hire you.

We will be sending out an email to all attendees right before PyCon with information about some of the available positions at sponsor companies. Come prepared with a resume and a repository URL!

Update

Room-nights have gone up by almost 100 since I drafted the first part of this post yesterday. We are now at 2757 room-nights.

PyCon 2011: Interview with Dave Beazley

2011-02-15T09:13:17Z

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.

The port to Python 3 might have been easier for him due to his experience with the changes in the I/O system -- the topic of his Mastering Python 3 I/O tutorial. While the first revision of his port only took 15-20 minutes, he says “I don't want to give anyone the impression that they can just take some arbitrary library, run it through 2to3, and have it working over their coffee break. You really have to understand Python 3's I/O model and know what you're doing.” Attending his tutorial would certainly help you in that area.

Dave’s tutorial double duty also involves a joint presentation with Brian Jones titled Cooking With Python 3. They plan to cover the new features, the differences, and their experiences in porting. The pair are also teaming up to write the third edition of the Python Cookbook, which is going to be all about Python3, expected to hit the shelves in late 2011.

Since all of his tutorials and talks are Python 3 based, I wanted to ask him some general questions about where Python 3 is. “I think that the adoption of Python 3.x is proceeding just fine,” he says. He mentions the porting of NumPy as work “that will pave the way for others to start playing with [Python 3] and porting other packages.” On the whole, after mentioning that wide scale adoption was estimated to be around five years, he says it’s still too early to make a judgement on it.

However, he says “I do think that Python 3 presents developers with many possibilities to create new libraries and packages.” Additionally, “if you're going to port old code, it's a good opportunity to clean it up (since Python 3 breaks everything anyways, you can use it as excuse to get rid of all of those deprecated features that you're keeping around for backwards compatibility).”

He’s no stranger to Python conferences, getting his start in 1996 and attending most of the US conferences since then, plus PyCon UK in 2008. One of his trips was even last minute, deciding just days before that it’d be a fun time to attend one of the PyCons in Washington, D.C. Asked about his favorite part, he says “For me, the best part of the conference is the people. [...] It's a smart group and I always go home with ton of new ideas.”

We’re looking forward to all of the diabolical things he has planned and hope you are too. If you haven’t bought tickets, hurry up. A last minute trip probably will not work out for you like it did for Dave.

PyCon 2011: Online Hotel reservations for PyCon end Friday 2/18/11!

2011-02-14T12:30:50Z

Online hotel reservation and booking will be disabled as of Friday 2/18/11.

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!

PyCon 2011: Interview with Wesley Chun

2011-02-14T09:09:59Z

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 and the Patch, to help you run Django apps on App Engine. Unfortunately, those older systems required you to modify your apps' data models in order to get them to run on App Engine. This is not the case with Django-nonrel, which should take its place as the leading tool that users should use when desiring to run Django apps on any NoSQL or non-relational database.

Along with Django-nonrel, developers also need the corresponding NoSQL adapter code, djangoappengine (for Google App Engine's datastore), Django-mongodb-engine (for MongoDB). they (and others) are working on adapters to other NoSQL databases, but more exciting than that is the prospect of having NoSQL JOINs!

2) What made you decide to speak on this topic?

I wanted to give this talk for many reasons... I already mentioned awareness earlier. The other thing is that people are so used to the Helper and the Patch, that they don't realize there's a better tool out there.

Another important reason is the concept of vendor lock-in, the phenomenon where you can't easily migrate your apps and/or data to different platforms because you're "locked in" by your current vendor. people complain that you can't run App Engine apps anywhere else, but this is not true. You can choose a different backend besides Google's original... two of these backends are AppScale and TyphoonAE. similarly, if you created a Django app and ran it via traditional hosting, Django-nonrel helps you bring it to App Engine with very little porting. Similarly, if you write a Django app and run it on App Engine using Django-nonrel, it shouldn't take much work to move it to traditional hosting.

3) What are the pros and cons in using Django on Google App Engine?

The most obvious pro is scalability. This is something that's both very difficult and very expensive to build. why not take advantage of all the smart people at Google that have built scalability into their core infrastructure that helps them be..., well, Google! With Django-nonrel, if Google isn't right for you, you can take your app and run it elsewhere! no vendor lock-in here.

One con would be that App Engine's datastore is still difficult to wrap your head around if you're used to the traditional relational database model. you can't do raw SQL or JOINs completely yet. Google does give you a stripped-down SQL syntax known as GQL, but it's not the complete picture. Also, in exchange for its benefits, you do have to give up some control over your app by letting Google host it. you can't use any C/C++ extensions, and don't have access to your logs or other raw files.

4) What are you most looking forward to at PyCon this year?

I'm looking forward to connecting with familiar and friendly faces of those I've met over the past decade of attending Python and open source conferences. Because we're all so geographically diverse, it's the one time you can count on to see people you haven't seen in a year and to catch up, either in the exhibit hall or part of an interesting hallway conversation.

I'm also excited to learn new things that are part of the Python universe. every year it seems to grow a bit more, so it's a struggle to stay up-to-date with what's been going on in the community. I'm also looking forward to reprising my Python 3 talk from last year, partly because it's becoming more important every year, and as part of my research for the talk, I'll be finding out which projects have moved to Python 3.

5) What were your favorite parts of PyCon in previous years?

The best part of the Python ecosphere is having a great programming language to rally behind, but the next best thing is the people... the Python community itself. And PyCon is the best place to interact with the community. the conference is phenomenal because of the talks, ability to reach to all skill levels (from beginner through advanced), superb tutorials stretching across TWO days, compelling session talks, amazing lightning talks and open space sessions, and of course, the hallway conversations, not to mention that crazy memes and hacks such as OHwar --http://pycon.ohwar.com -- that come from such convos.

Just think: you could meet your favorite Python author at PyCon this year AND learn about Django and Google App Engine at the same time. And if that doesn’t float your boat, Wesley is also doing a talk on Python 3. What are you waiting for? Get on over to the PyCon website and sign yourself up!

PyCon 2011: Interview with Lennart Regebro - “Porting to Python 3”

2011-02-13T10:24:45Z

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 experience to share,” says Lennart. He then took his article series and had the basis for a book which he created with reStructuredText and Sphinx.

While he agrees that the separation of string contents into binary data and Unicode text was the right move, it’s a challenge you’ll have to undertake if your application doesn’t already handle all text as Unicode. “This is where you can expect the biggest problems,” he claims. Luckily he’s taking the time to cover it in his talk. He also covers the important topic of porting strategies, including branching, continuous 2to3 conversion, and single codebase projects.

Asked about his hardest porting project, zope.testing appears to be the winner. The package used doctests from before they were included in the standard library, along with a custom testrunner module, so the first step was to separate and deprecate. “I think I ended up deleting the port and restarting two or three times either because I made a hash of it or the trunk code had changed so much that it was easier to restart than to merge the changes.” Although the port isn’t complete, “porting a package takes between a couple of hours and a couple of days, and is a lot of fun, except if you have a lot of doctests.”

The Zope Component Architecture tops his most-wanted list and is the driving force behind his efforts. “It's really cool, but uses a lot of Python internals so porting it is a challenge,” he says, mentioning that a further complication is the need of writing fixers, for which there is little documentation.” Understanding how 2to3 works internally was another challenge, which led to a chapter in his book. Along with 2to3, Benjamin Peterson’s six package has been helping Lennart along with his porting. “I was planning to write such a module myself, but now I'm glad I didn't, because Benjamin did a much better job than I would have,” he says.

Lennart is a PyCon veteran, coming to the 2008 and 2009 conferences in Chicago, along with several EuroPython events, as well as Polish and French PyCons. The evenings are some of his favorite times, “because there are so many people around you that are much smarter than you are, and are friendly and open and willing to hang with you over coffee or a drink.” Sprints were one of the highlights of his 2009 experience, where he organized a Zope sprint without hopes of a great turnout. He ended up being wrong: “we got a quite a big gathering with many of the top Zope names and had some fantastic discussions on the way forward for Zope, as well as an extremely productive sprint!” He finished the interview by saying, “that was great fun, and those type of things seem to happen a lot on PyCon.”

If you’re interested in the PyCon sprints, check out the sprint page, and don’t forget to buy your tickets soon!

PyCon 2011: Want to discuss things? Want to help promote - we'd love to have you around!

2011-02-13T10:12:31Z

We're only a month away from PyCon 2011! Help get the word out, and check out the new communication tools we have.

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.

You can tell people to tweet "@lanyrd attending #pycon" - our Twitter bot will pick them up and add them to the list on the PyCon page without them having to sign in to the site.

PyCon has great metadata on Lanyrd, so hopefully as our audience grows we'll be pointing more and more people towards PyCon as a natural effect of how the site works.

So come join us all over here at Lanyrd!

Third - Eric Florenzano and Leah Culver have fired up another newly minted YCombinator startup - Convore, a social site which is an interesting mashup of IRC, Twitter and other message board concepts. So far, we're digging it, and considering using it for the recommended "real time" chat tool for PyCon 2011. We have a PyCon 2011 group right over here you can join in on.

(Note: I challenge someone to come up with an awesome iPhone/Android - and OS/X / Linux client for Convore by PyCon)!

It's important to note: Both of these startups are Python powered, through and through and are built by long-standing Python/Django community members - hence why we're encouraging them. We're showcasing a lot of Python powered startups and services - and even some not powered by Python, but we as a team feel that encouraging these Python powered forums helps us all, while helping us spread the word about PyCon 2011.

We're going to work on having a real-time stream going on for all of the places PyCon might be being discussed - and there might still be more awesome discussion tech coming up in time for PyCon from other Python folk.

Blogging, participating in the social web - getting the word out - all help PyCon and helps get the word out. Thanks for everything you've done so far, and thanks for the hundreds of attendees already coming to PyCon 2011.

Registration is still open, and we're still taking on new sponsors!

PyCon 2011: Interview with Tarek Ziadé

2011-02-12T09:27:35Z

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 use cases. The long threatened death of setup.py, metadata and versioning, dependency graphing, and extensibility are in the plans. The new pysetup command, as he calls “one command to rule them all”, gets coverage as well. He plans to round the whole talk out with several examples, from porting to process improvements.

Speaking of process, Tarek and the Distutils2 developers have been using Mercurial via bitbucket to manage the project during its “outside the standard library life”. As you may know, CPython is getting close to a Mercurial switch, so I asked Tarek his experience with the tools. He says, “A DVCS really makes contribution simpler, as anyone can clone and propose changes that are easy for me to review and merge.” They follow a fairly common workflow of cloning, changing, then asking for a merge, but a change they are considering is the use of mq.

Tarek’s other talk, Firefox Sync, looks into the server side of Mozilla’s history, bookmark, and even tab synchronization across devices, all of which is written in Python. PHP used to be the tool of choice, but most of their server apps are being done in Python now. Asked about the technologies he’s employing, he responds “The stack I use is very low-level, since we're writing web services with almost no HTML pages. I've written a WSGI micro-framework mainly based on Paster and WebOb that can be used to build a new app. SQLAlchemy, python-memcached and python-ldap are used to work with data.” His talk covers this architecture, plus their use of encryption, along with the scalability and benchmarks they’ve produced.

Tarek will be at PyCon early for the Language Summit, one of his favorite parts, as its “a good opportunity to sync/meet in real life with the core people”. He’s also going to be sprinting on Distutils2, where they plan to polish the project and make sure projects are working correctly as they reach their final release. As with Armin (link to his interview), the hallway track is another of his highlights, but he’s also interested in the PyPy, ZeroMQ, and coroutine talks as well!

Stay tuned for an interview with speaker and book author Lennart Regebro, covering his experiences with Porting to Python 3.

PyCon 2011: Interview with Armin Ronacher - “Opening the Flask”

2011-02-10T21:26:33Z

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.

His talk “Opening the Flask” hopes to give an inside look and draw some conclusions from the year of work to make the real project what it is today. When asked what turned the joke into reality, he says, “My original frustration that lead to the April Fool's joke framework was the fact that some frameworks chose to re-implement WSGI […] just to be able to claim ‘no dependencies’.” From there, he decided it was worth a shot at creating a real framework based on his Werkzeug and Jinja2 projects. After all, people seemed to like the joke micro-framework idea, and a year later, people love it, so he’s doing something right.

Extensions are one of the key topics of the talk, and Armin recently announced the 30th extension had been created by the community. Asked about his favorite extension, he says “I love relational databases and I adore the design and implementation of SQLAlchemy so I would say Flask-SQLAlchemy is the one I use the most.” Another of his favorites is Flask-Script, which is similar to django-management in the Flask world.

Armin is one of the younger Python hackers out there today, getting his start into development around 2002 by writing games at school using QBasic. After finding a Delphi book and ignoring most of the contents, he and a friend “wrote a horribly developed game called ‘be a bee’.” They ended up taking that game to the under-19 ARS Electronica festival in 2003 and won second prize.

He found Python by way of Gregor Lingl’s “Python fuer Kids”, then shortly joined the German Python Forum. After getting acquainted with Ubuntu, he spent time working with the ubuntuusers.de forum, which ended in the creation of the Pocoo project. “Having something to work for and a Python core developer on board (Georg Brandl joined the project very early) is a great way to learn the language.”

While this will be Armin’s first US Pycon, he’s been to EuroPython and a number of Django conferences, and he’s no stranger to speaking there. To him, one of the best parts of the conference is “talking to other developers in the hallways and sharing experiences.”

We’re looking forward to his talk in Atlanta - it should be a great time, and Flask is another great addition to the Python web ecosystem. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting more interviews with upcoming speakers, authors and others involved in Pycon 2011, so stay tuned - and get registered!

PyCon 2011 - Announcing "Startup Stories"

2011-02-07T15:19:37Z

Today, we're excited to share even more awesome plenary talks which will be happening at PyCon 2011...

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 the stories of companies that have built and shipped (or, in the case of Threadless - about to ship) Python systems at scale. Or, in the case of Open Stack - it is the story of the next generation "Open Cloud" platform for Python at scale.

When we approached these companies (to their surprise!) we asked them to stand back from their own products and instead speak directly to the good, the bad, and the ugly of making Python scale all the way to success. We're excited about having some people who have made it in the trenches show us how Python made them successful - warts and all.

You can see all of the talks and details on the keynotes page

How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped

Rian Hunter, Engineer - Dropbox

Dropbox is a startup company located in San Francisco that has probably one of the most popular file synchronization and sharing tools in the world, shipping Python on the desktop and supporting millions of users and growing every day. Dropbox uses Python on the client-side and server side as well. This talk will give an overview of the first two years of Dropbox, the team formation, our early guiding principles and philosophies, what worked for us and what we learned while building the company and engineering infrastructure. It will also cover why Python was essential to the success of the project and the rough edges we had to overcome to make it our long term programming environment and runtime. Finally it will give some insight into the future of Dropbox and where the project is going.

Disqus: Serving 400 million people with Python

David Cramer, Engineer - Disqus
Jason Yan, CTO and Co-Founder of Disqus

Disqus, one of the largest Python applications on the web, will explain how they deal with scaling complexities in a growing startup. Founded in 2007, Disqus maintains a small engineering team reaching over 400 million users a month. Being powered by Python has allowed quick iteration of the application, without sacrificing code quality and performance. The talk will cover key parts of the architecture and development process at Disqus, including hardware, databases, and common bottlenecks.

Going Full Python - Threadless

Chris McAvoy, VP of Technology - Threadless

Threadless is a 10 year old community based design company with an overpowering love of witty t-shirts and a mission to 'inspire awesomeness.' After 10 years of working primarily with PHP, Threadless decided to switch its development stack to use Python as the base development language. As described by Chris McAvoy, VP of Technology at Threadless (and the founder of the Chicago Python Users Group), the decision was in large part driven by the ethos of the Python community. Chris will share a bit about the company's history, the role of technology in supporting the community at the core of the business, and why Python and Threadless are going to be totally BFF's.

An Open success for the cloud: OpenStack

Andy Smith, Core Developer - Openstack

Cloud computing brings radical flexibility to companies and is an enabler for all kinds of different types of startups. That is why it was a big deal when Rackspace, NASA, and a consortium of other companies announced OpenStack - an all-open-source, all-Python infrastructure for building public and private clouds. OpenStack is currently developing two interrelated projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage. OpenStack Compute is software to provision and manage large groups of virtual private servers, and OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.

This talk will go into details about the success of OpenStack with Python, limitations and how overall, Python was the right technology choice.

PyCon 2011: Announcing "A Fireside Chat with Guido van Rossum"

2011-02-02T18:17:13Z

An informal fireside chat with the BDFL? Oh dear readers - it doesn't get much better than this!

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.

Poster Sessions Announced

2011-01-29T20:00:11Z

A few days ago I promised that the poster session at this year's PyCon would be amazing. Now I'm in a position to back that claim up...

The Word is "Amazing"

A few days ago I promised that the poster session at this year's PyCon would be amazing. Now I'm in a position to back that claim up. The deadline for poster submissions has passed, and the final and official list of posters for 2011 is posted. Go ahead, go look over the list for a while... I'll wait.

This batch of 31 posters marks the next step in the growth of the PyCon poster session, nearly doubling the 17 we had for the inaugural session last year. I thought last year's posters were strong, but this year we've kept the quality and increased the quantity. Arguably the poster session will offer more content in a smaller space of time than any other event at PyCon. Now that is amazing.

You want scientific uses of Python? We've got that in spades. Bioinformatics? Yep. Parallel processing? Supercomputers?, Modeling fluid dynamics? Yeah, all of those.

But wait, there's more! We also have posters on open government, collaborative bookmaking, teaching beginners how to program, and not one, but two, posters on using a Kinect with Python in very different but equally interesting ways. And there's still more. But then if you've checked out the list of posters, you already know that.

But beware! 31 posters will mean less than 5 minutes per poster, and you know you'll want to spend more time than that. Another dilemma in the awesome "there's too much good stuff to do at PyCon" tradition. See you there.

So you want to, or know someone who would like to be a PyCon sponsor?

2011-01-27T14:39:12Z

PyCon 2011 is breaking records already - but we're still on the lookout for more excellent sponsors to join our already impressive list of sponsors - if you are part of a business, and you want to reach out to over a thousand Python enthusiasts - PyCon is the place to do so.

Your sponsorship helps keep PyCon affordable and accessible to the widest possible audience - and helps you connect to the Python community. The money goes not just to the conference, but also to the Python Software Foundation, who uses those funds to further grow the community through sprints, development grants, assisting to fund other conferences throughout the world, and much more.

Sponsorship not only brings good will from the community for your company - but it also offers you an awesome audience for your product(s) and services and can help with recruiting efforts (we strongly encourage recruiting at PyCon) - and it can even help with new product launches (speaking from personal experience)!

If you are interested - or know someone who is - take a look at the sponsorship prospectus. We offer a variety of levels for you to choose from, and can be flexible with the benefits. For example, if you don't need a booth - you may (on a case by case basis) trade it for additional session passes (good for the entire conference) or tutorials registrations for your personnel.

You can contact pycon-sponsors@python.org or Jesse Noller (jnoller@python.org) directly with any questions you might have. If you know someone who might be interested, you can also pass on contact information.

Early bird may be over - but registration is still going strong!

2011-01-27T14:37:35Z

PyCon early bird rates may be gone - but registration continues to be open (we have not hit our max attendance, yet) and hotel registration, tutorial registration, etc continues to be open. We are also signing up even more sponsors and affiliates!

We have an amazing lineup oftutorials, posters andtalks. We have anexcellent keynote speaker and thenew startup row. We haveopen spaces andsprints - so much packed into an amazing community conference it's going to be hard figuring out what to do next.

PyCon is going to be stunning this year - thanks to all of you in the community, and the hard work of the volunteers - and we still have more announcement to come! So sign up today to guarantee your spot, join us at the hotel and get ready for an awesome time!

PyCon 2011 Early Bird Registration Ends Tomorrow!

2011-01-24T10:54:36Z

Tomorrow marks the end of Early Bird registration for PyCon 2011.

Tomorrow marks the end of Early Bird registration for PyCon 2011. We already know why you should come to PyCon 2011.

We have an amazing lineup of tutorials, posters and talks. We have an excellent keynote speaker and the new startup row. We have open spaces and sprints - so much packed into an amazing community conference it's going to be hard figuring out what to do next.

But - early bird registration ends on January 25th. Right now, you still get discounts on registration and tutorials - so, you have to register now!

Right now, you save quite a bit on both tutorial, and registration fees! Also note, we're still looking for PyCon Sponsors, so if you know any companies who might be interested - send them our way!

Why should you come to PyCon: Round 2!

2011-01-24T10:50:51Z

We're getting great responses from our call for people to talk about what they can't wait to see at PyCon 2011...

Ah, it's always nice to see the community pick up a call to arms. Mike Driscoll (who is a blogging machine) has made several posts - "The 5 talks I want to see" (hacker news here) and "PyCon 2011 Needs You". On the point of his later post - there is a 2011 volunteer page located here which contains all the information you need for volunteering for 2011.

Following that - the intrepid Alex Gaynor's done a great post - "PyCon 2011 is going to be awesome" - which, of course, is total truth. We also have Rich Leland's - "Go To PyCon". So let's here it everyone: What can't you miss - what are you looking forward to at PyCon 2011?

Why should you come to PyCon?

2011-01-21T16:01:02Z

Wonderful posts from Brett Cannon and Daniel Greenfeld...

Both Daniel Greenfeld and Brett Cannon have started the blogging going with wonderful posts on why you should be attending (Brett included the traditional list of talks he can't miss).

We recommend checking out both posts if you need that extra "bump" - also, early bird pricing ends on January 25th, so better to get registered soon!

Announcing Startup Row at PyCon 2011

2011-01-19T12:22:33Z

For the first time this year, we are proud to announce Startup Row in association with PyCon 2011.

Since the beginning, Python has always been strongly associated with startups and entrepreneurs. Ever since Paul Graham wrote The Python Paradox, people have noted that Python programmers tend to build interesting and useful things in Python just because they love it. Python makes programming fun and agile - and that results in a lot of good ideas being implemented and brought to market in Python.

As a result, a number of well-known products out on the market today use significant amounts of Python in production. It is already well known that Youtube was built using Python, but others may not know that the popular filesharing service Dropbox uses Python, or that the new flight search service Hipmunk runs on Python.

This has been going on for years. Back in 1996 when companies were really starting to get on the web, Microsoft even shipped Python as part of its Merchant Server product.

For Startup Row, we wanted to look toward the future - companies that are just starting today, but may become household names in the future. To do this, we are working with Y Combinator and Startup Riot to highlight some of the most promising new companies that are using Python to build their businesses.

We haven't filled out all of Startup Row yet. Some of the spots won't be filled until after Startup Riot in mid-February, where the highest-rated Python-using startups will win a spot on Startup Row. From Y Combinator, though, we are proud to announce the following companies will be participating:

Mixpanel: Mixpanel is a startup focusing on web analytics. Where most analytics packages focus on tracking page views, Mixpanel focuses on event tracking, allowing you to understand what your users are doing on the page to make your website more effective.

Greplin: More and more of our data is on outside websites. Greplin is "the search bar for your life," allowing you to search your personal Gmail, Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, and a host of other services.

DotCloud: DotCloud takes Platform-as-a-Service to the next level by allowing you to choose your /own/ platform that will be supported by DotCloud. DotCloud allows developers to be developers and not system administrators.

Mailgun: Email is an essential part of doing business today - but building proper email interfaces can be tricky and error-prone. Mailgun provides an email interface for your app, allowing you to integrate email into your existing processes in a simple and easy way.

Olark: One of the most frustrating things for any business is having people come into your store, put items in their carts, and then... leave. Olark helps businesses engage with customers before they leave the site, increasing the numbers of visitors that become customers.

DrChrono: Healthcare is historically behind the times when it comes to providing doctors with clear, easy-to-use technology. DrChrono is attacking the problem head-on, giving doctors and nurses beautiful and elegant medical records software that works on iPads, iPhones, and Android devices.

CrowdBooster: Everything is social these days - and Twitter is the fastest-moving social platform of all. Crowdbooster gives you twitter analytics that let you understand who is talking about you in real time.

As Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. These are just the first few startups we will highlight on Startup Row - we will be including more new companies that are building and inventing new and interesting things with Python.

Edit: A number of people are asking about participating in Startup Row. A few details:

This is seed stage only. We are looking for Python-hacking founders generally.

We are also limited on space - 16 total slots right now. Seven are filled, and 4-5 will be filled based upon people's performances at Startup Riot.

Our purpose in holding Startup Row is to give these startups some attention and publicity, without overloading their time. Accordingly, our current plan is to have 8 small booths on Startup Row in the Expo Hall. There will be 2*X startups, so they will be there during Expo Hall hours (about 10-4) for one day only.

During the time on Startup Row, startups will be able to buy, sell, hire, demo, network, or whatever they would like in their booths. We are also trying to provide a few extras for them to make PyCon fun.

We will be evaluating any other startups that come to our attention and awarding the last few spots from there. I emphasize, though, that we are limited on space; right now the easiest way to get in is to 1) win at Startup Riot, or 2) be so incredible that we can't avoid including you.

PyCon Early Bird prices Extended until January 25th

2011-01-19T09:40:30Z

Early bird registration and tutorial pricing on extended until January 25th.

The PyCon 2011 team has decided to extend the early bird registration pricing until January 25th - this is due to a combination of factors including:

Ending on a 3 day weekend (in the US at least) making it difficult for people who are relying on corporate approvals to get registered in time (Monday is Martin Luther King day in the US).
Financial aid approvals being delayed (announcements have been sent out however).
The delay in talk and tutorial announcements.
A special announcement in the coming days...

While the first three reasons are more mundane, the fourth is what really excites us, and we're hoping it excites all of you as well when we announce it in the next 48 hours. We're seeing amazingly high numbers of registrations - at this point in time we are several hundred registrations ahead of registrations we had this time last year, and the year before.

We're rapidly heading towards our registration cap, so while we're extending it - register now

Early Bird Registration Ends Monday, Jan 17th - 3 days away!

2011-01-19T09:40:38Z

The early bird registration rates expire in only 3 days!

The early bird registration rates expire in only 3 days! Now is the best time to register as it gives you the best tutorial, and conference rates. Early bird rates expire on Monday, January 17th, so you better get on it!

Poster Session Proposal Deadline Nears

2011-01-13T15:59:16Z

Do you want to share your latest Python coding experiments? Or build interest in a budding project?

Do you want to have your work exposed to over a 1000 Pythonistas? And be able to interact with the most interested ones face-to-face?

Then submit a poster proposal!

PyCon 2011 is fast approaching. The talks have been announced, the tutorials are on the books, just about the only that remains is to submit a poster proposal!

The poster session, aka "the hallway track on steroids" was a big hit last year. The poster presenters were uniformly pleased with the response that they got and the opportunity that posters gave them to interact with interested people. Short of giving a keynote, a poster session lets you reach more people at PyCon than any other type of talk. So if you have an idea that you want to get out there, or a project you want feedback on, submit a poster.

For more information on the poster sessions and how to submit a proposal, visit http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/posters/ or http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/posters/cfp/ .

Poster proposals are being accepted on a rolling basis for one more week (or until we hit our limit of 35 posters). Submissions are coming in, so if you want to be sure of getting a spot, submit your proposal soon.

I hope to see you (and your poster) in Atlanta!

Specific Tutorial Registration Available

2011-01-11T09:24:32Z

For immediate release

Registration for Specific Tutorials Now Available

DATELINE: The Internet.

PyCon chair Van Lindberg temporarily removed the paper bag from his head today to announce that registration for specific tutorials was available via the PyCon registration bureau at http://us.pycon.org/2011/tickets/. This eagerly-awaited change enables attendees to add the tutorials of their choice to their already-existing PyCon registration. New attendees can register for tutorials and PyCon's general session at the same time. You can view the planned schedule here: http://us.pycon.org/2011/blog/2011/01/05/tutorials-announced-pycon-2011/

The addition of specific tutorial registration adds momentum to the widely-anticipated conference. Registration, running far ahead of all previous years, has been capped at 1500 delegates. Early bird pricing is set to end in six days, on Jan 17th.

News of the change spread quickly. "This is much better than an iPhone on Verizon's network," said Python developer Freddy G. Haich. "I can actually go to a PyCon tutorial. The Verizon iPhone is still unofficial. PyCon definitely wins this one."

PyCon 2011 - Full talk and tutorial list now available!

2011-01-07T13:59:07Z

I'm very pleased to announce, on behalf of the PyCon 2011 Program committee, and entire PyCon 2011 volunteer staff, that the full list of PyCon 2011 talks is now public, and available!

This was an especially hard year for the PyCon program committee: we had over 200 proposals for only 95 total slots, so we ended up having to reject a lot of excellent proposals. We've spent the better part of the last few months in reviews, meetings and debates selecting which talks would be in the final PyCon program. It was not and easy task - all of the proposal authors really came through in their proposals - the number of high quality proposals we had to chose from was simply staggering.

That said - the program committee completed it's work yesterday morning. Acceptance and rejection letters have been sent, and you can now view the full program on the site:

http://us.pycon.org/2011/schedule/lists/talks/

This obviously complements the list of tutorials also available:

http://us.pycon.org/2011/schedule/lists/tutorials/

Personally, this is my second year acting as the Program Committee chair (and hence, my last) - and between the talk list, and the list of tutorials, our current keynote speaker (http://us.pycon.org/2011/home/keynotes/) and the emerging line of up poster sessions - I'm extremely proud to have been part of the process, and extremely excited about the upcoming conference. It is going to be amazing

One behalf of the entire PyCon 2011 staff, I want to again thank every single talk author for their submission(s), and I look forward to seeing all of you, and them at the conference. PyCon is an amazing conference only because of the quality talks, tutorials and community we have. I'm confident this one will knock it out of the park.

As a reminder: Early Bird registration (http://us.pycon.org/2011/tickets/) closes January 17th - and we have an attendance cap of 1500 total attendees (speakers are counted against this number, and guaranteed a slot) so be sure to register today!

Tutorials Announced for PyCon 2011

2011-01-19T09:40:46Z

We are proud to announce the accepted tutorials for PyCon 2011!

Choosing the tutorials this year was especially difficult, as we needed to cut the number of proposals by half to fit into our limited space. The quality of the proposals (and the proposed presenters) was outstanding, and there was a lot of heartburn that resulted from the difficult decisions we had to make to come to our list of tutorials for PyCon 2011.

This year, however, we were helped by looking at the results of a poll we put out in mid December asking about the various topics we had available. While we would never claim that the poll was scientifically valid or completely representative of the community, we did find the results, coupled with experience with previous years very helpful in deciding which topics we would feature in the PyCon 2011 tutorials.

Wednesday AM (7)

Python 101
Pinax Solutions
Web2py Secrets
Scientific Python Tools not only for Scientists and Engineers
Distributed and Cloud computing with Python
Building your own tile server using OpenStreetMap
Advanced Python I

Wednesday PM (7)

Google App Engine workshop
Python For Total Beginners Using "Learn Python The Hard Way"
Mining and Visualizing Data from the Social Web with Python
Advanced Python II
Packet Crafting with Python
Packaging, Documenting, and Distributing your Python Codebase
Geospatial Computation and Visualization Cooperative Lab

Thursday AM (7)

Hands on Beginning Python
Mastering Python 3 I/O
Creating GUI Applications in Python using Qt I
Python/Django deployment workshop
Applied Machine Learning in Python with scikit-learn
Doing Data Structures in Python
(Re-)Introduction to C for Pythonistas

Thursday PM (7)

Hands on Intermediate Python
Cooking with Python 3
Creating GUI Applications in Python using Qt II
Faster Python Programs through Optimization
Writing Python extensions in C
Deploying web applications to the cloud
Documenting Your Project With Sphinx

Congratulations to these tutorial presenters!

Based on the feedback we described, we grouped these into a number of themes, as shown below.

Learning Python: Some of the perennial favorite tutorials at PyCon are our beginning and intermediate Python classes -- but that is not surprising considering that almost half of the attendees at PyCon are new to the language and relatively new to Python. This year, however, we are making an effort to cater to a number of different audiences and learning styles.

For those wanting an introduction to Python, we have three different teachers with three different styles. We are excited to annouce that we will be offering Python 101 by Stuart Williams, Beginning Python by Matt Harrison, and Python For Total Beginners Using "Learn Python The Hard Way" by Zed Shaw.

First, we are pleased to announce the return of "Python 101" by Stuart Williams. Stuart is a software developer in the financial services industry and previously taught an Introduction to Computer Science instructor at the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has taught Python 101 at PyCon for a number of years to great reviews.

Second, we have Matt Harrison's "Hands on Beginning Python" and "Hands on Intermediate Python." Matt's tutorial last year on the "Meaty parts of Python" was one of the surprise hits of the tutorial schedule. For this year Matt has integrated test-driven development with his exercise-based classes to bring beginning programmers up to speed in Python. For those with more experience, Matt's "Hands on Intermediate Python" will reprise many of the meaty topics from last year's tutorial.

We are also excited to have Zed Shaw presenting "Python For Total Beginners Using 'Learn Python The Hard Way.'" While many people know Zed as a prolific writer, coder and Internet personality, not as many people know that he has been called one of the finest technical presenters currently active. Zed's "Learn Python the Hard Way" has received rave reviews, and it will be a treat to have him present it in person.

Advanced Python Classes: We have traditionally not had as many tutorials focusing on advanced Python functionality, so it was a surprise to us when our poll indicated that the number one requested subject for PyCon tutorials -- by far -- was advanced tips and tricks for using Python. With such an outpouring of interest, we did not want to disappoint. We have four tutorials that fit the bill: Advanced Python I and Advanced Python II by Raymond Hettinger, Faster Python Programs through Optimization by Mike Müller, and Doing Data Structures in Python by Howard Whitson.

Raymond Hettinger is a core Python developer and consultant. His talk from PyCon 2010, "Mastering Team Play," was rated as one of the best talks of PyCon for its clear exposition of how to use the tools in the Python standard library to solve interesting and difficult problems in a clear and Pythonic manner.

Our other presenters are similarly distinguished. Mike Müller is a regular on the PyCon tutorial lineup, with his "Faster Python Programs through Optimization" a regular sellout for its practical and example-intensive approach. Howard Whitston is an instructor at the University of South Alabama with 27 years of teaching experience. His tutorial on data structures in Python focuses on choosing the right tool -- stacks, queues, binary search trees, and priority queues -- to handle data problems both big and small.

High level, low level: Our second-most-popular topic from the poll was using Python together with C. Python and C are both powerful languages, but their focus on high versus low-level programming makes them suitable for different parts of the stack. We picked a couple of excellent tutorials to guide attendees through the wilds of memory management: A (Re-)Introduction to C for Pythonistas by Noah Kantrowitz, and Writing Python extensions in C by Noufal Ibrahim.

Noah Kantrowitz is a full-time developer at Atari, with a number of projects (including the well-known project management tool Trac) under his belt. His (Re-)Introduction to C is designed to help programmers familiar with Python and other high-level dynamic languages to get down to the bits and bytes by focusing on writing clear, concise, and idiomatic C code.

Once attendees have finished with Noah's (Re-)Introduction to C, they can move on to Noufal Ibrahim's introduction to the C-Python API. Noufal is a professional trainer in Bangalore, India and works regularly with developers who need to wrap an existing API for use with Python.

In a similar vein is Justin Heath's "Packet Crafting with Python." For years Justin was a principal engineer on Snort, the well-known network intrusion system. Justin's tutorial will dive in to the very lowest levels of networking with Python, showing how to use tools like scapy, dpkt and impacket to read, build, manipulate, and replay network data.

Web Frameworks: It should not be surprising that the next biggest area of interest came from addressing the web and the various ways Python can make it easier to create web applications. Django and Web2Py both ranked highly in terms of developer interest, with other aspects of web development also receiving a number of votes. For those working on the web, we are happy to present a variety of classes that will make your web work faster and more efficient.

Pinax Solutions, by Daniel Greenfeld and Brian Rosner: Danny and Brian are Pinax core developers both using Pinax to develop and deploy websites every day. "Pinax Solutions" will take attendees from Pinax installation up through deployment, with instructive stops dealing with authentication, extending Pinax, media handling, and working with the Pinax and Django communities.
Web2py Secrets by Massimo Di Pierro: Massimo is the BDFL of the Web2Py community and a professor at DePaul University in Chicago. Web2Py has been embraced by a number of developers for its core focus on getting things done. Massimo will show how Web2Py's internal design and modular architecture can be used to build rich, AJAX-ready interfaces.
Python/Django deployment workshop by Jacob Kaplan-Moss: We are glad to include in PyCon 2011 a return of Jacob's highly rated Django deployment workshop. Attendees last year raved about Jacob's meticulous preparation and engaging style - and this year promises to be even better. Jacob is possibly the most qualified person on earth to talk about mastering Django deployment issues; come and learn from the Django BDFL himself.

Cloud computing: One of Python's strengths is that it is a popular choice for cloud computing. From Amazon AWS to Google App Engine, we are grateful to have a variety of experts teaching how to effectively leverage the cloud services available to build applications that scale.

We start with "Distributed and Cloud computing with Python" by Aaron Staley. As a cofounder of PiCloud, Aaron has extensive experience dealing with many different cloud computing solutions. Aaron will present an overview of running Python in the cloud with examples showing the use of Pyro, Oracle's Grid Engine, Google App Engine, MapReduce using Hadoop, and PiCloud's distributed function facility.

Moving from the general to the specific, the most prominent cloud computing provider today is Amazon. ThoughtWorks consultant Cosmin Stejerean will present "Deploying web applications to the cloud," focusing on the step-by-step process of moving a Django application to Amazon AWS and configuring it to take advantage of Amazon's load balancing, auto scaling, content delivery, and relational database services. Participants can use Amazon's recently released "free" development tier to gain hands-on experience deploying to the cloud.

For those focusing more on Google App Engine, we are excited to have Googler Wesley Chun presenting the "Google App Engine workshop." Wesley is an experienced speaker, writer, and consultant, and shows how to leverage the newest tools provided by AppEngine to create applications that run distributed over Google's massive data-crunching facilities.

GUI Development: Of course, we know that not all development is web development. We are glad to have professional engineer Paul Kippes teaching a two-part course on GUI development with PyQt. By the end of the course attendees will have an understanding of the Qt library and tools and be able to create simple but useful GUIs in Python.

Python 3: Another up-and-coming topic in the Python community is the movement to Python 3. Python 3 cleans up some of the "warts" of Python and makes it cleaner, lighter, and more consistent -- at the price of backwards compatibility with Python 2.

PyCon 2011 will feature a pair of tutorials focusing on Python 3, both with David Beazley as a presenter. David Beazley is best known as the author of the Python Essential Reference and the creator of SWIG. When he's not breaking the GIL, he spends his time teaching a variety of diabolical Python training courses.

The first Python 3 tutorial is a repeat of last year's "Mastering Python 3 I/O," our number-one-rated tutorial. "Mastering Python 3 I/O" takes a top-to-bottom tour of the entire Python 3 I/O system and provides practical advice for programmers porting code from Python 2 to Python 3.

"Cooking with Python 3" brings in Brian Jones, co-editor of the new all-Python-3 edition of the Python Cookbook, for a fun and interactive tour through what's new in Python 3. David and Brian will take on all a variety of challenges through a lively mix of interactive demos, examples, and discussion.

Data and Science with Python: Another consistent theme from the responses to our poll was that people want to learn more about data and science applications with Python. Our tutorial selections for PyCon 2011 were also designed to help scientists, engineers, and geographic information specialists.

Our first tutorial in this group is Mike Müller's "Scientific Python Tools not only for Scientists and Engineers." In this tutorial, Mike addresses the wealth of tools that Python offers for the interactive exploration of data, including NumPy, matplotlib, IPython, Cython, and others.

Moving to some more specific topics, we are delighted that Matthew Russell, author of O'Reilly's "Mining the Social Web" will be presenting "Mining and Visualizing Data from the Social Web with Python." Matthew regularly presents as part of his effort to get people busy hacking on social data. As he puts it, "The possibilities are immense, and I'd like to raise awareness and show people how low the bar to entry really is."

Continuing in the same sphere is Olivier Grisel's "Applied Machine Learning in Python with scikit-learn." Olivier is an R&D engineer at Nuxeo working on text analytics and natural language processing, where he uses scikit-learn to build machine learning applications for a number of different areas. Scikit-learn integrates machine learning into NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib making it easy to integrate classical machine learning into any data-wranglers toolset.

For those working more on geographic information systems, PyCon will include Andrii Mishkovskyi's "Building your own tile server using OpenStreetMap." OpenStreetMap is a Creative Commons-licensed set of map tiles that are continually being improved by an international group of volunteers. Andrii's professional work as a GIS developer will help him walk attendees through the process of building their own Google-maps-like tile server that they can use to explore geographic points of interest.

For those wanting something more advanced, Roy Hyunjin Han's " Geospatial Computation and Visualization Cooperative Lab" is designed to move beginning GIS developers up into the ranks of the experienced by working in small groups on an extensive set of guided exercises with provided solutions.

The Meaty Parts of PyCon: Last, but certainly not least, are some of the most useful tutorials included in PyCon. Sometimes the hardest challenges are come in mastering the mechanics of an important task. For these tasks, we have a series of tutorials that will help attendees with the practical tasks associated with building and maintaining an active codebase.

Our first of these tutorials is Christopher Perkins' "Packaging, Documenting, and Distributing your Python Codebase." Christopher is a long-time developer and contributor to Turbogears, Sprox, and c5t, among others. He has the experience to help attendees make their personal and professional projects fit for release.

The second tutorial is Brandon Craig Rhodes' "Documenting Your Project with Sphinx." "Documenting Your Project with Sphinx" is a requested repeat from last year's tutorial selections, and Brandon's engaging style makes any topic - including writing documentation! - enjoyable and engaging.

Whew! It is an amazing lineup of tutorials - and PyCon 2011 will be an amazing conference. Remember, we will be capping registration for PyCon 2011 at 1500 delegates, so register today to reserve your spot.

Also, for those who have already registered, you will be able to go back in to add or specify tutorials. The ability to do so will be up shortly.

Help influence which tutorials are presented at PyCon 2011

2011-01-19T09:40:56Z

We are trying something new this year -- getting some pre-feedback to help guide our tutorial selection process. We have a poll up at where you can vote for the tutorials that you think we should offer.

PyCon is made up of a number of different parts, each with its own goals. For the talks presented during the conference portion of PyCon, we go for both breadth and quality. There are enough different sessions and different tracks that each person can customize their PyCon experience according to their interests.

For tutorials, the goal is slightly different. We want to present tutorials that help developers deal effectively with their most common day-to-day challenges.

We categorized the various tutorial proposals into a number of broad buckets. You can vote on which topics you would like to see at PyCon 2011! We will take this information into account when deciding which tutorials will be presented.

You can view the poll at .

PyCon 2011 Registration and Financial aid open and available!

2011-01-19T09:41:05Z

PyCon 2011 Registration and financial aid are open and ready for business!

I wanted to take a moment and let everyone know that the PyCon 2011 Registration system is now online and accepting registrations for the conference!

http://us.pycon.org/2011/tickets/

PyCon 2011 is looking to be the biggest, and most impressive PyCon yet, we've already booked one fantastic keynote speaker, and the program committee is hard at work selecting the talks for the conference - over 200 proposals were submitted! We're filling up the poster sessions, a stunning number of tutorials are being reviewed - this really does look like it's going to be huge.

Financial aid is also open and available: http://us.pycon.org/2011/registration/financialaid/

Feel free to reach out to anyone on the PyCon 2011 team to ask any questions you might have. We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta.

Registration for PyCon now open!

2011-01-19T09:41:16Z

Registration for PyCon 2011 is now open! But you better hurry - due to limitations with space available in our venue, we have to cap this year's registration at 1500 people.

While the program committee toils away over the record number of talk and tutorial submissions, we are pleased to announce that registration is now open for PyCon 2011. Get your tickets early, because for the first time, we will have to cap this year's registration at just 1500 spots.

Something most people don't know about me is that I am a data geek. So, being who I am, I have gone back through the statistics for the past four years of PyCon to see if I could find any way of gauging the health of the conference from early in the cycle. I found that there was an almost perfect correlation between the number and timing of the talk submissions for PyCon and the final attendance.

This year, we got more talk and tutorial submissions than ever before in the history of PyCon. We broke the previous records by double-digit percentages in every category.

I shouldn't have been too surprised. We started hearing people get excited about this upcoming PyCon eight months ago. To keep from overwhelming our venue, we have decided that we need to cap attendance at 1500 people. We also promised that those who submitted a talk or tutorial proposal would be guaranteed a slot, meaning that of those 1500 tickets, approximately 250 are already spoken for.

Early bird registration rates are effective until January 17. Regular registration rates will run from January 18th until March 1 - if there are any spots left. More information is available on the registration page as well as a direct link to our registration site.

PyCon 2011: Record Breaking Talk and Tutorial Submissions.

2011-01-19T09:41:23Z

I'm very pleased to announce that the PyCon 2011 Call for Proposals for both the main conference talks, and tutorials is closed. Actually, it technically closed November 1st - but we've got great news.

The PyCon 2011 Call for Proposals was sent out September 28th - shortly followed by the call for Tutorials as well. It's my job as the Program Committee chair to help not only manage this process, but also drum up actual proposals. Personally, I do this by heavily relying on you - the Python Community to spread the good word, I also reach out to other groups and communities as much as I can with the help of the entire PyCon organizers, and PyCon program committee teams.

Behind the scenes - it's my job to worry. While each year we see a few proposals trickle in throughout the timeline ending in a tidal wave in the last few days and hours, with this year's abbreviated schedule and timeline, I got really worried really fast. It's important that even though we will only be able to accept a subset of the total number of submitted talks that we get a large number of submissions so we can select from a broad range of speakers, subjects and talk types. We will have the unhappy task, as the review committee, to turn down some number of the submitted talks - this is never fun, and its always painful

So, I worried, and with the enormous help of all of the people out there in the community we've managed, even in a much, much shorter submission timeline, to break all previous talk submission records. As of this writing, we have:

210 main conference talk proposals
52 Tutorials

This is amazing, and having been reading through the submissions, I can honestly say these are some of the highest quality, most exciting talk proposals I've ever seen - the extreme track alone will blow the doors off! Typically the number of talk submissions is indicative of final attendance - and as the number of submissions grows, so does the attendance. If these numbers are any indicator, when registration opens we will rapidly fill the 1500 reg cap we've had to set.

I wanted to take this moment to thank all of you working on PyCon, and out there in the community helping out - and I especially wanted to thank everyone who has submitted talk proposals. All of you, and all of the attendees will make this a hard PyCon to beat in the future.

On a final note, the PyCon Program Committee is always looking for help reviewing talks and working through the selection process. Please come and help select talks! If you're interested, drop me an email - mailto:jnoller@python.org.

I'm looking forward to seeing you all in Atlanta.

-Jesse

Call for Proposals Closes Tomorrow!

2011-01-19T09:41:32Z

The PyCon 2011 Call for Proposals end tomorrow.

If you have not gotten your proposal in for a talk for PyCon US 2011, you have until tomorrow! We close the system at midnight, November 1st (just remember, if it's November 1st anywhere in the world, we will be keeping it open)! If you have never submitted a talk, do not feel intimidated about presenting at PyCon. People are very friendly and you don't need to worry about a hostile presenting environment.

We're looking forward to an excellent conference this year - and we really look forward to all the speakers who will be joining us this year. Submit your talk here: http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/

PyCon 2011 Reminder: Call for Proposals, Posters and Tutorials

2011-01-19T09:41:39Z

Well, it's October 25th! The leaves have turned and the deadline for submitting main-conference talk proposals expires in 7 days (November 1st, 2010)!

We are currently accepting main conference talk proposals: http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/proposals/

Tutorial Proposals: http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/proposals/tutorials/

Poster Proposals: http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/posters/cfp/

PyCon 2011 will be held March 9th through the 17th, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Home of some of the best southern food you can possibly find on Earth!) The PyCon conference days will be March 11-13, preceded by two tutorial days (March 9-10), and followed by four days of development sprints (March 14-17).

We are also proud to announce that we have booked our first Keynote speaker - Hilary Mason, her bio:

"Hilary is the lead scientist at bit.ly, where she is finding sense in vast data sets. She is a former computer science professor with a background in machine learning and data mining, has published numerous academic papers, and regularly releases code on her personal site, http://www.hilarymason.com/. She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions."

We're really looking forward to having her this year as a keynote speaker!

Remember, we've also added an "Extreme" talk track this year - no introduction, no fluff - only the pure technical meat!

For more information on "Extreme Talks" see:

http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/extreme/

We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Please also note - registration for PyCon 2011 will also be capped at a maximum of 1,500 delegates, including speakers. When registration opens (soon), you're going to want to make sure you register early! Speakers with accepted talks will have a guaranteed slot.

We have published all registration prices online at: http://us.pycon.org/2011/tickets/

Important Dates November 1st, 2010: Talk proposals due. December 15th, 2010: Acceptance emails sent. January 19th, 2011: Early bird registration closes. March 9-10th, 2011: Tutorial days at PyCon. March 11-13th, 2011: PyCon main conference. March 14-17th, 2011: PyCon sprints days. Contact Emails:

Van Lindberg (Conference Chair) - van@python.org Jesse Noller (Co-Chair) - jnoller@python.org PyCon Organizers list: pycon-organizers@python.org

PyCon 2011 Call for Posters

2011-01-19T09:41:46Z

The poster session created a great buzz at PyCon 2010 and it's back for 2011! Posters are a great way to share your project with everyone at PyCon, but in a more interactive and one-on-one style. Poster proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis until the limit of 35 is reached, so consider offering a poster!

This is the second year that PyCon is offering a poster pession. A poster is a 4' x 4' graphical summary of the key points about your project, and a poster session provides another way of presenting that encourages more one-on-one communication between the presenter and the audience. Poster sessions are particularly suited for topics of interest to a subset of the community and/or presenters who are more comfortable interacting with smaller groups. Poster sessions also are a great incubator for further hallway track discussions.

Poster proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis until January 19 or we reach the limit of 35 posters.

For general information on the poster session visit the PyCon site at http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/posters/ , for a list of last year's posters go to http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/posters/accepted/, or see the full CFP for poster proposals at http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/posters/cfp/.

To submit a poster proposal use the PyCon speaker submission system found at http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/

See you in Atlanta!

PyCon 2011 Call For Tutorials

2011-01-19T09:41:52Z

The call for tutorial proposals is open until November 1st and we want to encourage you to submit a class idea! Teachers are paid for their efforts and it's a great opportunity for you to teach to a room full of people who have paid to hear what you have to say!

Tutorials are 3-hour long classes (with a refreshment break) taught be some of the leading minds in the Python community. Classes range from beginner (Introduction to Python) to advanced (OOP, Data Storage and Optimization) and everything in between. If you don't feel up to teaching a class, you can always encourage your favorite mentor to teach it! Anything Python may be proposed for a class and a variety of topics is always presented but we can't offer what isn't proposed!

Get more information at http://us.pycon.org/2011/about/ under the "Tutorial Days" section. Submit your idea on the site under the "Speakers" tab. That's it! You could be teaching a class at PyCon next March. See you in Atlanta!

First PyCon Keynote Speaker Announced - Hilary Mason

2011-01-19T09:41:59Z

The first keynote speaker for PyCon has been announced!

PyCon has a tradition of two big keynotes per conference - and last year the PyCon team and I scoured high and low to find us some excellent speakers (Antonio Rodriguez, Mark Shuttleworth) making last year be one of the best keynote-wise ever.

Well, this year we're on track to top last year! We're really pleased to announce that we've confirmed Hilary Mason as our first keynote speaker for PyCon 2011.

Hilary had been recommended to me numerous times over the last few months, and is a fantastic speaker and scientist. We're all really pleased that she accepted our invitation. Here's her bio:

Hilary is the lead scientist at bit.ly, where she is finding sense in vast data sets. She is a former computer science professor with a background in machine learning and data mining, has published numerous academic papers, and regularly releases code on her personal site, http://www.hilarymason.com/. She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.

You can see one of her previous talks here. We'll be adding her to the keynotes page shortly!

And as a reminder: submit your talk proposals here before November 1st!

-Jesse

PyCon 2011 Call for Proposals

2011-01-19T09:42:07Z

PyCon is back! With a rocking new website, a great location and more Python hackers and luminaries under one roof than you could possibly shake a stick at. We've also added an "Extreme" talk track this year - no introduction, no fluff - only the pure technical meat!

PyCon 2011 is looking for proposals for the formal presentation tracks (this includes "extreme talks"). A request for proposals for poster sessions and tutorials will come separately.

Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch your master plan to take over the world with Python?

PyCon is your platform for getting the word out and teaching something new to hundreds of people, face to face.

In the past, PyCon has had a broad range of presentations, from reports on academic and commercial projects, tutorials on a broad range of subjects, and case studies. All conference speakers are volunteers and come from a myriad of backgrounds: some are new speakers, some have been speaking for years. Everyone is welcome, so bring your passion and your code! We've had some incredible past PyCons, and we're looking to you to help us top them!

Online proposal submission is open now! Proposals will be accepted through November 1st, with acceptance notifications coming out by January 20th. To get started, please see:

http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/

For videos of talks from previous years - check out:

http://python.mirocommunity.org/category/conferences

For more information on "Extreme Talks" see:

http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/extreme/

We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Important Dates:

November 1st, 2010: Talk proposals due.
December 15th, 2010: Acceptance emails sent.
January 19th, 2010: Early bird registration closes.
March 9-10th, 2011: Tutorial days at PyCon.
March 11-13th, 2011: PyCon main conference.
March 14-17th, 2011: PyCon sprints days.

Contact Emails:
   Van Lindberg (Conference Chair) - van@python.org
   Jesse Noller (Co-Chair) - jnoller@python.org
   PyCon Organizers list: pycon-organizers@python.org