PyCon 2008
Registration for PyCon 2008 is now open. I'm signed up and ready to go. I haven't been for a few years, so I'm pretty excited to be going this year. I guess the first time I went to a Python conference was IPC8 back in 2000. We were snowed into the hotel that weekend by a freak storm in DC, and barely made it out of town before the next icing hit by taking an earlier flight than we had planned on Sunday. I missed IPC 9, but went to 10 out in Long Beach (the weather there was a lot nicer). Both conferences were fun and informative, and I'm glad to have a chance to attend again this year.
I'm not exactly sure what the difference is between IPC (International Python Conference?) and PyCon, except that PyCon is billed as a "community conference." I guess that has to do with how it is organized. I know a lot of people have been putting in a LOT of time and effort to set the whole thing up this year.
Conference Schedule:
Looking over the schedule, I see a few of the talks I had hoped to attend are going to overlap. Having to choose between two fascinating presentations at a conference is a real First World problem, though, so I guess I can't complain. I'm glad there are plans to podcast the sessions again this year, so I'll at least be able to listen to any I can't attend.
Here's a list of the sessions I'm considering for my schedule:
Buffer interface in Py3K (Travis E Oliphant)
I have no idea what that is, but I obviously want to find out about any new APIs in Py3K.
MPI Cluster Programming with Python and Amazon EC2 (Peter Skomoroch) OR How Import Does Its Thing (Mr. Brett Cannon)
I'm interested in the clustering stuff, but I also have an idea for using memcached to cache imported modules, so the "Import" session would be interesting.
Running a Successful Usergroup (Jeff Rush) OR Applying expert system technology to code reuse with Pyke (Bruce Frederiksen)
PyATL is running fairly smoothly, but the book club seems to have petered out over the holidays. I've been really busy this month, and we haven't been able to spur interest again. Maybe Jeff has some ideas. On the other hand, expert systems!
Dogtail: Taking your applications for a walk (Mr. Ramakrishna Reddy Yekulla) OR PyTriton: building a petabyte storage system (Jonathan Ellis)
Testing or big storage? Both would be useful for me at work.
Rich UI Webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo (Mr. Kevin Dangoor)
I don't count myself as a TurboGears fan, but it should be interesting to see Dangoor talk about it.
Jython on the Joint Strike Fighter (Mr. George F Rice) OR Tahoe: A Robust Distributed Secure Filesystem (Brian Warner) OR The State of Django (Adrian Holovaty)
I do count myself as a Django user, so it will be tough to choose between Holovaty's talk and the other two. I think I would probably end up in the Tahoe talk if I don't go to the one on Django.
Like Switching on the Light: Managing an Elastic Compute Cluster with Python (George Belotsky, Heath Johns) OR Django: Under the Hood (Marty Alchin)
The first talk there sounds related to what we do at Racemi.
I noticed that there are several "large computing" talks this year (cluster/compute cloud/big filesystem). Is that a trend?
Conference Goals:
Aside from attending sessions, the other thing I want to come away from the weekend with is a couple of new author commitments for the magazine. Whether from presenters or attendees, I'm going to be scouting for subjects and authors. If you have any interest at all in writing, but just aren't sure how to start, look me up at the conference and we can talk (or, of course, email me and we can talk now doug dot hellmann at pythonmagazine dot com).
So, are you going to PyCon? What sessions are you attending and what do you hope to get out of it? Tutorials? Sprints?
8 comments:
Hopefully the buffer interface talk will have something to do with getting the low-level interface of numpy (also by Travis Oliphant) built into Python. numpy, and its predecessors Numeric and numarray, have always been so generically useful to scientific computing that something like them really belonged in the standard library. Guido turned down Numeric once in the past due to coding issues, but perhaps this talk is about making the existing Python buffer interface more amenable to efficient N-dimensional arrays in Py3k.
Speaking of which, an article on numpy would be great for Python Magazine. It's a tool that anyone who works with large, homogenous data sets should have in their Python toolbox.
Thanks, Stan. I suppose I should go and read the full descriptions of the talks. :-) I was working from the schedule, which just gives the titles.
As far as a NumPy article goes, we would LOVE to have one. Know anyone qualified to write it? (hint, hint)
Hah, I wish was qualified, because that would mean I was getting to use numpy on a regular basis, rather than the ugly C++ libraries which dominate my field. (At least I get to use them through python bindings.)
You'll have to corner someone who looks competent at Travis's talk. :)
Doug,
I am working on getting the schedule app up and running for this year with some new features.
Last year, people could publish their personal schedule via google calendar. For those without accounts this was a one-time import/export. For those with accounts it was a live feed connection so changes were synced. This required having a google account and a 5 step process to create, connect, add comments and then embed the schedule in your blog. As a result only one person did it (well two if you count my test).
This year I want to add a more direct embed mechanism. That is once you select the talks (and sync to your account) the first time, there will be a link to generate the IFRAME html for embedding your schedule in your blog. It would not have all the features of the google calendar (no comments, no tooltips, no publishing, etc.) but it would allow us to have a list of links on the talks back to the blog posts.
The tooltips could be done as well but that could have nasty side effects/bugs so I would want that as a late optional addition.
Do you think this would be useful? Would you have found it useful for your post?
Last years schedule app:
http://us.pycon.org/apps07/schedule/
(sorry logins are no longer working)
Doug,
Being able to set my schedule on the PyCon site would definitely be a nice feature. Are you planning to support ICS export? That would let users subscribe from desktop calendar apps such as iCal as well as Google Calendar, and you wouldn't have to worry about the syncing issue (since it would be one way). The HTML/IFRAME export could be useful, too, but I'm not sure if I'd use that or not. I would *definitely* subscribe to an iCal feed.
BTW, the registration app looks really good. Keep up the good work!
Doug
Doug,
Yes, the app already supports ICS export and ICS Feeds (for both the full schedule and your custom schedule). There are instructions for use on iCal, Outlook and Google. The use of the feed is the syncing I am talking about. Very few people used this feature last year and only one person used it to put the information on their blog. There were two problems. First it was too complicated; second people did not have a google account.
We will continue to have that feature, but we are also looking at other potential social networking features.
On the registration app; thanks! I spent too much time on the back end issues (blog post coming about that some time), so the client side is a bit confusing. Carl Karsten created the badge preview which I believe is the key feature of the new system.
Thankfully the rest of the organizers are dealing with cleaning up the instructions and AMK is managing all the issues as the Registration Manager. With registrations in his more than capable hands things should go smoothly.
Doug,
Posting details about a daily schedule on my blog neat, but I don't think it is a Killer Feature. Being able to sync the schedule into a PDA or phone with alarms seems much more useful.
I remember a badge preview while I was registering, but I don't see it when I go back to look at my completed registration. Should I?
Doug,
The badge preview on the view/edit registration is coming. We got it working with dirty registration form data just before we went live. Now we need to get it working with model and cleaned form data.
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