PyCon 2010

Details

Parent Category: Expos and Conventions

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 15 February 2010 05:00

Written by L E Shannon

PyCon 2010 takes place February 17 to 25, 2010, at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Georgia. The conference is organized and run by volunteer programmers of the computer language Python; the users' perspective governs everything from talk selection to conference cost, making an exceptionally worthwhile conference. The first two days are tutorials, followed by the three-day conference.

Attendees gather for serious learning, discussion, and strategizing, as well as fun. PyCon 2010, the eighth annual conference of the Python programming community, promises more talks, more education, more creativity; more work and more play. PyCon 2009 drew nearly a thousand Python programmers from around the world, representing projects on all seven continents - including Antarctica.  

Interest in PyCon is growing along with the use of the Python language itself. This year alone has seen a 50% increase in the number of talk proposals submitted by community members, and the organizers have added an unprecedented fifth track to the conference schedule.

The conference will include 95 regular talks and panels, covering everything from language basics to deep-space astronomy to robotic submarines. PyCon also offers 32 half-day tutorials, Open Space sessions, special keynotes, Lightning Talks, development sprints, an exhibit hall, and a hands-on lab - countless opportunities for attendees to learn.

This year, PyCon also introduces Poster Sessions for detailed, personal examination of a variety of topics with subject matter experts. Poster sessions provide an alternative presentation mechanism that facilitates 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.

Python's growth has been partially driven by an explosion in new implementations of the language. The IronPython and Jython implementations make Python a good tool for .NET and Java environments, say proponents, in that it helps make full use of those platforms' capabilities and libraries. Other implementations, like Stackless and Google's Unladen-Swallow, focus on improving Python execution speed.

Finally, the Pynie and PyPy implementations bring Python programs to all-new experimental execution environments. All these implementations will be examined in several PyCon talks and in PyCon's Python Language Summit and Virtual Machine Summit.

Keynote Speakers

Antonio Rodriguez was CTO of HP's consumer imaging and printing business where he worked on a wide array of projects: from mass customization to making the web more "printable," to e-reading, to mobile platforms. He came to HP through the acquisition of Tabblo, a company he founded in 2005.

Mark Shuttleworth is founder of the Ubuntu Project, an enterprise Linux distribution that is freely available worldwide, and has both cutting-edge desktop and enterprise server editions, and has become very popular. In April 2002 Mark flew in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station.

Invited Talks include:

Ian Bicking – Deployment, Development, Packaging, and a Little Bit of the Cloud

Jeff Rush – Interfaces, Adapters and Factories

Jack Diederich – Python's Dusty Corners

Ned Batchelder  – Tests and Testability

Lightning Talks
A lightning talk is a short presentation of an attendee’s choosing, no longer than five minutes. Unlike scheduled talks, there is no approval process; speakers simply sign up during PyCon.

This quick pace forces speakers to focus on the essentials and treats the audience to ten different topics in an hour. PyCon 2010 will aim for five sessions.

Development Sprints
A sprint is a time set aside for developers to come together and focus their undivided attention on improving an open source project. The PyCon Development Sprints are four days of intensive learning and development—a focused, sustained time to test, fix bugs, add new features, and improve documentation.

Development sprints are a key part of PyCon, a chance for the contributors to open-source projects to get together face-to-face for up to four days of intensive learning and development. Newbies sit at the same table as the gurus, go out for lunch and dinner together, and have a great time while advancing their project. All experience levels are welcome.

About PyCon
Presented by the Python Software Foundation and sponsored by Google, the world’s largest Python conference brings together a diverse group of developers, enthusiasts, and organizations to explore new challenges, launch new businesses and forge new connections within the Python community. PyCon provides attendees with the opportunity to delve into the dynamic programming language relied upon by institutions from MIT and NASA to Cisco and Walt Disney. PyCon helps people learn new tools and techniques, present their own projects, and meet other Python fans.

About Python
Python is an open-source, dynamically typed, object-oriented programming language that can be used in nearly the entire range of technology applications. It offers an easy learning curve and access to a vast array of libraries. With implementations available for all common operating systems as well as the Java and .NET platforms, Python can be used on virtually any system in existence. Python's power and versatility have made it one of the world's most popular programming languages, currently ranked #7 in the TIOBE index. Like other open-source, dynamic languages, it offers rapid productivity and a vigorous developer community; at the same time, Python's clarity and reliability give confidence to enterprise users.

For more information, go to http://us.pycon.org.  

PyCon 2010
February 17-25, 2010

Hyatt Regency Atlanta
265 Peachtree Street NE
Atlanta, Georgia, USA 30303

• < Prev
• Next >