PyCon Asia Pacific Call for Papers

If you would like to visit Singapore next year, please consider submitting a paper to PyCon Asia Pacific, which runs from June 9-11 next year. The call for papers is open until February 1, but why not get that proposal in before Christmas?

Talk at PyCon, Become a TV Star?

Well, maybe not a star, but who knows? You will certainly get to meet a lot of interesting people with a common interest in Guido van Rossum's invention. And sessions are televised. Last year I posted two months after PyCon to point out that there had been 180,000 views of PyCon-related videos on blip.tv.

Of course it's too late now to be a speaker at PyCon 2010 if you haven't already been accepted - those decisions were made a while ago (with great difficulty, as there were so many excellent submissions this year).

It would be interesting to hear from some of the quarter of a million people who've viewed the PyCon videos just to see what you thought was good and bad about them. They certainly make information about Python much more readily available.

The people who speak at PyCon (and the many other Python conferences throughout the world) are stars anyway, in my opinion, and deserve our support. They are giving freely of the experience they have developed, and they deserve our thanks and recognition. PyCon speakers don't get free registration or much else in the way of reward, so when you are at the conference (or if you come across one of them elsewhere) please let them know how much you appreciate their work.

Pyticipate: Interpret Your World

Well, Grig Gheorghiu just posted the list of invited speakers for PyCon 2010, with their chosen topics. It's a doozie:

Ian Bicking: On the Subject of Source Code
Jeff Rush: Interfaces, Adapters and Factories
Jack Diederich: Python's Dusty Corners
Mike Fletcher: Debating 'til Dawn: Topics to Keep You Up All Night
Raymond Hettinger: Mastering Team Play: Four Powerful Examples of Composing Python Tools
Bob Ippolito: The Other Kind of Testing
Alex Martelli: Powerful Pythonic Patterns
Joe Gregorio: Threading is Not a Model
Ned Batchelder: Tests and Testability
Holger Krekel: The Ring of Python
Ted Leung: A Survey of Concurrency Constructs

More details on the PyCon web site. If PyCon only had those talks it would make an amazing one-day event, but of course there will be three days of talks, with four tracks, so in practice it will be completely impossible for anyone to attend all the talks that they would like to.

That's where the Pycon videos come in - high quality recordings of every scheduled talk will be available. It's nowhere near as good as being there, but if you were at PyCon it's a great way to fill in the gaps, and if you weren't then it's a good reminder of exactly why you should be next time around.

PyCon is a great conference. I'm looking forward to it already!

Last Week to Submit Your PyCon Papers

PyCon is a little earlier next year, and the organizers are trying to prepare earlier too. So this is a reminder that there is one week remaining to submit your PyCon talk proposals. PyCon 2010, in Atlanta, is a must-attend event. It's a great event to speak at, too, so don't delay!