PyCon Announces Schedule, 95 Talks Selected

After reviewing a record breaking group of talk proposals, the PyCon organizers scheduled three days of the best talks the Python community has to offer. The Santa Clara, CA conference is sure to be a sellout.

Santa Clara, CA - After an intense series of meetings to choose 95 talks out of nearly 400 submissions, the PyCon organizers have settled on what looks like the best conference schedule yet. Initial feedback on the schedule has been glowing, with most responses centering on the fact that every slot has multiple talks that everyone will want to attend. Some responses have shown a want to attend each and every talk in a given time slot. Preceded by two days of tutorials, the talks run Friday March 9-11, 2012, followed by four days of sprints. The schedule is available at https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/.

Friday kicks off the Santa Clara, CA conference with a selection of testing, accessibility, and object oriented topics. In the first 90 minutes of the conference, experts Raymond Hettinger and Jack Diederich go back-to-back on the topics of subclassing and not writing classes at all. After lunch and throughout the rest of the day the onslaught of testing talks continue and are joined by a sampling of security, debugging, database, and diversity talks.

Among the impressive range of topics on Saturday is a track of alternative VMs, featuring the PyPy developers introducing their interpreter and providing a deep dive into their JIT, followed by Jython developer Jim Baker speaking on making Jython faster. Come back from lunch and check out how to build a computer vision driven, Python powered, garden protecting, squirrel shooting water cannon. Wrap up the afternoon with two email experts: CPython developers R. David Murray and Barry Warsaw. David brings the audience through the story of the standard library email package’s recent overhaul and Barry outlines the modernization of the ever popular Mailman project.

The abbreviated Sunday schedule still packs a punch. The poster session runs for 90 minutes prior to the first talks and provides a great space to walk right up to a presenter and talk one-on-one. Later, designer Idan Gazit walks through the art of sketching during the iterative process of product design. Carlos de la Guardia introduces useful patterns from configuration to deployment of Pyramid applications. Brandon Craig Rhodes, who is also giving a talk on Saturday as well as a tutorial, offers a whirlwind tour of compilation, linkage, virtual memory, and other operating system goodies.

Though the keynote schedule hasn’t been finalized, two keynote speakers have been announced: Paul Graham of Y Combinator and Stormy Peters of Mozilla. Paul will return for his second PyCon keynote, bringing the experience and perspective of a Lisp hacker turned startup investor. Stormy’s position as Head of Developer Engagement and her numerous other engagements including founding and leading Kids on Computers, will make for a unique presentation.

Early bird ticket rates have been extended through January 25, 2012, but don’t wait. Attendance is being capped at 1500 attendees and the conference is sure to sell out, so get your tickets early. For more information about registration, see https://us.pycon.org/2012/registration/.

PyCon can not be PyCon without our stunning and ever growing list of sponsors, lead by Diamond sponsors Google, Dropbox, and Heroku. Our Platinum sponsors include Microsoft, New Relic, Survey Monkey, Nasuni Corporation, Facebook, Nebula, Gondor.io and EventBrite.

Gold sponsors include ZeOmega, Bitly, White Oak Technologies, DotCloud, OpDemand, CCP Games, ActiveState, JetBrains, Caktus Consulting, Enthought, Cloud Foundry (VMware), Linode, Disqus, Spotify, Leapfrog Online, Loggly, Snoball, Evite, PlaidCloud, Revolution Systems, Canonical, Aldebaran Robotics, Mozilla, Lab305 and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Silver level sponsors are Urban Airship, Cox Media Group, Eucalyptus Systems, Olark, WiserTogether, ESRI, Accense Technology, AG Interactive, Vocollect, 10gen, BigDoor, The Open Bastion, Toast Driven, Net-ng, MyYearBook, Threadless, gocept, Lex Machina, Aarki, FreshBooks, Github, fwix, Imaginary Landscape, OpenStack, devsAr, Stratasan, MapMyFitness, Kelly Creative Tech, Bitbucket, Mailgun, Opscode, Continuum Analytics, Wingware, Emma, Shining Panda, Python Academy, Cisco, Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall, Kontagent and Truveris.

For more information on our sponsors, please see https://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors/.

Jesse Noller, Conference Chair
jnoller@python.org
+1 (978) 212-9863

Brian Curtin, Publicity Coordinator
brian@python.org
+1 (630) 364-0250

about/press/schedule_announced Recently modified by brian: Jan. 9, 2012, 9:30 a.m. (History)