jessenoller.com

Pre­am­ble

There’s been some recent dis­cus­sion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speak­ers should have to pay for admis­sion as well — see Chris Wanstrath’s (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Con­vore thread for exam­ples. Obvi­ously, as PyCon is the “big dog” so to speak for Python con­fer­ences, every­one looks to “us” for a model to work from, or how we man­age things. I’ve seen a lot of poop slung towards the Djan­go­Con orga­niz­ers, mainly due to a lack of know­ing “why” cer­tain poli­cies (such as “Every­one Pays”) exist for Djan­go­Con, PyCon, and other conferences.

As co-chair and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair last year, and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair the year before, and now chair for the next two years — I fig­ured it might be good to take a moment to explain the ratio­nale behind PyCon’s approach — as well as some sta­tis­tics about the bud­get. I’m not going to state that this pol­icy is per­fect; nor that it won’t be changed; I also will not release the bud­get pub­licly — I don’t think giv­ing every­one a spread­sheet with­out the con­text of the hun­dreds of man hours of work that go into it is use­ful, at all.

Impor­tant Note: PyCon is orga­nized and man­aged by the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion — this means that, as part of being a 501c3 char­ity, some of the finan­cials from past PyCon is avail­able as part of pub­licly acces­si­ble finan­cial doc­u­ments of the foun­da­tion. You can find those on the PSF’s site.

The same rea­son­ing may not apply to a con­fer­ence that is orga­nized by a com­mer­cial entity or is done for profit. OSCON is a com­mer­cial con­fer­ence, so hav­ing speak­ers get in free is gen­er­ally expected. DjangoCon.us is in the mid­dle — it is orga­nized for profit by a com­mer­cial entity, but it also con­tributes heav­ily back to the Django Soft­ware Foun­da­tion. DjangoCon.eu is man­aged dif­fer­ently as well.

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Preamble There's been some recent discussion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speakers should have to pay for admission as well - see Chris Wanstrath's (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Convore thread for examples. Obviously, as PyCon is the "big dog" so to speak for Python conferences, everyone looks to ...

One of the posts I’ve been mean­ing to do is this one — a more extended ver­sion out­lin­ing what I spoke about in my five minute light­ning talk I did at PyCon 2010 (more gen­eral thoughts on the con­fer­ence later). Of course, mean­ing to post it — and actu­ally get­ting a chance to are two dif­fer­ent things.

So — my goal of the light­ning talk was to say thank you to the python com­mu­nity, not only from me, but from the point of view of the com­pany I work for (Nasuni) which recently launched. Thanks can be given back to the com­mu­nity in a vari­ety of ways — money, code, spon­sor­ship, pro­grams, etc.

Some­times, a sim­ple Thank You can be a good start, and that was my goal. Unfor­tu­nately, I also com­pletely deleted my slides (inten­tion­ally, what was I think­ing?) after my talk was done.

What is Nasuni? We’re pretty small — obvi­ously much smaller when start­ing (5 core engi­neers). The goal was to build a sim­ple to man­age, secure, reli­able cloud-storage backed vir­tual stor­age appli­ance. Every­one helped code and design the prod­uct. We had to build it fast — when you’re a startup on VC money, you’ve got to be fast — you have finite time. Lim­ited time, money and people.

From a tech­nol­ogy stand­point — it sim­ply made sense to put the core data path in C and C++ — you need speed, secu­rity, and the com­pact­ness C offers you when you’re talk­ing speed. Not to men­tion, this is a device which has a finite amount of space, so keep­ing it rel­a­tively com­pact is a Good Thing. So the brain and cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem are in C — but we’re lack­ing something:

The rest of the per­son. D’oh. You know, arms and legs and stuff.

Let’s look at all of the other stuff we needed:

• tests
• tools/glue scripts
• prototypes
• user interface(s)
• other sys­tem daemons
• infrastructure
• web site
• deploy­ment tools

And that’s just the stuff I could think of off the top of my head right now. So, we needed to com­pli­ment our super strong core with some­thing pretty flex­i­ble, some­thing that could also eas­ily mesh with the core sys­tem as well.

When pick­ing the tech­nol­ogy; we needed speed of devel­op­ment, a broad ecosys­tem to build from, and it needed to ramp up and down. It had to be flex­i­ble enough that any­one involved in the project could become imme­di­ately effec­tive with it.

Enter Python.

“Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the uni­verse together.”

Python Ramps “up”, and it ramps “down” — it’s good for “hard” pro­gram­mers, and peo­ple just try­ing to get things done. It’s sim­ple enough that any­one who has scripted in the past can get some­thing done, and quickly. My motto has slowly become “there is no such thing as bad code — there’s just code that works, and code that doesn’t”. Code that comes out of some­one who is just learn­ing, and gets the job done is just as valu­able as code that is well thought out and designed.

Python, and it’s broad ecosys­tem. It’s the glue, the face, the hands, the legs. It, plus insanely smart engi­neers let us move quickly, adapt to any­thing that popped up and put together a kick ass product.

8 months.

With Python’s help, we put together a ready-to-ship sim­ple to man­age, secure, reli­able cloud-storage backed vir­tual stor­age appli­ance. 8 months! This isn’t a web app, or a another web ser­vice. This is some­thing just shy of putting actual hard­ware into a dat­a­cen­ter! We’ve got python deep in our DNA. (And heck — the pres­i­dent of the com­pany wrote a good chunk of it! How awe­some is that?)

The moral of the story, how­ever brief it is — when you need to sell Python to your boss, or that client — or if you’re just start­ing out. Don’t sell it with words. Sell it by show­ing it’s effec­tive­ness, it’s speed. Just do it — that’s what Python is here for. help­ing you get your job done and succeed.

Python is not meant to be the pret­ti­est, or the fastest-to-run, or the one with the lat­est fea­ture du-jour. It’s there to let you get your job done. That’s why I love it, and much of the com­mu­nity around it — it’s the prag­ma­tism, how will this let peo­ple be effec­tive.

I wanted to take a moment not just to cheer­lead — but to also specif­i­cally thank the projects and tools out there in the com­mu­nity that helped us get the job done.

• Python (duh)
• The Python stan­dard library: This can not be stressed enough! Despite any­thing else we use from the ecosys­tem, the stan­dard library is rich enough that it’s a mas­sive time, and life saver. This is why I don’t believe that “get­ting rid of it” makes any sense at all. Python’s suc­cess is not just a by prod­uct of the lan­guage itself — the stan­dard library is such a big sell­ing point it can’t be stated enough.
• Django
• Vir­tualenv / Virtualenvwrapper
• Nose
• pip
• fabric
• paramiko
• lxml
• pycurl

And many, many oth­ers (includ­ing obvi­ously non-python projects). Thank you, thank you, thank you!

In clos­ing — Thank You!. With­out Python, as a lan­guage — Python as a com­mu­nity, Django, and so many oth­ers — we would not have been able to achieve our goals. There’s so much to be proud of as a com­mu­nity, and some­times we loose sight of it while debat­ing frame­works, this, that or the next thing. Python is the per­fect secret weapon for peo­ple and com­pa­nies just try­ing to get things done

Thank you all — hope­fully we can give back as much as we’ve gotten.

One of the posts I've been meaning to do is this one - a more extended version outlining what I spoke about in my five minute lightning talk I did at PyCon 2010 (more general thoughts on the conference later). Of course, meaning to post it - and actually getting a chance to are ...

So, fol­low­ing the lead of sev­eral other PyCon/Python peo­ple — I thought I’d share the talks I’m pretty jazzed about, as well as some other bits of PyCon-related news.

First up — early bird reg­is­tra­tion is open — early bird reg nets you a decent dis­count on reg­is­tra­tion fees for PyCon, and will run until Jan­u­ary 6th.

Next — for those of you who didn’t see the news, Mark Shut­tle­worth will also be doing a Keynote at PyCon — this is awe­some news. I think both keynotes, his and Anto­nio Rodriguez’ will be great. I don’t want to speak as to the con­tent just yet — but with two high cal­iber entrepreneurs/founders, I’m dead sure it will be awesome.

As for the talks I want to see — well, this is crim­i­nally dif­fi­cult. I pretty much want to see almost every sin­gle invited talk we have (I’m espe­cially excited about Alex’s, Jack’s, Joe’s and Ned’s talks. I think our invited speak­ers this year will be very, very popular.

As for talks that “made it through the painstak­ing review process” I presided over, here’s my per­sonal “gotta see” list:

• “Under­stand­ing the Python GIL” — David Bea­z­ley; David’s been hint­ing at tak­ing his talk he did ear­lier this year “up a notch” — I can’t wait!
• “Actors: What, Why, and How” — Dono­van Pre­ston. Hell yeah!
• “Tur­tles All The Way Down: Demys­ti­fy­ing Deferreds, Dec­o­ra­tors, and Dec­la­ra­tions” — Glyph Lefkowitz; Glyph is a fan­tas­tic, and ener­getic speaker. Def­i­nitely look­ing for­ward to see this dog-and-pony show.
• “Using Django in Non-Standard Ways” — Eric Flo­ren­zano; I’ve been doing a fair amount of non-standard Django work lately, and I’m inter­ested to see things which may apply to my day-to-day work.
• “Mod­ern ver­sion con­trol: Mer­cu­r­ial inter­nals” — Dirk­jan Ocht­man and “Hg and Git : Can’t we all just get along?” — Mr. Scott Cha­con; these both apply to a lot of the work I’m doing (not the day job) and given the adop­tion rate of both mer­cu­r­ial and git, and the fact git con­tin­ues to fill me with a seething rage every time I use it, I des­per­ately need to see Scott’s talk!

That’s a quick top five (six) off the top of my head — and I could prob­a­bly list out a heck of a lot more. I’m com­pletely jazzed about PyCon this year. We’ve added a fifth track, we’ve got poster ses­sions, kick ass tuto­ri­als, fan­tas­tic talks, and rock­ing Keynotes.

So why haven’t you reg­is­tered yet?

So, following the lead of several other PyCon/Python people - I thought I'd share the talks I'm pretty jazzed about, as well as some other bits of PyCon-related news. First up - early bird registration is open - early bird reg nets you a decent discount on registration fees for PyCon, and will run until ...

The offi­cial talk list for PyCon 2010, hap­pen­ing in Feb­ru­ary in Atlanta Geor­gia is now live:

http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/talks/

My thanks go out to every author, and per­son involved in get­ting us this far. With out the hard work of a lot of peo­ple, this would not have been possible.

The official talk list for PyCon 2010, happening in February in Atlanta Georgia is now live: http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/talks/ My thanks go out to every author, and person involved in getting us this far. With out the hard work of a lot of people, this would not have been possible.

PyCon is com­ing back around — although it seems as if we just fin­ished PyCon 2009! This next PyCon (PyCon 2010) will be held in Atlanta, Geor­gia Feb­ru­ary 17 through 25th at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. PyCon 2010 is now accept­ing talk pro­pos­als — the Call for Papers went out yesterday!

This year is a bit dif­fer­ent for me; this year I’ve taken the torch of Pro­gram Com­mit­tee chair from Ivan Krsti? — this means I get to “lead up” the com­mit­tee in reach­ing out for talks, review­ing pro­pos­als and choos­ing the con­tent all of us will be privy to. This isn’t a job I take lightly; hav­ing been both a speaker and a critic of con­tent in the past, I’m very sen­si­tive to the qual­ity of the talks we get at the con­fer­ence. That being said…

PyCon 2009, by most mea­sure­ments was one of the most suc­cess­ful and well-run PyCons to date. I met more Python­istas in the week-and-a-half I was there, had some of the best con­ver­sa­tions and went to some of the best talks I’ve had the priv­i­lege of going to ever there. I was lucky enough to also stay through the sprints for the entire time, and had one of the best times I’ve ever had coding.

PyCon 2009 was an inter­est­ing ani­mal — despite most of the world being sucked down by an econ­omy doing it’s best boat anchor impres­sion, and with many con­fer­ences sim­ply clos­ing down entirely — we still man­aged to get around 900 peo­ple to come, which is sim­ply amazing.

That all being said — I think PyCon 2010 can be bet­ter. In fact, it’s my firm belief that a lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion is good, and there’s no bet­ter com­pe­ti­tion than try­ing to one-up some­thing you’ve done in the past. So, not to dimin­ish what’s hap­pened in the past — but let’s kick our own ass. Let’s make PyCon 2010 bet­ter — and ulti­mately that requires you.

PyCon is a vol­un­teer run, vol­un­teer made, vol­un­teer speaker con­fer­ence. It’s up to you, me, and every­one within the Python com­mu­nity to make this thing a suc­cess. Every speaker, every reviewer — every vol­un­teer down to some­one who helps bag t-shirts the night before help make this one of the best con­fer­ences out there.

This is a call for you yes, you to step up and help PyCon 2010 kick ass. Think you have an idea for a talk? Sub­mit it. Seri­ously. Even if you’re ner­vous, a first time speaker, or you’re unsure of your topic — our crack team of review­ers (which you can also be one of) will help you mas­sage and improve your submission.

If you want to have some point­ers on how to make your talk bet­ter — check out out this video (a talk on… giv­ing python talks!). Bet­ter yet, hit up pycon.blip.tv and watch some of the talks from the past.

Some poten­tial talk top­ics I’d per­son­ally like to see are:

• Deep dives into more-advanced parts of python (a great exam­ple is Ray­mond H’s “Core Python Con­tain­ers” talk”)
• Python 3 stuff — importlib, han­dling bytes vs. strings, etc.
• Idiomatic/optimized Python code (“make my code better”)
• Testing(and test­ing with) Python (I think michael should do a talk on all the new UnitTest stuff he and oth­ers have done)
• Cloud com­put­ing infra­struc­ture — not “using” the cloud — more “build­ing and deploy­ing the cloud”. Some­thing which comes to mind is a talk on Fabric.
• A talk on pip/virtualenv
• How to con­tribute to Python — and avoid Lindberg’dification (I sus­pect that’s not a word)
• Get­ting $THING done with Python — one of the key draws of Python, and what makes me so pas­sion­ate about it is that it sim­ply lets me get things done — what have you got­ten done with Python? Most of all — how did you do it? What did you use?

Again, per­son­ally — I’d rather see less “we did this cool thing” and more “this is how we did this cool thing. I know that’s a tall order for what can be a short win­dow of time, but sup­ple­ment it with down­loads, blog posts — give peo­ple some­thing that they can take home and do.

If you don’t feel com­fort­able doing a talk — maybe you’re bet­ter off being a talk Reviewer. Talk review­ers are respon­si­ble for help­ing talk sub­mis­sions by ask­ing ques­tions, mak­ing improve­ment sug­ges­tions — and they ulti­mately decide what talks every­one is going to see. They help make-or-break the con­fer­ence as a whole. It requires read­ing, and a will­ing­ness to dis­cuss — I know every­one out there can do that, and we need peo­ple with all types of skills and back­grounds to help us make sure every­thing gets a fair treat­ment and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Again, see this page for how to become a reviewer.

If you don’t feel com­fort­able with doing a talk, or review­ing — check out the “Help­ing Out at PyCon” page for other ways of help­ing. We need ses­sion run­ners, A/V peo­ple, peo­ple to man the reg­is­tra­tion desk; every­thing. Check out the staffing page for slots we need to fill!

Finally — if you don’t do any­thing else: Come. Bring a friend, bring two friends. Bring peo­ple who might only be vaguely inter­ested in Python, expose them to this great com­mu­nity and the pas­sion of it. Come for the talks, the open space dis­cus­sions — and the sim­ple oppor­tu­nity to come and meet some of the bright­est peo­ple in the community.

Then stay for the sprints; cause they’re damned use­ful and fun.

PyCon is coming back around - although it seems as if we just finished PyCon 2009! This next PyCon (PyCon 2010) will be held in Atlanta, Georgia February 17 through 25th at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. PyCon 2010 is now accepting talk proposals - the Call for Papers went out yesterday! This year is a ...