Benjamin Smith

I’m jazzed to be heading to Chicago again this year for pycon. Last year I had a blast and learned a lot. I even got to apply some of what I learned in practice at work and on personal projects! I’m hoping that I’ll take away as much value from the conference this year. A quick look at the talks suggest that won’t be a problem.

I’m going to try to blog while I’m there, but most likely you’ll get more out of me via twitter, so why not follow me there?

Here’s the list of talks I really want to attend:

There is no order here, scheduling is the tricky part..

• How to Give a Python Talk — Mr. Andrew M Kuchling
• Paver: easy build and deployment automation for Python projects — Kevin Dangoor
• Building tests for large, untested codebases — Dr. C. Titus Brown
• Coverage testing, the good and the bad — Ned Batchelder
• Designing Applications with Non-Relational Databases — Ben Bangert
• Pinax: a platform for rapidly developing websites — James Tauber
• Panel: Functional Testing Tools in Python — Panel, multiple folks.

There’s more, but those are the ones that stuck out to me.. Don’t think I’m in too much danger of missing anything this year.

A few of us at AG Interactive are planning a night of getting together for what we’re dubbing as #pyconbeer on twitter, so keep a search up: Twitter #pyconbeer I’m thinking we’re going to shoot for Friday evening, the 27th.

Hope to see many of you there and put names to faces!

Take a look at my Flicker for some fun pictures of my time at pycon 2008 in Chicago. Good times!

Take a look over at Dave Stanek's post about hosting PyCon in 2010. I think it's a phenomenal idea. Cleveland is an inexpensive place to host a conference with the big city attractions that prevent boredom. I can personally attest to the fun-factor here as it's part of the reason I chose to stay. Cleveland also has a good sized python community as well as pretty heavy python use in the tech companies.

In short, Cleveland loves python and we think Pythonites will love Cleveland, too.

Currently in a session about PyTriton Petabyte File system. Interesting stuff. Tonight we're going to head down to The Ram Bar and check out their brews. I have some pictures of our awesome useless trip downtown last night, but I can't seem to locate an extra usb cord. If anyone has one, look for me, or reply here and let me know!

Tomorrow I think we're going to The Map Room where I'm looking forward to a Black Out Stout!

In the middle of writing this blog I ended up moving next door to the "Python in System Administration", hoping to take a lot away from this.

In the interest of adopting newish technology and request from a user I'm happy to let everyone know that my comment sections (and blog authoring area, yay!) now use Markdown for, erm, Markup :).

Thanks for your patience on this very pressing matter.

On a side note, 6 days till PyCon!