I’m really looking forward to attending my first PyCon this weekend. After moving to SF, it’s great to have so many cool conferences right in my backyard! It’s sold out this year, which might be a first? The talks look great, but I’m just as hopeful to meet a bunch of cool people and trade ideas on projects and Python. After writing Python for around 5-6 years now, I’m finally beginning to understand most things and hopeful to begin contributing to large projects or things that might help improve the language.

Some of the Python talks began already, with Graham Dumpleton’s “Web Server Bottlenecks And Performance Tuning” talk last night at the local Django/Python meetup and it was quite good. I’m expecting big things this PyCon!

My Schedule

Below is my tentative schedule after flipping through the schedule. Not to be a buzz kill, but this isn’t SXSW, I’m ready to schedule and get as much learning as possible!

For Friday, having Paul Graham keynote should be quite interesting. After that, I’m planning on mostly staying on Track 4 for heavy low-level Python and then mixing it up.

• 10:50AM - Introduction to Metaclasses
• 11:30AM - The Art of Subclassing
• 12:10PM - Stop Writing Classes
• 1:45PM - The Magic of Metaprogramming
• 2:40PM - Interfaces and Python
• 3:20PM - Make Sure Your Programs Cras
• 5:20PM - Practicing Continuous Deployment

For Saturday, it’s a better mix of topics, which seem more web related. I’m totally happy with that!

• 10:25AM - What you need to know about datetimes
• 11:05AM - Django Form Processing Deep Dive
• 11:45AM - Pragmatic Unicode, or, How do I stop the pain?
• 1:20PM - Coroutines, event loops, and the history of Python generators
• 2:15PM - RESTful APIs With Tastypie
• 2:55PM - Using fabric to standardize the development process

By Sunday, I think I will be happy to still be standing.

What I’m Looking To Takeaway

I’m really looking forward to chatting with main Python people to get thoughts on Python3 and packaging.

I have yet to fully port any of my libraries to Python3, but I have a few branches started.. I’m always curious for more people opinions on what’s good and bad with Python3.

For packaging, I would love to see what I can do to improve things or see what people are working on with packaging. It seems like everything with packaging has caveats and is not as nice as RubyGems or CPAN and I want to fix that.

If you read my blog or follow me on twitter, send me a message, I’d love to meetup!