PyCon stuff & PSF core grant, day 10

I am going to start this post with me pimping PyCon 2011. To start, early-bird registration is on until January 25th, so make sure to register ASAP. I would not procrastinate as attendance is capped at 1,500 and there are already about 50% more registrations now than there were last year when attendance hit 1,200. There is absolutely no reason to think we will not hit the cap this year and have to turn people away because they did not register soon enough.

Also don't forget to register for any tutorials you want to attend now rather than later. The most popular ones are already either full or practically there and this always leads to a cascading effect where other tutorials continue to fill up. So once again, don't procrastinate and register ASAP for tutorials.

As usual, there are some new things being tried out at PyCon this year. The latest one to be announced is Startup Row. Basically a bunch of startups are going to be highlighting there use of Python. Should be interesting as startups typically push Python pretty hard and end up developing very cool technology stacks.

And finally, a tradition amongst Python bloggers who attend PyCon is to list the five talks you are looking forward to the most. As usual that's a bloody hard list to make; I started with 30 tabs filled with talks I want to attend! But here are five I do plan to attend:

1. Through the Side Channel: Timing and Implementation Attacks in Python
2. Packaging, from Distutils to Distutils2
3. Using Python 3 to Build a Cloud Computing Service for my Superboard II
4. Writing great documentation
5. Why is Python slow and how PyPy can help?

There is also the Python VMs panel that I organized, but I figured I can't list that as a talk I want to attend since that seems a bit presumptuous. =)

In case my enthusiasm for PyCon in general and this year in particular is not coming through my prose, I'm excited! I have been attending PyCon since its founding in 2003 and have always had such a fantastic time that I leave the conference looking forward to the next one.

Now that I have raved about PyCon, I can talk about what the heck I did yesterday for the PSF.

After the usual fixes I went through and cleaned up the Misc directory. There was outdated stuff in there along with files that belonged more in the devguide than there; previously there just wasn't a good place to put stuff like a README on how to get Emacs set up. So I went through and pruned the directory down.

While I have been working on the devguide I had a copy of the dev FAQ that I was chopping up to keep track of what I needed to cover. Some people were worried I was going to cut out all of the questions from the FAQ concerning svn or SSH; people liked that I had bothered to answer common tool questions there over the years so that they didn't have to try to search for a solution. So I stripped out anything that would be repetitive so its more of a tools FAQ.

Because I am in the home stretch I dropped some todo items and them into issues. They revolve around creating some code which can lead to tasks for people to help with in the future.

I also went through the old dev docs and made sure I was not about to lose any critical links.