[Announce] 5th Intl Python Conference in Dallas, Feb 23-25, 2007

[Jeff Rush]

Greetings.  As co-chair for the upcoming volunteer-run conference in the
Dallas (Addison) Texas USA area, I would like to extend an invitation to the 
Linuxchix community.

The event is the fifth international Python Conference, being held Feb 23-25,
2007 at the Marriott-Quorum in Addison.

The conference draws approximately 400-500 attendees from diverse backgrounds
such as scientists from national and medical labs, college/K-12 educators, web
engineers and the myriad of IT developers and programming hobbyists.  Those
new to the Python language are welcome, and we're offering a half-day "Python
101" tutorial on the day before the conference, Thursday Feb 22 to help you
get up to speed and better enjoy the rest of the conference.

Out of the 66 talks offered, a few that might especially appeal to Linuxchix 
members are:

  - Packaging Python apps for Linux Distributions
  - Web Frameworks Panel
  - Test Automation for a Complex System: Technology and Social Aspects
  - Interactive Parallel and Distributed Computing with IPython
  - Pybots: Testing Python Projects in Real Time
  - pyweek: making games in 7 days
  - Easy Creation of Interactive Tutorials
  - How I Wrote a Python App and Got $5 Million
  - Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites
  - Software Development with Trac
  - twill, scotch, and figleaf -- tools for testing
  - Testing Tools Panel
  - The Wonderful World of Widgets for the Web
  - Studying Internet Censorship: a Python case study
  - Good-bye Hello World: Rethinking Teaching with Python
  - Visual Python in a Computational Physics Course
  - Weaving Together Women and IT

Being run by the Python community as a non-profit event, the conference
strives to be inexpensive, with registration being only $260, with a further
discount for students.  On the day before the conference we are running a full
day of classroom tutorials (extra charge per class) and then after the
conference is a free four-days of sprints, which are informal gatherings of
programmers to work together in coding on various projects.  Sprints are
excellent opportunities to do agile pair-programming side-by-side with
experienced programmers and make new friends.

Other activities are lightning talks, which are 5-minute presentations to show
off a cool technology or spread the word about a project, open space talks,
which are spontaneous gatherings around a topic and, new this year, a Python
Lab where experienced and novice programmers will work together to solve
challenging problems and then present their solutions.

The conference is also running four keynote talks by leaders in the
programming field, with a special focus on education this year:

   "The Power of Dangerous Ideas: Python and One Laptop per Child"
      by Ivan Krstic, senior member of the One Laptop per Child project

   "Premise: eLearning does not Belong in Public Schools"
      by Adele Goldberg, of SmallTalk fame

   "Python 3000"
      by Guido van Rossum, creator of Python

   "The Importance of Programming Literacy"
      by Robert M. "r0ml" Lefkowitz, a frequent speaker at O'Reilly conferences

I believe you will find the conference educational and enjoyable.  More
information about the conference along with the full schedule of presentations
with abstracts, is available online:

   http://us.pycon.org/

Thanks for any help you can give in spreading the word,

Jeff Rush
Co-Chair PyCon 2007