We need more PyCon US 2013 submissions | Hacker News Reader

We need more PyCon US 2013 submissions

pydanny.com

117 pointspydanny43 comments

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Who still uses Python you ask?

Easy!

This Year: https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/

Last Year: https://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors/

And I've got about 14 more pending for 2013 :)

There's some big names there. I know there are more. Almost every company listed there is hiring there, both on the site and at the on site jobs fair:

https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/prospectus/

Join us.

"Almost every company listed there is hiring there, both on the site and at the on site jobs fair"

It's true. That's how I got my job at (2013 Gold sponsor) TrueCar, back in 2011. It's a great event to attend, just to be around that many like-minded folks.

I was actually on "Startup Row" and wandered around a bit during talks when the exhibit hall was empty and was asked if I'd like to work two blocks from the beach. The line worked.

Speaking of Startup Row, do you have plans to run that again this year? It was great to see all the young companies using Python.

As someone who's never given a speech at a conference before, but is very interested in sharing his newfound knowledge and love of Python, is there anywhere people would recommend reading up on the form or content of such a proposal?

Thanks!

The PyCon site has a page of advice that links to sample proposals and relevant blog entries: https://us.pycon.org/2013/speaking/proposal_advice/

This is a much better answer than mine above :)

Either way, thanks to both of you. I appreciate the guidance as a relatively new member of the community.

And with any luck, you'll see me at PyCon this spring!

I'll echo Simon - just submit a short proposal (I've posted 3 :-). New speakers are encouraged as they help the community to grow. Consider adding a Poster Proposal as a backup so you could still talk about your subject even if you don't get a speaking slot. The Poster sessions last year were huge and very good.

You might be over-thinking things a bit... depending on the conference, a talk proposal often only needs to be a couple of paragraphs. You don't need to have planned the talk out in detail - just an explanation of what it is you intend to talk about and some background on your experience with the topic.

PyCon is still my favorite conference by a long shot. I did think that 2012 felt like it was losing some of the community vibe, with evenings dominated by big sponsor events instead of BoF sessions, but in a way I guess that's a good problem to have.

I felt the same way for 2012

Some people want to talk but aren't sure what to talk about, so what were your favorite topics from last year? Some of mine were:

* Sketching a Better Product

* Building a Robot that Can Play Angry Birds on a Smartphone

* RESTful APIs With Tastypie

* Documenting Your Project With Sphinx

How many is enough? Is it encouraged to spam with many presentations to see if any stick? I submitted one tutorial, three talks...

I just watched Robert Hancock's talk on coroutines [0]. More of that or him would be awesome!

[0] http://lanyrd.com/2011/pygotham/shppw

BTW, anybody interested in python coroutines should go read the greenlet source. It's pretty readable, well commented, and is the best way to get your head around what's happening to the stack when you do a coroutine switch.

https://github.com/python-greenlet/greenlet/blob/master/gree...

Gosh, it seems like Pycon 2012 was just yesterday. I considered contributing to PyCon 2013 but time just flies.

Python is dead.

If a language is not making the front-pages of /r/programming and Hacker News much it does not mean that it is dead. Maybe just not as "hip" or even "hyped" as it used to be.

Python makes the front page here almost every day. I think this thread is being trolled.

Yes, by 2 accounts created about 20 minutes ago for the purpose. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=leopy and https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=darmon

Might be time to put a 24 hour wait period on allowing comments. You know, to let them think about what it is they're about to post.

In that case, make it a year?

Why not ten years?

trollolololol

Long live Python.

Who still uses Python?

Google, NASA, Intel, AMD, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Canonical, Red Hat, Amazon, Netflix, and thousands upon thousands more.

Facebook as well.

I'm sure Python is used prevalently at Facebook, but if you search their career page for 'Python' you get zero results.

https://www.facebook.com/careers/search?q=python&locatio...

If you search for 'PHP' you get goose eggs too. Does anyone know if language names are intentionally filtered out of career searches at Facebook? 'GIS' and 'Logistics' work as search terms.

I believe our mentality is good engineers want interesting problems to solve and can learn any language. We're interested in what you've done, not the language can do it in.

(Work at Facebook, but not on this system, and know nothing about it.)

It looks like the search matches on job title/position, and not content. That does seem a bit unexpected.

In general, Facebook does not place much emphasis on programming languages that people know before they start at the job, and part of the Bootcamp process includes the expectation that people will be learning at least one language they don't know (unless they already know C++, Java, PHP, and Python at a production-code-writing-ability, and then they'll have to learn our libraries anyway).

We obviously discuss the languages we use and what we use them for during the hiring process so that people know what they're getting themselves into - people might be looking for something familiar to ease themselves into it, or they might be looking to explore a new language when they start.

(Yes, we use Python for a bunch of stuff. And I know we had a few people working on talk abstracts for PyCon to try meet the deadline that explore a few ways we use it.)

Great answer. Thanks. Hopefully I'll get to see some of those talks at Pycon.

I first learned Python (which I use for web-related functions) from an engineer at Seagate who uses it everyday in failure analysis of drives (they use something like Python 2.2 still). That's something I always loved about Python -- it can be used for anything. It may not always be the "best" language for the job, but you can always "get it running" in Python.

That's why I love Python.

Yeah. but any companies whose names I might actually recognize?

thought not, pythons is clearly dead....

</sarcasm>

I'm many companies... At least I know many researchers who us it to build small prototypes and rapidly demonstrate a proof of concept.

When I was applying for a job a large majority of the companies were looking primarily for python developers. Google uses python and that alone is probably enough to never need to ask the parent's question.

I agree about many companies using Python, but I've heard from former Googlers that most of their code is written in Java or C++.

Depends a lot on what department you're in. There are a lot of Pythoners at Google.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/2561008

Yeah... lets not forget that Guido van Rossum himself is employed by Google (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum).

A lot of things that are built on Django probably use Python: Disqus, Pintrest, Instagram, Fitocracy, some Mozilla stuff, and a lot of news sites (just to name a few).

Errr ... "a lot of"? Django is a Python web framework. All the things built on Django use Python.

To be fair... I learned python by starting with django. I didn't realize I didn't know anything about python until I switched.

I still use python a lot. Out of curiosity then what are the popular languages now?

Oberon, Squeak and Forth.

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