Paris Buttfield-Addison and I co-presented a talk at Linux.conf.au in Ballarat recently. The topic was on designing mobile apps that don’t suck on Android. The talk was pretty well received, the audience attentive and engaged (as evidenced by the fact that they heckled), and it was probably one of the better talks that Paris and I have co-presented.
The video of the talk is available as an ogv movie file, alternatively, the YouTube version is embedded below.
In case you missed the news, PyCon Australia is being held on August 18th and 19th in Hobart, Tasmania. Like the first two PyCon Australia conferences, 2012 hopes to be full of presentations, tutorials and panel sessions from experts and core developers of the Python programming language, as well as the Python libraries and frameworks that you rely on for your work.
It’s time for us to start shaping the conference programme for 2012, and we need your help. We want to know what topics you want to see covered at PyCon Australia, or which presenters you think can help make our conference perfect for you.
If you’re already convinced, pop over to http://tinyurl.com/pyconau2012-cft and fill out our Call for Topics form. If not, read on!
Oh, still reading? Let see…
PyCon Australia is running a Call for Topics. This is like the reverse of a traditional Call for Proposals: instead of proposing a presentation, you can propose a topic that you’d like to see a presentation on at the conference, or possibly a presenter that you really want to see present. PyCon US have been doing this for a long time, it helps ensure that their conference attracts the best possible presenters. There’s a couple of reasons why you should help us out:
We’re planning on putting out our usual call for proposals in February 2012, but we need to make sure that the best possible presenters submit proposals to PyCon Australia. Our delegates, like you, want to enhance their skills in Python with every session that they attend. Our CfP can’t reach everyone, and even then not everyone who sees the CfP will think that they’re good enough to present at a conference — getting an invitation to present can be a pretty good motivator!
One great reason to come to a Python conference is to increase your skillset in the tools and frameworks that you use in your day-to-day work. Perhaps there’s a new library that you’re considering using? Nominating it as a presentation topic for PyCon Australia will increase the chances it being covered in the conference. If you don’t know of an expert in the field, don’t worry. We can find one.
Great! We can’t want to hear your suggestions. Just head over to our call for Topics form, and send in your ideas. Every idea can help make this conference perfect for you.
So one thing I forgot to mention on this blog is that I’ve taken over the reins of PyCon Australia for the 2012 and 2013 conferences. After spending two formative years in Sydney, under the direction of Tim Ansell, Richard Jones et al., we’re taking the conference south to Hobart, Tasmania. We’ve got a great team, consisting of myself, Joshua Hesketh and Matthew D’Orazio, and our papers committee is being led up once again by Richard Jones.
So, what can you look forward to? Well, here’s what we know so far.
We’re holding PyCon Australia around the weekend of August 18 and 19 2012. Our venue is the Wrest Point Convention centre in Sandy Bay. We’re really excited about our choice of venue — as well as offering us perfectly-sized rooms for our conference, the wide variety of spaces in the complex allow us to bring all of the traditional PyCon Australia events — CodeWars, the sprints and the conference itself — under the same roof for the first time.
Wrest Point is situated on the shoreline of the River Derwent, and this not only admits excellent views from the conference venue, but will also enable us to run some truly memorable social events, including the conference dinner, which we hope to share more details about shortly.
Our venue also lets us offer accommodation across a very wide range of budgets (starting around $124/room/night) to our delegates — this is not just a nominated conference hotel, it’s in the same building complex as the conference venue. This means that delegates can stay on-site for the entirety of the conference. We think this will prove very popular, especially amongst delegates sticking around for the conference sprints.
For students and those travelling on a budget — we plan on keeping the conference affordable: there’ll still be heavily discounted student tickets, and we’ll announce budget accommodation options when registration opens.
Finally, you might be wondering how you can help make PyCon Australia the perfect conference for you? Well, in the coming week, we’ll be opening a Call for Topics. This is an opportunity for you, as a potential PyCon Australia delegate, to nominate both topics and presenters that you’d like to see at the conference. By nominating presentations, you can help ensure that PyCon Australia can help you enhance your skills and increase your knowledge of Python.
Of course, if you have something that you could present at PyCon Australia, we’d love to hear from you as well. We’ll be opening a traditional call for presentations during February.
So, that’s it for now. I’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on our progress as we seek to put on the best Python Conference that Australia can offer. If you’ve got something to ask, feel free to drop a comment, either here, on Twitter, or on our Google+ page — we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible!
(Photos: “Wrest Point” by JJ Harrison, CC-BY-SA; “View of Hobart CBD” by Aaroncrick, CC-BY-SA)
Google Reader’s just announced that they’re turning off reader sharing progressively from today. I wrote the following in my share stream a few moments ago, and realised that this was massively counterproductive — it will probably disappear in a few hours anyway.
So on the off chance that you subscribe to my feed and haven’t read this:
Hey all,
Reader sharing starts dying today. I’m pretty sad about that, I’ve loved reading the things all of you have shared over the past few years — I’ve discovered new things, built up new interests, learnt a lot and have had a lot of fun doing it. I’m going to miss reading what you have.
So what am I going to do? Well, I’ll be seeing if the ‘plus’ features actually replicate reader sharing in any useful form. Who knows, it might actually be a useful feature.
If not, we’ll see what manner of useful *external* sharing appears (share by e-mail looks particularly useful) — shared feeds don’t seem too hard to re-implement, and we could theoretically have something useful up and running over a weekend. I’m seriously considering doing this. Let me know if you’re interested!
So yeah, if you’re not already following me on twitter, that’s probably the most useful place to find me: I’m @chrisjrn. My blog is at http://chris.neugebauer.id.au. Keep in touch! I still want to read your stuff!
Thank you, and goodbye!
–Chris
Although I did not know the man, the contributions of Dennis Ritchie have have a profound effect upon my life and the community with which I associate. I interact with systems inspired by the first versions of UNIX, and write code in languages that owe their design principles to C, almost on an daily basis.
Dennis Ritchie was a giant on whose shoulders many of those in technology, including myself, can feel proud to stand on.
TL;DR — submit a proposal at http://tinyurl.com/opm2012-proposal
before the first round closes on Friday 7 October.
I’m pleased to announce that The Open Programming Miniconf, a fixture for application developers attending Linux.conf.au since 2010 is returning as part of Linux.conf.au 2012, to be held in January at the University of Ballarat. The miniconf has been an opportunity for presenters of all experience levels to share their experiences in in application development using free and open source development tools.
The Open Programming Miniconf for 2012 invites 25-minute presentations on topics relating to the development of excellent Free and Open Source Software applications. In particular, the Miniconf invites presentations that focus on sharing techniques, best practices and values which are applicable to developers of all Open Source programming languages.
In the past, topics have included:
Past programmes can be found at http://lca2011.linux.org.au/programme/schedule/monday and http://www.lca2010.org.nz/wiki/Miniconfs/Open_Programming_Languages
To submit a proposal, visit http://tinyurl.com/opm2012-proposal and fill out the form as required. The CFP will remain open indefinitely, but the first round of acceptances will not be sent until Friday 7 October 2011.
OPM2012 is part of Linux.conf.au 2012, being held at the University of Ballarat on Monday, 16 January 2012. Further enquiries can be directed to Christopher Neugebauer via e-mail ( chris+opm2012@neugebauer.id.au ) or via twitter (@chrisjrn).
I really like this shot — looking up Pine Street in San Francisco, with a B&W conversion done by punching a bunch of buttons in *cough*iphoto*cough.
I’ve been told it makes a good background screen for a certain 2:3-ratio mobile device, too.
Update: actually identified the street that the photo is of.
… When you’re completely distracted by all manner of things! So, as promised, here are a bunch of pretty photos of the things that I’ve done whilst here:
Wandered around San Francisco, looking at the awesome architecture…
Had fantastic coffee, brewed with SCIENCE^w SIPHONS! (Thanks to @bluebottlemint for that…)
Caught the Caltrain between San Francisco and Mountain View far too many times.
Visited clichéd tourist attractions (actually, the bridge is pretty spectacular, and I’m very glad I went to have a look at it!)…
Other things not featuring photos:
Since then I’ve been based in the lovely city of Mountain View, which appears to be the epicentre of much of the tech industry — it’s home to such notable companies as Mozilla and Google, and the coffee shops are full to the brim with people sporting laptops… and there’s ubiquitous free wireless internet provided thanks to Google. I’m spending a lot of my time at Red Rock Coffee, who I’m eternally grateful for, as they helped me to discover that the variety of espresso drink known as “Caffe Latte” in Australia is known as “Cappucino” over here [1]. They have an OK rotation of single origin espressi here, though they taste a bit over-roasted at times… it beats the crap out of everything else in the area though…
Downtown Mountain View, including Red Rock (on the right of the shot).
So that’s the short wrap-up of what I’ve been doing of lately. Hopefully I’ll have some more to report on in the next week or so. Or earlier. I’ve no idea.
Oh, and thanks to Paris Buttfield-Addison for showing me around the area, and also to Jon Manning, who occasionally emerged whenever Paris would let him 
Until the next post,
–Chris
[1] Ordering a “Latte” here appears to get you three weak flat whites served in a bucket.
And once again in the flurry of action that occurs during and after LCA, I have completely neglected to update my blog.
So since then, I’ve been doing various bits of development work for my benevolent mad scientist overlords at Secret Lab; this Thursday I’m off to the San Francisco Bay area to do three weeks of onsite work with my next client, which should be thoroughly enthralling.
I suspect the most reliable place to find any evidence whatsoever of my recent activity will be my Flickr stream, though I may take Jethro Carr’s lead and just post regular blogs with lots of pictures every other day (at least it *looks* like he’s had regular activity…).
Until the next post, whenever that may be!
–Chris
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