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:

See the presenters you want to see

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!

Learn about the tools that you want to use

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.

Heard enough?

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, 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)

See you in January, Ballarat!

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.

 
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:

• Doing a cross-city trek to a Best Buy to purchase some Nexus S phones for friends back home.
• Getting an Uber cab to pick us up from this Best Buy (LOL!). Actually, Ubers are pretty damn cool — it’s a mobile app used to hire private town cars (think private drivers for expensive hotels). The cars are all Lincolns (high-end sedans), and the service is incredibly convenient.

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.

• Open Programming Miniconf
• FOSS in Research & Student Innovation Miniconf

Unfortunately, you’ll also notice that both Miniconfs lack a complete schedule at this point in time. If you have a talk that would be of interest to either miniconf, we’d love it if you could submit a proposal as soon as possible so that we can publish our completed schedules! The CFPs for each miniconf are available from:

• Open Programming Miniconf
• FOSS in Research & Student Innovation Miniconf

I look forward to seeing you at either of these miniconfs, presenting or otherwise!

Nothing in particular, but I do have a couple of counts I could make:

• Various occasions in High School computing classes where I found myself correcting my teacher.
• Any time when someone uses Comic Sans when they should know better.
• Seeing Jethro’s selection of the word ‘cringeworthy’. (:D)
• The Oracle Sales guy at LCA2008, giving the same speech about their RHEL support programme on no fewer than 3 occasions, all of which I happened to make it to. Hrnnngh.

I’m sure I could come up with more if pressed, but right now I’m not! See you at the next post!

Android.

I like Android for a couple of reasons. The first is that it slots into the Google Apps ecosystem that I built much of my online life around prior to getting an Android phone — an excellent Gmail app for starters, but also my use of calendaring has improved significantly since getting my ADP1.

The second is that it’s Open Source. This means that (provided you have a suitable handset), it’s possible to obtain or write your own custom firmware which lets the phone do more than what its manufacturer intended. This, for me at least means running later versions of Android well past the support of the manufacturer.