Thursday, September 09, 2010

Funding for PyCon PL'10

The PSF Board has offered a grant of $750 to the organizers of the PyCon Poland 2010 conference.

Conference Details

PyCon Poland 2010 will take place from October 8 to 10, which is a little earlier than the previous conference. The conference will be held at the Centre for Leisure-Training "Gwarek" in Ustron Jaszowiec in Cieszyn Silesia, the same location as last year.

The conference website mentions a planned hot grill, barbecue on Saturday 9th, and also names the possibility to burn off those calories in the gym or sauna.

Presentation topics include programming Python and Ajax, optimization and profiling, physics, math, administrative tasks, GPU programming, and more.

See the conference website web site for more details about the conference.

Monday, September 06, 2010

New member election

During July the members of the Python Software Foundation elected four new nominated members and one sponsor member to the foundation.

New Nominated Members

Nominated members are individuals or entities who have demonstrated a commitment to the Python language and community. They are nominated and elected by existing members of the foundation.

Noah Gift

Noah is the co-author of Python for Unix and Linux System Administration by O'Reilly, and also a speaker, consultant and community leader. He is a regular contributor to IBM Developerworks, RedHat Magazine, O'Reilly, MacTech and Manning.

He had spent a lot of time making the movie industry aware of Python's capabilities and attractions, especially among animation studios. Learn more about Noah on his website

Laurens Van Houtven

Laurens is one of the major voices on the #python Freenode's channel. Known by the nick of lvh, he spends countless hours helping people that want to learn more about Python or that have some doubts about code they are working on.

Follow Laurens on Twitter @lvh_

Terry Peppers

Terry is one of the co-moderators of the Testing-in-Python mailing-list and one of the organizers of the related BoF sessions at the past two PyCons. Apart from that, he has been active in the organizational work and proposal reviews on the PyCon Program Committee.

Check out Terry's blog.

Stephen Thorne

Co-maintaner of the #python channel on Freenode, Stephen has been one of the most active Python advocates in Australia. He has been involved with the local Open Source community, directed OS Developers' Conference and assisted with the Linux.Conf.Au.

He also organizes meetings of the Brisbane Python User Group, BrisPy,
held at the NetboxBlue for the locals that want to attend. Get a glimpse into Stephen's activities via his blog.

New Sponsor Member

In addition to the nominated members, a new sponsor member, Exoweb, was approved. Sponsor members are also nominated and voted by the PSF's current members, but they have to pay a yearly fee to the Foundation.

Exoweb has been pro-active in helping the PSF to ensure the python.cn domain and Facebook page are properly managed. Also, the company hosts the Chinese Python bulletin-board and is well known among the Asia-Pacific Python community. Internally, Exoweb takes advantage of Python capabilities on various systems for sys-admin scripting and uses Django and Twisted in their product pipeline. The main reasons they adopted Python are the ease of use, excellent performance, and development optimizations.

PSF Membership

The FAQ contains more information about membership in the Python Software Foundation.