Pycon 2012 pyweb

With some generosity from Cars.com thanks to Michael Ryabushkin, a contribution of space from PyCon thanks to Jesse Noller, and some prompting by Doug Hellmann, if we can get some attendance, we'll able to have a "Web Development Summit" at PyCon in Santa Clara this year. It will take place on one of the two "tutorial days" before the conference. It will not compete with the language summit (that will be on a different day).

The original idea for this took shape as a Google+ post:

""" It's hard not to notice that the Python Web-SIG mail list is very low-traffic; surprising given how much Python is used in the web world. It may be that no one likes to participate unless there's a contentious issue, or it might be due to balkanization in the Python web community. Communicating over the web is pretty impersonal and just kind of hard in general; it's much easier to stick with what you know than to try new things and become a member of a different community.

PyCon is great, but it tends to be so large that folks tend to clump into their own brand-oriented packs without taking the opportunity to talk much with people from the other packs. Rounding the wagons is also usually kind of necessary, because for some, PyCon acts as a summit where communities sort of get together once a year anyway, and there's often not enough bandwidth for folks to really talk to people they don't already know pretty well.

What'd be really cool is to have a little miniconference of just the folks who produce Web-oriented Python software (frameworks, applications, libraries). An attendance of fewer than maybe 50 would be great, with good representation from members of the major web frameworks, apps, and libraries.

In particular, at such a minconference, I think it would be really fun and useful to get together and do the following things:

• Present your worst software design decision, and its impact. How would you do it differently today?

• Present your best software design decisions, and their impacts.

• Present your findings while building an application in a system that you generally don't use "in anger".

• Present a talk on some obscure corner of your system that you find really cool, but that you can't talk about in polite company.

• State-of/future-of sorts of talks about particular frameworks, applications, libraries.

• Participate in a panel about a topic (e.g. "reusable applications", "deployment"). """

It would be great to get some of the "core committer" type folks from the Python web community involved in the summit. That's why you're receiving this email. It's my intent to mail at least one contributor from each of the following communities: Django, Web2Py, Zope 2, Grok, Bluebream.Zope 3, Plone, Turbogears, Twisted, WebCore, Flask, Bobo, Cherrypy, Webob, GAE, web.py, WSGI, mod_wsgi (if there are any major communities you believe I've missed in this list, please let me know).

Without a clear "BDFL of the web", I suspect this day needs a bit more structure than the Python "language summit", which seems pretty free-wheeling and loose; without some structure we'll end up wondering why we're there. But it's also true that the hallway track is more important than the actual formal content. So, with those things in mind, I propose a schedule something like the below.

9:00 - 9:15 Introduction

9:15 - 9:45 Keynote

9:45 - 10:30 Creating a Better Deployment Story (panel). Topic: Deploy your web app easy-peasy style.

10:45 - 11:30 Porting to Python 3 (panel). Topic: best practices, things to avoid, what has been ported.

11:45 - 12:30 Factoring Code for Reuse (panel). Topic: reusable libraries, apps, plugins, etc.

12:30 - 1:30 lunch

1:30 - 2:30 State-Of <insert your framework/app/library here> Multi-Talk (10 minutes on your stuff, max of 6 participants)

2:45 - 3:30 Promoting Python for Web Use (panel)

3:45 - 5:15 Lightning talks (5 minutes apiece)

Better suggestions for structure and/or content are welcome, this is just my own proposal.

I know this is pretty last-minute, and you may have already made travel plans that might preclude it, but please consider attending. I think it'll be a good opportunity to give the various groups in the Python web space a chance to communicate in meatspace. If you're amenable to it, I'd love to get your committment to do one (or a few) of the following:

• Participate in one of the panels.

• Prepare a ten-minute state-of talk.

• Volunteer to moderate one of the panels.

• Prepare a lightning talk (suggestions: good and bad design decisions in your project, cool corner areas of your project).