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Unofficial Women's Lunch at EuroPython 2012

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Unofficial Women's Lunch at EuroPython 2012

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Women attendees! Come join the unofficial Women's Lunch for an opportunity to chat with your fellow female Pythonistas over great pizza.

We invite any female (and anyone who identifies as a female) conference-goer to lunch at an informal, friendly meet & greet to form connections, share Python programming stories, and enjoy the Italian summer.

When? Tuesday, July 4th, 2012

Meet your host Lynn at the registration desk at 13:00, she will distribute the lunch coupons; lunch will be at the pizzeria Outside Bistrot just aside the conference hotel.

 

Hosted by:

Lynn Root, speaker, Increasing Women Engagement in the Python Community

Graciously assisted by:

EuroPython conference organizers

Help Desk: call for runners

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Help Desk: call for runners

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The Help Desk is thought to be run by EP attendees for EP attendees, so to encourage information exchange and networking during the conference.

We're in the defining phase of Help Desks, and we're looking for people interested in running one; here are some good reasons to run a help desk at EuroPython:

• Self-promotion: by offering support on your favorite technology, you get a chance to spread word about your skills. You can distribute advertising material about your company or activity while you're running the help desk, and contacts with people you support can later turn into contracts.
• Improve your skills: by discussing concrete problems with help desk attendees, you get to know interesting use cases for a technology and are encouraged to wrap your head around a problem to propose a solution, which might later prove itself useful in your own activity as well;
• Secret reward: the EuroPython organization board has prepared a secret reward for each Help Desk runner...

Help Desk runners will be available at the designated desk for four hours, the duration of a Help Desk session. Each session is divided in 8 half an hour slots. Attendees will be able to book their slot for free on the EP website, so help desk runners will have a precise schedule of who's coming when at the time their session starts.

Please drop us a line at helpdesk_application@pycon.it stating your technology of interest; we'll be in touch very soon.

PyEvents Announced!

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PyEvents Announced!

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PyBirra is a goliardic time in the pubs of downtown Florence during which you can drink, chat and know each other Python programmers.

The event is hosted by one of the oldest pubs in Florence:

James Joyce Pub

• Lungarno Benvenuto Cellini, 1
• 50125 Firenze
• Tel: 055 6580856

Important: bring your EuroPython's badge, you will have any drinks at a low fixed cost!

PyFiorentina

As explained in the events page, PyFiorentina is a dinner that will take place Wednesday, July 4th to give all our visitors the opportunity to taste the legendary Bistecca alla Fiorentina!

We have arranged a special menu with a fixed price of €37 with the restaurant (Trattoria ZaZa). Have a look:

First courses:

• Tris di minestre: ribollita, pappa al pomodoro, passato di fagioli con farro(Trio of soups: stewed legumes, tomato soup, bean and barley soup)
• Tagliatelle ai funghi porcini(Tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms)
• Ravioli strascicati(Ravioli with rosée sauce)
• Fettuccine alla crema di tartufo(Fettuccine with truffle cream sauce)
• Penne alla Boccalona(Pasta with a special sauce from the chef)

Main courses:

• Tagliata di manzo alla brace con rucola e salsina ZàZà(Grilled steak with rocket/arugula and special ZàZà sauce)
• Tagliata di manzo alla brace con rucola e crema di tartufo fatta in casa(Grilled steak with rocket/arugula and home-made truffle cream sauce)
• Tagliata di manzo alla brace con rucola e scaglie di Grana(Grilled steak with rocket/arugula and Grana Padano)
• Coniglio ripieno al forno con spinaci saltati aglio e olio(Oven-roasted stuffed rabbit with sauteed spinach with oil and garlic)
• Arista di Cinta al forno con fagioli all'uccelletto(Oven-roasted pork loin and Italian white beans with tomato)
• Bistecca alla fiorentina, min. 3 persone(One T-Bone steak, minimum serving 3 people)

Desserts:

• Crema di mascarpone(Mascarpone cream)
• Tiramisù al caffè(Tiramisu)
• Torta di mele alla ZàZà - ricetta segreta(ZàZà apple cake - secret recipe)
• Vin Santo con Cantucci fatti in casa(Sweet wine with home-made anise-flavored almond biscuits)
• Torta al cioccolato alla ZàZà(ZàZà chocolate cake)

Drinks

• Bottle Water
• House Red Wine

How to join PyFiorentina

Although the restaurant is fully available to us, places are also limited to 220, and reservation is mandatory. To book your seats in advance, you need to buy a voucher for the full amount of €37 through this website (basically paying the whole dinner in advance). We will then give you the physical voucher once you register at EuroPython, and you will need to present the voucher at the restaurant as a proof of payment.

Please notice that it is still possible to order some extras by having a look to the full menu of the restaurant. For instance, a true meat lover might want to skip the first courses and go for a whole T-Bone Steak to eat by himself; in this case, you will need to pay the difference from the €37 voucher directly at the counter.

Looking forward to your feedback ... Keep a light lunch!

The map show both places in yellow placeholders, in order to simplify the gathering.

Special grant for students and unemployed

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Special grant for students and unemployed

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This grant is sponsored partly by the Python Italia Association, and partly by the generous contribution of many speakers who are renouncing to the ticket discount they were offered.

The grant includes a free ticket for the conference (with access to buffets) and accommodation in two triple rooms for the whole conference week.

The grant is open to everybody, even people that have already bought a ticket (in which case we would proceed to a refund).

Students

• Must be 30 years old or less (on 1st January 2012).
• Must be currently registered to a school, college, or university-level institute.

Unemployed programmers

• Any age is allowed.
• Must not be a student.
• Must be actively seeking for a new job as a computer programmer.

Application

Application is open until June 1st.

If you think you qualify for this grant, please send an e-mail to info@pycon.it, put the tag "[GRANT]" in the subject, and write down a motivational letter covering the follow points:

• Short introduction of yourself, your current study/job status
• Your current experience with Python (if any)
• Why you would like to join EuroPython
• Why you have not bought a ticket yet
• Which other conference you attended to in the past few years (if any).

All personal information contained in the motivational letter will be kept strictly private.

Winners of the grant will be selected on June 3rd.

Google Diversity Grant

Remember that Google is offering a diversity grant reserved for female computer scientists. Applications are open until June 1st! (NOTE: Google's website currently says May 15th as a deadline, but it's been extended and will be fixed soon)

Partner Program 2012 released!

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Partner Program 2012 released!

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We've prepared a specific page dedicated to the program with guided tours and visits to museums at cheap rates!

The Program is open to everybody, whether you have bought a ticket to the conference, or not. Conference delegates can of course buy tickets for the partner program for their partner/family/friends, and join themselves if they want to escape from the conference to sightsee Florence and the Tuscany countryside.

The Program

You will find two different kind of events in the program: Leisure & Art

Leisure events include a nice Vespa tour in Florence, some special showcooking events presented by Mediterraneo's Chef and will teach you wonderful things about Tuscany food and wines, leading you from a guided tasting of wines in one of the oldest winery of Florence.

Art events are dedicated to Florence as "art city", taking you to visit the Uffizi, the Duomo, Michelangelo's works, the districts of Oltrarno and the craftsmen in Florence.

Booking Info

All tours are organized by a tour operator; the Python Italia association does not have any margin on the tickets, and is just organizing and coordinating the program to improve your staying in Florence.

After you have bought one or more tickets, you will be able to fill in the name of the exact person that will be attending the tour. Don't forget to do it!

We really hope that you will enjoy the program and your staying in Florence!

Early bird ends today!

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Early bird ends today!

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The end of Early Bird is today, May 2nd, 23:59:59 CEST. You can forward this post to anyone you feel might be interested, as a reminder not to lose the chance of registering while still on Early Bird reduced fares. EuroPython 2012 schedule will feature an amazing lineup of:

• Keynotes: some of the most influential individuals in the Python world will come and give their vision;
• Talks: more than 120 high-level technical talks, in 5 parallel tracks;
• Trainings: in-depth four-hours long practical sessions, in 2 parallel tracks - delivered by trainers and professionals, one training is worth alone the Early Bird ticket price;
• Posters: for the first time at EuroPython, a Poster Session will be held!
• Events: who said that conference activities close at 7:30PM? Like during last year, expect nerd entertainment and networking chances during the EP evenings;
• Sprints: take the chance to learn and contribute to your favourite project hacking session during the weekend sprints.

Don't worry about your other half getting bored; they can join our Partner Program and have the chance to visit the old city centre and visit museums of Florence at reduced rates. Get the chance and register now!

Early Bird will end in 3 days!

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Early Bird will end in 3 days!

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The end of Early Bird is on May 2nd, 23:59:59 CEST. We'd like to ask to you to forward this post to anyone that you feel may be interested.

We have an amazing lineup of tutorials and talks. We have some excellent keynote speakers and Guido will be with us! ... but remember that early bird registration ends in 3 days!

Right now, you still get discounts on talks and tutorials so if you plan to attend this year to the conference.

Schedule is online!

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Schedule is online!

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The subject says it all ... but look at the first day:

• Guido Van Rossum will be with us!

We just received the confirmation and we thought it is important to tell everyone at once!

Guido's keynote at EuroPython 2012 will be: Not the State of the Python Union

Browse the schedule and "star" your favorites talks

Start browsing the schedule now and see what talks have made it thanks to the community voting.

As usual, providing a way to guide delegates through the conference and help them not miss any event they like is our top priority.

Thanks to a brand new navigation panel, you will be able to:

• Filter talks by type (training, partner program, sprint)
• Jump to a specific day schedule
• Put your preferred talks in MySchedule

Then you can turn on/off tracks that you are interested into (like the Italian track if you don't speak italian); after login, you will have the star buttons at your disposal to quickly like the talks, and a my schedule view that only show the talks that you like.

Did you join the talk voting? If so, your vote will appear next to each talk, to makes it even easier to find what you like most.

It's all a bit in beta right now, but rest assured that we will keep working on it in the next few days. If you find bugs, report them directly in the chat or by e-mail.

Book a Training

Reservation is not mandatory, but we will obviously give precedence to people that have a reservation; if the training is full (no seats left) and you do not have a reservation, you might be unable to attend the training. This is why we suggest that you book your trainings in advance, to make sure that you don't miss them.

You can book the trainings you want to attend, directly from the schedule (click on the training, and then click on the "Book" button).

Remember: Access to trainings is limited to people that bought a standard ticket; lite tickets do not provide access to trainings.

What is missing

We need another week or so to sort out the final details on:

• Sprints: we will concentrate on organizing the sprints starting tomorrow. For people that need to know their exact schedule for travel arrangements, we plan to have sprints during the whole Saturday and Sunday, starting at 9:00 and ending at 19:00. More details in next weeks.
• Evening events: don't believe the schedule that says "Finish" at 19:30, we will have great evening events even later in the evening, for those who can't really miss a single drop of EuroPython! We are really looking forward to announce them, so stay tuned!

We really hope that you will like our schedule browser!

Announcing wifi and intranet servers at EuroPython

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Announcing wifi and intranet servers at EuroPython

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Wifi and Internet

We know how much wifi and Internet connection is important at a technical conference. Really, we do understand it. This is why we have started working very early to plan the wifi service for EuroPython 2012, after last year's problems.

To make sure that everything will go smooth, we have partnered with two companies that we are truly confident will provide a great service:

• Fastweb Spa: It is the largest Italian ISP after the ex-incumbent. Together with the hotel staff, we made an agreement with them which will provide a 100 Mbps full-duplex fiber-optic link for EuroPython. This link should provide more than enough bandwidth for handling the traffic (this year's PyCon US had a good wifi service with a 50Mbps link, with 2250 attendees).
• Devaus Oy: It is a company based in Finland, specialized in advanced networking services. It has already successfully handled wifi at large technical conferences, and this year, in cooperation with the Plone project, they will provide wired and wireless network at EuroPython.

Devaus has published an initial page with some information on the EuroPython network. We will obviously make more information available later on.

House your server/VM in our Intranet

We are also pleased to announce that, for the first time, we will be running an Intranet at EuroPython, to let sponsors, startups, open-source projects and speakers showcase their products directly within our network.

If you want to run a website, application or whatever else you want, we have two different free offers for you:

• Housing: you can bring your pre-configured computer or even laptop, and we will plug it in within our data center. The data center is always locked and accessed only by the EuroPython network staff.
• VM: we can give you immediate root access to a small VM running on one of our servers; they are small instances, but you can start configuring them in next weeks and we will bring the servers to EuroPython so that you don't have to carry any hardware.

If you want to be part of the EuroPython intranet, just drop us a line and we will find together the best solution for your project.

Why wifi didn't work well last year

Some people are still curious on why we had problems last year with the wifi. Obviously there was no single problem, but there were a few concurrent causes:

• Insufficient bandwidth: we planned for 2 ADSL lines with a real data rate of 15Mbps down and 1Mbps up. This planning looks ridiculous in retrospect, but it was based on our previous experience at PyCon Italy where 1 of those lines was mostly able to handle ~330 people. The main difference was that, at PyCon Italy, each user was aggressively shaped (limited in bandwidth) while EuroPython network didn't have any per-using shaping policy. In addition to this, the two DSL lines had noise because of cross-talking (we had tested them independently but not at the same time!), so one of the two couldn't really go more than 9Mbps down and 512Kbps up.
• Insufficient extra bandwidth: after the first morning, we already knew that upstream was the bottleneck; thus we pulled off some hat trick and managed to find a supplier that could activate a terrestrial 4Mbps symmetric radio link in 24 hours (that's the best we could do in one afternoon of phone calls!). Since the load-balancer could only handle two devices, we turned off one ADSL and started using the radio link and the other DSL. Alas, without any shaping policy, it looked like this setup was barely sufficient anyway.
• Scalability problems with the authentication portal: Italy regulations forced us to use an authentication portal and to tunnel all the traffic via VPN to an ISP. The authentication portal (contrary to what one would expect) was running on remote servers, and thus accessed through the Internet link. Because the Internet link was always saturated, most people could usually not get through the authentication portal; this also means that *lots* of people were constantly hitting it at the same time. The problem was made even worse because every time an user changed access point or even disconnected, he had to reauthenticate through the portal. This whole network design (remote authentication portal, no AP roaming) might seem absurd for a conference, but it was expected because we were basically reusing a hotspot service that was designed for different use cases. The authentication portal itself was seeing too much traffic and could simply not handle it fast enough, causing timeouts and thus further disconnections and traffic to it. Obviously, we tried our best to fix the scalability problems on the portal, but it's not easy to do that in a couple of days (especially since the portal was actually a complex piece of software of which only a very small part was visible and accessible from EuroPython).

Lesson learnt, though: for EuroPython 2012, we have allocated a larger part of the budget for connectivity, and at the same time we worked hard to bring a much fatter pipe at an affordable price. Meanwhile, regulations in Italy changed and we will not be forced anymore to authenticate users: this means that we will run a standard WPA2 network with no captive portal. And since we have full trust in Devaus' proven expertise with technical conferences, we are now really looking forward to providing a really outstanding Internet experience at EuroPython. Get a ticket and see it yourself!

Talk voting results

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Talk voting results

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This year, 148 people joined the voting, casting a total 11780 votes!

It's really a great result, and we are happy that so many people are contributing with their votes to make the best possible talk lineup for the conference.

Working on the schedule

We are now working on the schedule, and will do our best to honor the April 18th deadline. We are still adjusting the structure of the schedule, so we are not really sure how many talks will make it to the final schedule.

To give you a rough number, we probably have room for 80 English talks and 10 trainings. Moreover, as anticipated, we have a few invited and sponsored talks, in addition to the winning proposals.

And, while you are waiting, in the following days we will announce more events that will take place during EuroPython. Stay tuned!