Here are a few notes on how things are going with regard to PyTexas 2011
- I'm strongly leaning toward using this blog as the primary website for PyTexas; it looks better and has most of the needed functionality which the wiki lacks. There are still a lot of pages linking to the wiki from the outside so I'm not going to shut it down; it still has uses that this blog does not yet fulfill. It might make sense to point the domain pytx.org to this blog, and keep pytexas.org for the wiki for legacy reasons. I have already setup http://wiki.pytexas.org and hope everyone can use that going forward when linking to the wiki.
- The Sponsor Prospectus has gone out, the PyTexas Sponsor payment gateway has been set up, and sponsor donations have started to roll in. Thanks go to Kurt Kaiser of the PSF for getting the payment gateway set up.
- We now have sponsor pledges for $3925, though not all have completed payment. Thanks to OpenStack, BitBucket, Snoball, and ZeOmega for stepping up to Platinum Sponsorship. Thanks to Luna Data solutions of Austin agreeing to sponsor at the Gold level. Likewise, thanks to FreshBooks of Canada for buying a Silver Sponsorship even though they are nowhere near Texas. Fish Technologies of Dallas has also sponsored at the Silver level. Even some individuals have started to donate at the $25 "friends" level. Not all the sponsors are yet displayed since I'm still lacking logos.
- There is a good chance we'll have video recordings of PyTexas this year...stay tuned.
- The submarine battle programming competition will not be ready to run in time for PyTexas, so we'll have to save that for a later event. That means that Sunday can be filled with additional presentations, tutorials, sprints, etc.
- We have a decent variety of talks planned, and I have some ideas about filling out the schedule further:
- Workshops aimed at helping beginners and intermediate developers expand their skillset around installation, building, and distribution of Python packages. I'm confident we can get experienced volunteers to help out running such workshops, provided they can be done in an ad-hoc manner with little preparation required.
- Jeff Rush mentioned an idea about having panel discussions; a web framework "hot seat" might prove popular.
- "Open social" timeslots to make sure people have time to interact with the attending sponsors, eat snacks, etc.
- The draft schedule is not yet posted but I plan to have that done soon.
- I've decided to use Google Docs for surveys and registrations, in the name of expediency. I have several surveys planned and general registration is ready for testing.
- If anyone wants to help out with managing the design/layout of this site, or contribute blog postings, please let me know.
Lastly, I'd like to show off Dave Birch's design for this year's t-shirt graphic, inspired by Monty Python:
