Dublin is one of the world's best emerging startup hubs, uniquely situated as the gateway between Europe and America. As programmers, we enjoy a blend of productivity, low costs and global reach previously inaccessible in any profession. In both geography and history, we are privileged in our ability to make a dent in the universe. In this talk, veteran entrepreneur and python programmer Sean Blanchfield makes the case that Irish programmers should be founding startups, and will share some tips for those who want to get started.

The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost single board computer, created with the aim of supporting and promoting the teaching of computer science. We hope to ship one million units by the end of the year. I will detail the history of this charitable project before looking at progress to date and challenges for the future. The Raspberry Pi software stack has matured rapidly since the initial release, but there's still much that could be done to really push the hardware to its limits. I'll outline the progress made so far, plans for the future, and how the Python community can get involved.

Built with zmq, Circus (http://circus.io) is a process and socket manager we're writing at Mozilla Services.

It has many features like a web interface with a live stream of process/socket stats, a command line tool to drive the system. etc.

This talk will present the architecture of the tool, its uses cases at Mozilla, and what we're planning next.

A paper on the lesson learned delivering Introduction to Game Programming to Secondary School Children by Introducing Python programming. An overview of student demographics, challenges, tools, and libraries used. I'll also be displaying some of the projects completed by 12 - 14 y/o coders.

Computer education is going to become more and more prominent in the primary and secondary level education system. It may even come to a par with maths and other core subjects as a basic building block to a students education.

In the past year I have taught computer programming (Python and Scratch) to a range of primary and second level students through the popular CoderDojo movement and via helping an outreach officer at work.

For my talk I want to discuss my experience and to then ask the following questions from the audience:

• What is or should computer education be?
• Should it become a subject with leaving cert points etc.?
• How to teach computer programming as part of computer education? Boarder education system?
• Can computer education help students in their understanding of science and maths subjects?
• Is Python a good language as an introduction to a computer language?
• Can Python Ireland help?

At Mozilla Services, our job is to reduce the hassle of spinning new web services. To do this, we created a bunch of toolkits. One of them is named Cornice and allows you to create web services in a clean and efficient way. It deals for you with documentation generation and even helps you to avoid many of the mistakes one usually do.

The talk will cover how to create services with Cornice and how we implemented it internally so you can see how to contribute if you need.

We, as developers, build software. A great part of this software has command-line interfaces (CLI). As with any user interfaces it is hard to get them right.

Fortunately, we have tools (such as optparse and argparse) that help us to avoid burden associated with creating great CLI. Or do they?

This presentation will show the drawbacks of those tools, and present a better solution for creating beautiful command-line apps in Python.

A brief introduction to the different ways of executing concurrent code using Python, as well as some tricks to avoid problems. This includes multithreading, multiprocessing, asynchronous programming and the infamous Python GIL.

Over the past decade, ADTECH (currently a member of AOL Advertising.com Group) has established itself as a leader in the digital advertising industry, building strong relationships with a broad spectrum of agencies, publishers and marketers globally.

Ad serving and digital marketing are business-critical processes which demand the highest quality standards for the technology which they are based on. High-end performance, scalability and the perfect interaction of all functions and processes, from data entry into user interface to delivering the advertising via data centers, ensure that online marketing is efficient.

Focus on quality and testing play a crucial role to ensure that delivered solutions are as bug free as possible. With recently introduced new products and technologies software test automation and continuous integration started playing a key role within the entire company. Automated deployment, component, integration and acceptance tests written in Python and Jython, using behavior driven development (BDD) frameworks, allow teams to deploy and test applications from front end and API through to back end. BDD tests allow to express user stories and test scenarios in plain English with Python / Jython code underneath.

In this conference talk we will cover following subjects:

• Role of BDD in Agile processes
• Implementation and examples of Python BDD framework: “Lettuce”
• Implementation and examples of Jython BDD framework: “Cucumber-JVM”

Follow on from last years talk with an analysis and description of some of the various in production parts of our stack.

IE, Linux, MySQL, Memcache, Django, Apache, Solr, Django-sentry, Buildout/Fabric, statsd.

Some discussion also of alternative choices, up and coming technology, things to watch.

This is a combined talk from Fergal Reid and Paul O'Grady.

Part 1:

We'll discuss the main elements of applying a machine learning approach to a problem: getting, cleaning, and organising data; investigating the data; developing, testing, and deploying models.

We'll provide examples using the Python Scikit-learn toolkit, and other python packages, to deal with data.

We'll discuss a recent Essay Scoring machine learning competition in which I participated, as a practical case study of quickly applying simple machine learning techniques.

Part 2:

We will give an overview of Python's scikit-learn Machine Learning module, present some fun examples, and give some pointers along the way...

As more people adopt relational models for applications, there is a greater need for ODMs to manage flow between language libraries. Using MongoEngine as an example we'll look into the technical aspects of building a fully featured Object Data Mapper for mongoDB.

We'll cover why we want an Object Data Mapper for a schemaless database,followed by a technical deep dive into MongoEngine internals. Topics covered:

• use of Meta classes to add functionality to the document mappings
• creating a custom query language
• handling data conversion between mongoDB and MongoEngine
• being able to deal with truly dynamic data
• transparently handling changed data.

OpenStack is a widely supported Open Source platform for building private and public clouds. This talk will give an overview of the project and how python is used throughout.

Project Euler is a web site hosting programming challenges that flex your knowledge of discrete math. The only rule is that your solution must run in less than a minute, leading to a lot of problems that can be brute forced easily, but where a faster solution must be found.

In this talk, I will present tips, techniques, algorithms and pieces of code that I have found useful in solving euler problems over the years.

Python Ireland's annual general meeting. Everyone is welcome (and encouraged) to attend. In this meeting we will give a summary of the year and elect a new committee.

We use them everyday, often without thinking about them. However, most of us probably only use a small subset of them without realising that there might be more optimal solutions or builtin functions available for various tasks and problems.

This talk will give a general overview of common everyday types, functions, operators and idioms within python, while highlighting some common use cases and gotchas. Hopefully there should be something in it for people of all levels of experience.

In Facebook Infrastructure, Python is one of our primary languages. Our main configuration system (Configerator) and our Automated break-fix engine (FBAR) are both built on Python. I'll talk about how these systems work and why we chose python.

Unfortunately, solving simple problems with Python isn't always 'import antigravity'. Best practices are sometimes far from obvious. This talk will analyze the high barriers of entry that clutter the Python landscape. We'll discuss ways to make Python more accessible for newcomers and less of a headache for seasoned veterans.

The RestFS is an experimental project to develop an open-source distributed filesystem for large environments. It is designed to scale up from a single server to thousand of nodes and delivering a high availability storage system with special features for high i/o performance and network optimization for work better in WAN environment. The Restfs is pure-python, but several of the libraries that it depends upon use C extensions (sometimes for speed, sometimes to interface to pre-existing C libraries). The Project is on the beginning stage, with some technology previews released.

The main characteristics of the RestFS are : - Scalability, no limits on storage and clients size - High availability, no single point of failure and data replication - Adaptative, load balancing and uniform distribution - High Performance, parallel transfer, local cache consistency, data transfer by difference - Flexible, S3 compatibility interface, dedicated library for integration in web server and application layer

This talk describes the architecture, internals of RestFS and comparison among different free software solutions. The session will discuss our experience in this development and detailed information on performance and scalability.

What's the toss up between Twisted and Tornado? And where do they fit in relation to things like Node.js and Erlang? Which one should you use, or should you use any of them??

There's plenty of talk about one asynchronous framework or the other, but most information is provided with little context. This talk will tell you why these frameworks exist, what the differences between them are, and when you might consider using them (or not!).

In the last few years, Continuous Integration (CI) has been widely adopted as a software development best practice. However, despite the invaluable safety net that it provides, CI falls short of covering and automating what happens after the build is deemed successful. In particular, there is one critical part of the software life cycle that CI seem to ignore: deployment.

With that in mind, Continuous Delivery (CD) aims at testing and automating the last mile that separates a code check-in from being accepted to being deployed on a working environment. Given the advent of virtualization technologies, it becomes easier to test that not only does your build passes unit and functional tests but that it can also be automatically deployed to a clone of your target production environment.

This talk will discuss CD and present a proof-of-concept tool written in Python that enables it.

All the cool kids are talking about distributed version control these days - tools like Git and Mercurial, and services such as Bitbucket and GitHub. But what are the benefits and pitfalls of moving serious projects and teams from centralised version control systems to distributed systems? Steve will talk about this subject from several perspectives based on prior experience - that of an independent developer, a former enterprise software team lead, and an open source project lead. This isn't a practical training course on a specific DVCS system, although elements will be mentioned where relevant. Prior DVCS experience is not required.

The lack of native "print to PDF" functionality on several Windows versions, gave us the opportunity to realize a WYSIWYG, distributed and highly customizable PDF printing solution based on python.

git is becoming the hot version control system and is quickly becoming an standard, but using it can be challenging and mind-blowing. Learn to use git in your favor instead of struggling against it. This includes the description of advanced git commands, as well as recommendations, tricks and best practices. It will be assumed that basic git use (commit, push, pull) is known.

As part of the fleet management system created by Visual Units AB, the quality of the J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) software in the 'black boxes' are key to customer experience and the trust the customers place in the system. Since the boxes exist very much in the real world and things can (and do) go wrong in new and unexpected ways, we have adopted a fuzzy error handling for the embedded software that uses a number of different indicators to identify problems, attempt to fix them, and send alerts. While this has proven a successful model with a great track record, testing the error handling in Java and on emulators has proven extremely challenging. To remedy these problems, we adopted Jython as our testing platform, and we can now do regression and scenario testing of the entire embedded application in an environment where we can control literally every aspect.

During this talk I will briefly outline the specific problems of quality assurance in embedded systems roaming through several countries, discuss how fuzzy error handling can help, and present how Jython can be leveraged to test Java code. I will specifically discuss how behaviours that are hard-to-impossible to predict and test using conventional tests (like unit test) can be tested using scenario testing, and how Jython has allowed us to set up both very specific scenarios as well as 'scenario fuzz testing'.

Note: Unfortunately Paul can't make it, in his place Michael Twomey will be giving a version of this talk.

Yet Another Python 3 Talk... well, it wouldn't be a PyCon in Ireland if Paul Barry didn't stand up and talk about Python 3 now, would it? And Paul's at it again this year! Python 3.3 is just around the corner, Python 2.7 has entered permanent "maintenance mode", projects are announcing Python 3 support in an ever increasing number, and now the time must surely be right for you to make the move... because time is running out!! Come along to Paul's talk to find out what he's on about (again).

Quick, fun, five-minute talks on almost any topic. Want to give a lightning talk at PyCon in exchange for a drink voucher? Just sign up at the conference.

Are you looking for a job? Are you a company looking to hire? Here's your opportunity at PyCon Ireland's Recruiting Session.

Each company/candidates will have time to briefly talk about themselves.

Then candidates will hand in their resumés to the company representative and have a short chat about opportunities. Because of time constraints, there won’t be actual time to have a full job interview at the session, but it’ll allow both parties to know each other

Tutorials offer the opportunity to learn about new topics, or to brush up on existing skills. They are also a good place to come with those burning questions you've had, the later portions of the tutorials will be more advanced. In order to fully participate you should bring your own laptop to follow along.

In addition to the formal tutorials people can organise more ad-hoc sessions in the Open Spaces.

OpenSpace is a simple methodology for self-organizing conference tracks. It relies on participation by people who have a passion for the topics to be discussed. There is no preplanned list of topics, only time slots and a space in the main meeting room where interested participants propose topics and pick time slots.

For the entire duration of PyCon Ireland we've set aside an entire track for OpenSpace sessions.

OpenSpace is a small set of rules that allow groups of people to interact in a simple, productive, organized way to create valuable dialogs that address the participants' most important issues.

The Fundamental "Rules" of the sessions that happen during OpenSpace conferences are:

• Whoever shows up is the right group
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it's over, it's over.

• Come up with an interesting topic and title for your discussion.
• You don't need to develop these before the conference; most of the ideas will come to you during the event.
• Fill out a schedule Post-It for your topic.
• Place the topic on the schedule.
• If you see topics that have something in common, consider combining them into a single time slot.
• If a significant number of people want to attend your discussion and another discussion in the same time slot, try to trade into another time slot to ensure maximum dialog and participation.

• Check the schedule and sign up for a talk or just drop in if you wish.
• Use the 'Law of Two Feet.' If you feel that you are not contributing or benefiting from a presentation, please feel free to move on to something else.
• Allow the discussion convener to steer his or her topic. If you have an opposing opinion that needs a full time slot you should feel free to add your own OpenSpace slot to discuss the topic.

Development sprints take place on both days in the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel. This is only for conference delegates.

Development sprints are traditionally a key part of PyCons, a chance for the contributors to open-source projects to get together face-to-face for up to four days of intensive learning and development. Newbies sit at the same table as the gurus, go out for lunch and dinner together, and have a great time while advancing their project.

Basically, a sprint is a time set aside for developers to come together and focus their undivided attention on improving an open source project. The PyCon Ireland sprint is a day of intensive learning and development; a focused, sustained time to test, fix bugs, add new features, and improve documentation.

PyCon provides the space and infrastructure (network, power, tables & chairs); you bring your skills, humanity, and brainpower (oh! and don't forget your computer).

Anyone! All experience levels are welcome; sprints are a great opportunity to start contributing to your favourite Python project.

Participation in the sprints is free!

Yes, check with STAFF member where you can add your sprint on the day.

(See http://us.pycon.org/2011/sprints/ for the original sprint guide.)

If you have more questions, please feel free to contact the sprint coordinator, [TBD].