Heroku's Kenneth Reitz to present keynote at PyCon Australia 2012
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Submitted on 2012-05-17 21:36
With Early Bird registrations well underway, PyCon Australia is very pleased to announce Kenneth Reitz of Heroku as the first of its keynote speakers for the 2012 conference, to be held on August 18 and 19 in Hobart, Tasmania.
As the world of software development turns to making things more usable for end-users of applications, making libraries and APIs easy for developers themselves to use often becomes an afterthought. Even in the Python world, many key APIs are a pain to work with. "Unfortunately, solving simple problems with Python isn't always 'import antigravity'. Best practices are sometimes far from obvious.", says Kenneth. "My keynote will analyse the high barriers of entry that clutter the Python landscape, and I'll be discussing ways to make Python more accessible for newcomers and less of a headache for seasoned veterans."
One of Kenneth's shining successes in making formerly difficult tasks easier for Python developers is the Requests HTTP library (python-requests): a tool that has transformed making HTTP requests in Python from a cumbersome and error-prone task into one that's elegant, easy to understand and easy to remember. Such is the success of Requests, it is now considered the de facto way of making HTTP requests in Python. python-requests is now the third most-watched Python project on GitHub, second only to projects from Facebook and Django.
Kenneth is now working with Heroku, overseeing the technical design of their Python application stack. Kenneth's other popular open source projects include Legit, Clint, Python-Guide, HTTPbin, Inbox.py, OSX-GCC-Installer, and more available at http://github.com/kennethreitz.
We at PyCon Australia can't wait to hear Kenneth's insights on improving the Python ecosystem in August! Registration is open at http://2012.pycon-au.org with Early Bird rates available to the first 60 paid delegates, or until Friday 1 June, 2012.
(Photo Credit: "Kenneth Reitz" by Kenneth Reitz, CC-BY. )
About PyCon Australia
PyCon Australia is the national conference for the Python Programming Community. The third PyCon Australia will be held on August 18 and 19, 2012 in Hobart, Tasmania, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast developers with a love for developing with Python. PyCon Australia informs the country’s Python developers with presentations, tutorials and panel sessions by experts and core developers of Python, as well as the libraries and frameworks that they rely on.
To find out more about PyCon Australia 2012, visit our website at http://pycon-au.org or e-mail us at contact@pycon-au.org.
PyCon Australia is presented by Linux Australia (www.linux.org.au) and acknowledges the support of our Gold sponsor, Google Australia (www.google.com.au); our Event partner, Secret Lab; and our Silver sponsors, the Python Software Foundation, Anchor Systems, Red Hat, ekit, and CSIRO.
About Heroku
Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Developers can focus 100% on code and never think about servers, instances, or VMs again. Tens of thousands of developers have already deployed hundreds of thousands of apps to Heroku. For more information, visit heroku.com