PyCon USA 2010 will be held in Atlanta, Georgia this year, from February 19-21. There are also tutorial and sprint days that precede and follow the conference. Last year, I was told that my employer wouldn’t pay my way next time. So this year I had to decide if I would go all on my own.

I dislike dropping more than $1000 ($300 for the conference + $800 for flight and hotel) in one go, but PyCon is a good place to learn and network with like-minded programmers, so it was pretty tempting. Finally, I bit the bullet and decided to go. Now you need to go too! Check out the list of attendees and see if there’s someone you want to meet. Check out the schedule and see what you’ll miss out on if you don’t go!

One thing I don’t like about the conference is that there’s too many things I want to see, but can’t. I need to come up with some way to clone myself that will allow me to share my thoughts with my clone…in the meantime, I thought I’d just copy Van Lindberg and Jesse Noller (Python Magazine author and creator maintainer of the multiprocessing module) and tell you what I want to see.

I look forward to bugging the vendors and going to even more open space sessions than last year. I may try to learn a new board game too! But I’m sure you’re more interested in my talk picks, so here we go:

1) Brett Cannon’s “Import this, that, and the other thing: custom importers” (Talk #9)
2) Tarek Ziadé’s “The state of Packaging” (Talk #63) or Joseph Lisee’s “An Underwater Python: Tortuga the Python Powered Robot” (Talk #175)
3) Jeff Rush’s “Deconstruction of an Object” (Talk #62)
4) Christopher Johnson and Chris Moffitt’s “Ecommerce in Python: Introduction to Satchmo and GetPaid” (Talk #146)
5) Aaron Maxwell’s “Python Testing Patterns” (Talk #30)

I’ve heard good things about Cannon’s talks and I’ve actually been to Jeff Rush’s talks and a tutorial. I know he’s really good. The rest of the speakers I don’t really know anything about, but the talks themselves interest me. I’m sure I’ll be checking out others and maybe even skipping some of these.

I hope to see you there in February!