Sessions at PyCon US 2011 with video on Saturday 12th March

Dropbox is a startup company located in San Francisco that has probably one of the most popular file synchronization and sharing tools in the world, shipping Python on the desktop and supporting millions of users and growing every day. Dropbox uses Python on the client-side and server side as well.

This talk will give an overview of the first two years of Dropbox, the team formation, our early guiding principles and philosophies, what worked for us and what we learned while building the company and engineering infrastructure. It will also cover why Python was essential to the success of the project and the rough edges we had to overcome to make it our long term programming environment and runtime. Finally it will give some insight into the future of Dropbox and where the project is going.

Believe it or not, but you can write pretty horrendously awful code even in a language as elegant as Python. Over the years, I've committed my share of sins; now it's time to come clean. Step right up for a tour of twisted, evil, and downright wrong code, and learn some strategies to avoid writing criminally bad code--if you dare!

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. It is not only a web server but it is a light-weight, use only what you need, web development framework. In this talk we will review the current state of the Tornado project, review the features Tornado provides and give examples of how to implement asynchronous web applications in Tornado.

Topics covered will include:

• Core Tornado concepts
• Building an asynchronous web application
• Using the Tornado template engine
• Database Interaction
• Secure cookies and Sessions
• Utilizing built-in OAuth Clients for Authentication
• Websockets
• State of asynchronous drivers available to Tornado
• A light introduction to Tornado internals

Since launch Django Packages (http://djangopackages.com) has become the place to find and compare apps, frameworks and projects produced by the Django Community. Through the use of public APIs, Django Packages constantly fetches hard data from PyPI, Github, and Bitbucket, aproviding a powerful mash-up of real-world data on the volume of usage of a particular package. At a glance you can see which package is the most downloaded, which is the most used, and which has seen ongoing development.

The project is open sourced on Github, with all non-user data accessible available via the API. Django Packages was conceived and and launched in the 2010 Django Dash. Since launch it has seen features added incrementally and was a frequently mentioned project at the 2010 DjangoCon and was #1 on Hacker News on Sunday, December 5, 2010. It's purpose is to provide a place for Django Developers to submit, research, and review apps, projects, and frameworks.