Why your employer Should send you to PyCon

pycon_send.txt

LINKS:
https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/what-is-pycon/
http://juliaelman.com/blog/2012/mar/13/my-first-pycon/
http://pydanny.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-you-should-go-to-pycon.html
http://jessenoller.com/2011/09/23/pycon-2012-sponsorship-making-the-case-for-sponsorship/
https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/whysponsor/

Goal of this document: Provide a compelling case for why companies should send their employees to PyCon. Ideally tie into stories like this: http://pycon.blogspot.com/2012/09/pycon-us-2013-highlighting-aweber.html and http://pycon.blogspot.com/2012/09/pycon-us-2013-highlighting-dreamhost.html

This document will be converted to markdown/html and posted to the PyCon website and the PyCon blog.
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Because you're new to Python

This year's PyCon is all about education. The Program Committee is making an effort to include talks that cover all levels of experience; this includes talks, tutorials, and posters. Need I remind you, the conference's tag line is:

"Change the future - education, outreach, politeness, respect, tenacity and vision"

Beginners will probably get more benefit from tutorials than talks, and it's perfectly okay to just sign up for tutorials. If you're hesitant, take a look at 2012's schedule. If there are even a couple of talks that seem interesting to you, you can be certain that similar subject matters will be spoken about for 2013.

I also want to point out that talks and tutorials, while key to the conference, do not make the whole conference. Spending hours in the Exhibit hall, talking to companies that use Python, learning about community outreach programs or open source projects are what makes the most out of a PyCon experience. Many companies will be recruiting, and perhaps that is intimidating, but it shouldn't be. Talk to them about the steps it takes to succeed at their company; find out what they're looking for in an engineer. This information can help you set goals for what you want to get out of learning Python.

meh that last comment was for 'general' convincing.

You're convinced, but your employer might not be

It's cheap. Tutorials are $150/200 each (early bird/on site) for 3 1/2-4 hours of intense learning. The conference is $450/$600/$700 (corporate prices, early bird/regular/on site). Comparatively, these huge conferences often go for far more than that.

You will learn more in 9 days of tutorials, talks, and sprints than a year of reading books. Not only will you be exposed to trends, new technologies and ideas not yet written about, you have the opportunity to talk with other Python devs. Another company had the same deployment issues you folks are having? What about managing real time data? The hall way track presents many opportunities to have those conversations and knowledge transfers.

Pycon is where I find the technologies and techniques that I use the entire next year in our development cycle.

I also get to rub elbows with the maintainers of the packages we use. Great for future support!

PyCon provides extremely cost effective training. For the cost of a typical training program ($1,500) attendees have access to a wide variety of tutorials, presentations and discussions. Add onto that access the authors of libraries and tools they use and you have some very compelling reasons to attend PyCon.