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.
=============

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.