After Pycon was over, I contacted the people on the python group organizers mailing list to see how to get contacts from publishers in the hopes of gathering contacts and acquiring some swag for the Iowa Python Users Group (AKA Pyowa) meetings.
My first contact ended up being with Packt Publishing. They have been very helpful and even gave me a book on Django to review. I hope to have that read and reviewed in the next several weeks. They gave me a sample from the book which is posted on Pyowa’s main page. I also got a contact with O’Reilly and hope that that will turn out well too. Hopefully I will end up with some decent swag for future Pyowa meetings.
Next month, the Pyowa group will be hosting a core developer from the Mythbuntu project who will be talking about his experiences with Python. We also have a presentation planned on SqlAlchemy, a really cool Python Object Relational Mapper (ORM). Finally, we’ll have a GIS-related code review. For that we will take some auto-generated code from what I think was ArcGIS and try to improve it. All of this will take place at the Marshall County Sheriff’s Office on Monday, May 4th from 7-9 p.m. Snacks and drinks will also be available. Directions are on the Pyowa website.