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See you at PyCon 2011

As many of you may know, Python is one of the official languages here at Google. Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, is a Googler too—so naturally we’re thrilled to be supporting PyCon 2011 USA, the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. The PyCon conference days will be March 11th to the 13th, preceded by two tutorial days, March 9th and 10th. For those of you with coding in mind, the Sprints run afterwards from March 14th-17th. All-in-all that’s nine days of Python nirvana!!

In addition to having many Googlers in attendance, some of us will be presenting as well.

• On Wednesday, March 9th at 2 PM, I will be leading a Google App Engine tutorial with fellow teammate Ikai Lan. Tutorials have gotten so popular at PyCon, they’ve now been expanded into a two-day affair!

• On Friday the 11th, the very first day of sessions, App Engine engineer Brett Slatkin will kick things off with his talk, “Creating Complex Data Pipelines in the Cloud” using the new App Engine Pipeline API at 10:25 AM.

• After lunch on Friday, I’ll take my Google hat off momentarily to discuss Python 3 in my talk subtitled “The Next Generation is Here Already” at 1:35 PM. It is mostly a repeat of the well-received talk I gave last year but with updates. The main point is to introduce folks to the next version of the language and discuss how its backwards-incompatibility will affect users, when users should port their apps to Python 3, what the differences from Python 2 are, etc. My job is to calm and soothe, dispelling any FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about Python 3.

• On Saturday morning at 9:25 AM, Python creator, BDFL, and App Engine engineer Guido van Rossum will do his annual Q&A session for all conference attendees in a fireside chat session.

• Later Saturday morning at 11:05 AM, I’m looking forward to speaking about “Running Django Apps on Google App Engine.” This is exciting for me, not only because it’s a relatively new topic, but it represents a major change for Django developers: being able to write Django apps that run on NoSQL or non-relational databases — it’s been only RDBMSs all this time. Furthermore, with Django-nonrel, you can move Django projects/apps between traditional hosting and App Engine, helping to break that “vendor lock-in” issue that many have had concerns about when hosting apps in the cloud. A good part of my talk does focus on porting apps from App Engine to Django however.

• Right after my talk, at 11:45 AM comes another famous Googler, author of Python in a Nutshell, co-editor of the Python Cookbook, and a long-time member of the Python community, Alex Martelli. Alex’s invited talk on “API Design anti-patterns” will be insightful and cerebral, sure to cause many future hallway discussions.

• Late Saturday afternoon at 4:15 PM, Google engineer Augie Fackler will deliver his talk entitled, “HTTP in Python: which library for what task?” There are many libraries that do HTTP. Which ones should you use and when? What are the benefits and tradeoffs?

• Finally, several members of the Google App Engine team, App Engine forum gurus, and experienced App Engine users are attending PyCon this year. I’m hoping to establish an OpenSpace session one of the conference evenings where we can meet other users, chat about best practices, and do some informal Q&A letting people ask anything they want (except “When will you support newer versions of Python?”). 🙂

You can find the entire PyCon schedule online. It’s interactive if you log-in, allowing you to bookmark sessions you’re interested in attending. This will be PyCon’s biggest year yet, so hopefully you can join us in Atlanta next week! Keep an eye out on the PyCon blog to get the latest news, and be sure to follow the Twitter hashtag (#pycon).

We invite you to join Google team members at all our talks, plus stop by our booth to meet our technical staff as they demo select developer tools and APIs. We’ll have handouts there and also encourage you to try a short coding puzzle for a prize!

Shaderlight Winter Wonderland winners announced

Our friends at Shaderlight have just wrapped up their Winter Wonderland rendering competition; the winning entries are delightful:

First Place: Luke Holdmann, Milwaukee, USA

Second Place: Abedallah, Christchurch, New Zealand

Third Place: Zoungy, USA

Kate from ArtVPS (makers of Shaderlight) tells me that the Mac version is on schedule for release in March. Can’t wait!

More Details On Google Places Hotel Booking Feature

Details about Google Places Hotel booking feature, first widely seen in November, are starting to leak out. Google has been somewhat reticent to make meaningful public comments and provide significant details about it. This Places feature allows users to select a booking date, click through from the Places Page and immediately begin the booking process.

It was reported yesterday at Travolution.co.uk, in an apparent press release, that Worldhotels was now offering the Google feature to its affiliate hotels:

Independent hotels can now post information including room rates on Google Maps and Google Places using Worldhotels.

The hotel group is the first of its kind to allow independent hotels to display their real time rates and availability on Google Maps and Places.

This pay-per-click ad model is connected with the groups booking engine. The first hotel to test the new pricing display option is the Worldhotels property Georgian Terrace in Atlanta, USA.

Worldhotels is a company that provides a marketing umbrella that allows independent hotels to maintain their uniqueness but take advantage of back room processes that benefit from scale like booking, rewards programs, negotiating better rates with online booking companies and now obviously, access to Google’s Pay Per Click hotel booking test.

Rather than give up between 25 and 50% of their booking fees to the online travel sites, independent hotels can join a group like Worldhotel for a very small percentage of each booking while additionally taking advantage of other programs like frequent visitor benefits that the affiliate organizer has to offer.

In the case of Google Places, the hotel noted in the press release, is offering a Petite Single Room for their discounted rate of $116 (the same room is $199 through their site) which is exactly the same as the Expedia/Travelocity price. The cost to the hotel is likely the 2% affiliate booking fee plus their AdWords cost vs the 15-25% that they would normally be paying to the online travel site. Thus they could be paying somewhere on the order of $4.50 for the booking versus $31 via the current system. This model, while still in its infancy, is likely to put pressure on the margins of the online travel booking sites.

Google has noted that they are also “exploring ways to allow individual hoteliers to easily share updated pricing / availability” which would mean that even hotels not in a franchise or otherwise affiliated would likewise be able to take advantage of the savings in such a system.

It will be interesting to discover how Google is pricing the pay per click ads in this model. What are the current costs of PPC for hotels in major markets?