PyCon 2004, March 24-26, 2004 in Washington, D.C., is a community-oriented conference targeting developers (both those using Python and those working on the Python project). It provides opportunities to learn about significant advances in the Python development community, to participate in a programming sprint with some of the leading minds in the Open Source community, and to meet fellow developers from around the world. The organizers work to make the conference affordable and accessible to all.

Mitch Kapor to give keynote address Mitch, founder of the Open Source Application Foundation, will be the keynote speaker for the conference.

Chandler Sprint OSAF will be running a Sprint from Mar 20-23 prior to the PyCon 2004 conference. The topics for the sprint will focus on the Chandler Repository. At the moment, these include Repository dump/restore functionality, and remote Repository sharing using WebDAV.

Ted Leung and Jeffrey Harris will be the coaches for the sprints, and will be doing brief tutorials for people unfamiliar with the Chandler Repository. We want to use the sprint to involve more people in the Chandler development process as well as accomplish some tasks that will be useful for Chandler.

If you are interested in participating in the sprint, please add your self to the ChandlerSprint page: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/ChandlerSprint

What is a Sprint? The sprint is a four day focused development session, in which developers pair in a room and focus on building a particular subsystem. A sprint is organized with a coach leading the session. The coach sets the agenda, tracks activities, and keeps the development moving. The developers work in pairs using extreme programming’s pair programming approach.

And a BOF too! In addition, we plan to have an OSAF ‘Birds Of a Feather’ gathering during PyCon itself to answer questions about Chandler and socialize with Python developers.

Software Developer — GUI Framework We are looking for someone to help make Chandler shine on multiple platforms: OS X, Linux and Windows XP. This person will develop a deep familiarity with both the Chandler application itself, the wxPython/wxWindows project, OS X Carbon libraries, GTK, and Windows APIs. This position will be the “go to” person for supporting an outstanding native experience in Chandler on OS X, Linux and Windows XP.

For a full description with requirements, qualifications, and how to apply see the Employment page.

It’s the start of a new year and here at OSAF we’re hard at work making progress on Chandler development, but we need your help. To keep moving forward as quickly as possible we need to fill some key engineering positions. There are currently five open positions with full descriptions, requirements, and “how to apply” listed on our Employment page: * Release Engineer * Quality Assurance Engineer * Software Developer - Applications Infrastructure * Applications Developer * Software Developer - Email Backend

You can help us by spreading the word to your friends and associates, or apply yourself and come join the OSAF team in 2004.

The current issue of Hemispheres, United Airlines’ inflight magazine has a good article on OSAF and Chandler by Tom Mueller. In case you were not planning on taking a United flight this month you can catch the article online at http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/cyber/desktop.html