py-sig Manchester NH: Goffstown Man with T-Shirt from PyCon reports:

~1100 people, the largest pycon every. 10% female. A thing of note.
Tracks, birds of a feather, lightning talks.
Takeaway messages:
1) Use distribute and pip rather than setup tools.Not easyinstall.
Peripheral Interchange Program.
Distribute keeps track of what's installed so it can uninstall too.
google for and download distribute_setup.py
then say easyinstall pip.
this will keep track of all the new stuff.
2) interesting session on greenlets, a lightweight threaded model..
3) David Beasley's talk on global interpreter was impressive.
charts on contention and giving up locks but taking them back up before something else could get them.
jpython doesn't have this problem.
unix had global kernel locks.
[discussion about tuning each lock manually. has to do with how interpreter works. deadlocks created. better to be slow than stopped.]
"If you're worried about the global interpreter lock, use Jython."
He was wearing a t-shirt saying "python is for girls"
4) No-sql databases
key-value
distribute copies across multiple servers
python bindings for these, not written in python since C is faster.
5) A nice presentation on testing, unit testing.
6) Ark was trying to get people together into a sprint to convert the rest of the libraries to python3.

Videos of PyCon sessions are on pycon.blip.tv