GIS programmer writing Python in Emacs

This year marks a huge milestone for me -- I'll be giving a tutorial session at PyCon. Being selected as one of the speakers is not only a great honor but also a huge responsibility. Whatever, that's not the point of this post. This is supposed to be a self-advertisement. So, if you don't know what's OpenStreetMap, how to render a map in Python and what GIS stands for (or any of the above) -- don't hesitate to spend $150 on registration. For those of you who think that they can handle this with ease, I suggest a much more sophisticated alternative. I don't recommend this workshop to people not experienced in Python, though. There're plenty of other tutorials so don't hesitate to share this information with your friends, colleagues and random people on the Internet.

Oh, and don't forget to register for the main conference, because it's probably the only way to find out about giant telescopes, huge robots or automation of airplane engines.

On almost unrelated not, if you have registered for my tutorial and want to try out all examples while in the session room I'd suggest you go through this check-list:

• Install Mapnik. See the installation instructions. There're pre-built packages available for most major platforms, so the install process should be straightforward.
• Install shapely. Play with examples, try to recall your geometry classes from school. This will help you feel more comfortable with examples I'm going to provide during the session.
• Install PostgreSQL with PostGIS extension. Some of the examples might include writing SQL queries, so if you're not familiar with SQL, you should probably read some basic tutorial, but that's definitely not obligatory.

Of course, you could just skip all of these and try out the code samples later after the session, in a calm and quiet setting. The tutorial itself doesn't force students into constantly writing code.

In conclusion, don't miss out on your opportunity to extend your knowledge base and social network, visit PyCon 2011 in Atlanta, it's going to be cool.