[Chicago] Introduction and possible presentations for Feb 14th.

[Trent Nelson]

Hi folks!

    As luck would have it, it's highly likely I'll be visiting the Windy
    City on the weekend of Feb 15th, so I figured why not try and come a
    day earlier and attend the meetup on the 14th.

    Little bit of background: I'm a Python and Subversion committer and
    also the founder of Snakebite (www.snakebite.net).  I'd be up for
    giving a presentation if time allows.  I have two in mind:

        - A general presentation on Snakebite -- I've given these in the
          past and they've always been well received.  Not technical,
          should have wide appeal.

        - A pre-PyCon presentation on a little project I've been working
          on the past month: "Parallelizing the Python Interpreter: The
          Quest for True Asynchronicity".

          Sensational title aside, this presentation details the work
          I've done to "parallelize" the Python interpreter; allowing
          Python code to exploit all CPU cores without impeding normal
          single-threaded performance.

          (This work is comparable to previous attempts to remove the
          GIL with fine-grained locking, as well as the STM work being
          done in PyPy.  My approach differs from both: I don't remove
          the GIL nor do I introduce fine-grained locking (which is why
          single-threaded execution doesn't take a performance hit).)

          This would be a very technical presentation.  There's even a
          bit of assembly language involved (well, compiler intrinsics,
          at least).  However, it's a pretty cool topic, so even if you
          don't grok the low-level CPython internal stuff, there will be
          lots of other interesting stuff at a higher level.

    Look forward to meeting you all!  (Chicago is probably my favourite
    city in the US.)

    Regards,

        Trent.