"Almost every company listed there is hiring there, both on the site and at the on site jobs fair"
It's true. That's how I got my job at (2013 Gold sponsor) TrueCar, back in 2011. It's a great event to attend, just to be around that many like-minded folks.
I was actually on "Startup Row" and wandered around a bit during talks when the exhibit hall was empty and was asked if I'd like to work two blocks from the beach. The line worked.
Speaking of Startup Row, do you have plans to run that again this year? It was great to see all the young companies using Python.
As someone who's never given a speech at a conference before, but is very interested in sharing his newfound knowledge and love of Python, is there anywhere people would recommend reading up on the form or content of such a proposal?
I'll echo Simon - just submit a short proposal (I've posted 3 :-). New speakers are encouraged as they help the community to grow. Consider adding a Poster Proposal as a backup so you could still talk about your subject even if you don't get a speaking slot. The Poster sessions last year were huge and very good.
You might be over-thinking things a bit... depending on the conference, a talk proposal often only needs to be a couple of paragraphs. You don't need to have planned the talk out in detail - just an explanation of what it is you intend to talk about and some background on your experience with the topic.
PyCon is still my favorite conference by a long shot. I did think that 2012 felt like it was losing some of the community vibe, with evenings dominated by big sponsor events instead of BoF sessions, but in a way I guess that's a good problem to have.
BTW, anybody interested in python coroutines should go read the greenlet source. It's pretty readable, well commented, and is the best way to get your head around what's happening to the stack when you do a coroutine switch.
If a language is not making the front-pages of /r/programming and Hacker News much it does not mean that it is dead. Maybe just not as "hip" or even "hyped" as it used to be.
I first learned Python (which I use for web-related functions) from an engineer at Seagate who uses it everyday in failure analysis of drives (they use something like Python 2.2 still). That's something I always loved about Python -- it can be used for anything. It may not always be the "best" language for the job, but you can always "get it running" in Python.
If you search for 'PHP' you get goose eggs too. Does anyone know if language names are intentionally filtered out of career searches at Facebook? 'GIS' and 'Logistics' work as search terms.
(Work at Facebook, but not on this system, and know nothing about it.)
It looks like the search matches on job title/position, and not content. That does seem a bit unexpected.
In general, Facebook does not place much emphasis on programming languages that people know before they start at the job, and part of the Bootcamp process includes the expectation that people will be learning at least one language they don't know (unless they already know C++, Java, PHP, and Python at a production-code-writing-ability, and then they'll have to learn our libraries anyway).
We obviously discuss the languages we use and what we use them for during the hiring process so that people know what they're getting themselves into - people might be looking for something familiar to ease themselves into it, or they might be looking to explore a new language when they start.
(Yes, we use Python for a bunch of stuff. And I know we had a few people working on talk abstracts for PyCon to try meet the deadline that explore a few ways we use it.)
I believe our mentality is good engineers want interesting problems to solve and can learn any language. We're interested in what you've done, not the language can do it in.
A lot of things that are built on Django probably use Python: Disqus, Pintrest, Instagram, Fitocracy, some Mozilla stuff, and a lot of news sites (just to name a few).
When I was applying for a job a large majority of the companies were looking primarily for python developers. Google uses python and that alone is probably enough to never need to ask the parent's question.
Easy!
This Year: https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/
Last Year: https://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors/
And I've got about 14 more pending for 2013 :)
There's some big names there. I know there are more. Almost every company listed there is hiring there, both on the site and at the on site jobs fair:
https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/prospectus/
Join us.