The PyCon Blog

After two great years in Portland, PyCon is shipping off to Cleveland for the 2018 and 2019 renditions of the Python community's largest gathering. PyCon 2018 will take place May 9 through 17 with two days of tutorials, three days of talks, and four days of development sprints.

For more information, check out our newly refreshed website at https://us.pycon.org/2018/ and follow us here on the blog and at @pycon on Twitter.

New Website

The new site features a design centered on the historic landmark Terminal Tower, a 52 story skyscraper that overlooks downtown Cleveland. When it opened in 1930, the tower was the fourth tallest building in the world and the tallest building outside of New York City. Though its height no longer tops the charts, the tower and surrounding Tower City area remain highly important to the city. What once was a beacon to guide ship captains to Cleveland's port and airplane pilots to its airport, the tower now includes 508 LEDs that light up for the holida…

PyCon 2017 is in full swing. The last four days of the conference will be development sprints. If you've never heard about sprints before, this is the time when developers, maintainers, regular users/contributors, AND complete newcomers get together and develop features or fix bugs in their favorite projects. Many projects will be sprinting throughout various rooms. Last year there were roughly 500 people sprinting on many different projects.

If you ever thought of contributing to Open Source projects, but did not know where to start, PyCon sprints are a great place to learn new skills. Having the maintainers of the projects sit at the same table with new contributors always helps to solve issues fast.
I am a complete newcomer, don’t know where to start. Is joining development sprints a good idea for me?

Quick answer: yes, of course. Not only do the experienced mentors help new developers at the sprints, we also have some extra help for beginners:

* We try to identify the projects whi…

It has been a trend over the past several years that our top sponsors — the companies who step forward to make the biggest investment in PyCon and its community — tend to be companies that not only use Python for their own development, but who turn around and offer Python as a crucial tool for their own customers. And that is certainly true of PyCon’s biggest sponsor this year.PyCon 2017’s Keystone Sponsor is Intel Corporation!Did you see Intel’s booth in the Expo Hall at PyCon 2016 last year? It was a phenomenon. I remember remarking to a fellow volunteer that Intel was making stunningly good use of their space. Their booth was very nearly a small self-contained conference of its own. It featured a large display and space for a speaker to stand, which Intel used to run a busy schedule of quick presentations and tutorials that focused on both Intel hardware and their support tools for developers. There always seemed to be an attentive crowd gathered whenever I would pass by.Given Inte…

[A guest post by PyCon 2017’s Open Spaces Chair, Anna Ossowski!]Open Spaces are one of the most often overlooked activities at the PyCon conference.PyCon is not merely a 5-track conference — it’s true there are 5 tracks of talks, but there are also 5 tracks of Open Spaces that run alongside the talks.What are Open Spaces?Open Spaces are self-organizing meetup-like events which occur in parallel with main conference talks. There are actually more hours of Open Spaces, in total, than there are of talks! While most of the conference is planned months in advance, Open Spaces are created on-site by PyCon attendees. They offer groups the ability to self-gather, self-define, and self-organize in a way that often doesn’t happen anywhere else at PyCon.Open Spaces are one-hour meetups during the three main conference days, held in meeting rooms within the PyCon convention center. Some people reserve spaces to discuss a favorite technology — like web frameworks, neural nets, or natural language …