The PyCon US Blog

Who is at the sprints? Sprints at PyCon US are organized by the attendees. The conference provides the space with tables, power strips, Internet connectivity, and, for the first two days, catered lunches. The attendees band together to work on their open-source and community projects of choice. You can expect bigger projects like CPython, Django, Flask, or BeeWare, to have their own dedicated rooms to hack on their stuff. Smaller projects either group together topically or just join a random friendly room with empty seats. You’ll find project maintainers, seasoned contributors, community organizers, and first-time contributors alike. Everybody’s welcome! Which project should I join for sprints? This is a question worth answering before coming. Sprints work best for contributors who are already users of a given project. If you know a project like, say, CPython or Django well enough, you probably stumbled upon a bug in that software in the past. Maybe you looked into how some internals o...

  This is a blog series where we're asking each of our PyConUS 2026 keynote speakers about their journey into tech, how excited they are for PyconUS and any tips they can provide for an awesome conference experience! Thank you Pablo for this interview! You can learn more about Pablo's keynote on the PyConUS Keynote Speakers page and you can also attend Pablo Galindo Salgado s meet and greet at the PSF Booth in the Expo Hall on Saturday May 16 after Pablo's keynote. How did you get started in tech/Python? Did you have a friend or a mentor that helped you? I got into tech through the back door: as part of my Physics studies, needing to write code to run simulations and process data. The simulations themselves were in Fortran 77 and C++ but for the rest I tried a bunch of languages before landing on Python, but Python had something the others didn't: it was genuinely fun. And then I discovered the community, and that was it. I didn't have a single mentor so much as a...

  This is a blog series where we're asking each of our PyConUS 2026 keynote speakers about their journey into tech, how excited they are for PyconUS and any tips they can provide for an awesome conference experience! Thank you amanda for this interview! You can learn more about amanda's keynote on the PyConUS Keynote Speakers page and you can also attend amanda's meet and greet at the PSF Booth in the Expo Hall on Thursday May 14 during the opening reception at 5 - 6pm PT. Without giving any too many spoilers, tell us what your keynote is about? More and more these days, amanda is asking how do you make space in open source for hope. How did you get started in tech/Python? Did you have a friend or a mentor that helped you? My first time wrestling with Python was in 2009 when I was struggling to set up a webserver for a graduate student project building a microgrid testbed for a local national park. When I moved to Seattle a few years later, the local Python tech communit...

Looking to make a meaningful contribution to the Python community? Look no further than PyCon US 2026! Whether you're a seasoned Python pro or a newcomer to the community and looking to get involved, there's a volunteer opportunity that's perfect for you.  Sign-up for volunteer roles is done directly through the PyCon US website . This way, you can view and manage shifts you sign up for through your personal dashboard ! You can read up on the different roles to volunteer for and how to sign up on the PyCon US website . PyCon US is largely organized and run by volunteers. Every year, we ask to fill over 300 onsite volunteer hours to ensure everything runs smoothly at the event. And the best part? You don't need to commit a lot of time to make a difference–some shifts are as short as 45 minutes long! You can sign up for as many or as few shifts as you’d like. Even a couple of hours of your time can go a long way in helping us create an amazing experience for attendees. Ke...

This is a blog series where we're asking each of our PyConUS 2026 keynote speakers about their journey into tech, how excited they are for PyconUS and any tips they can provide for an awesome conference experience! Here's our interview with Lin Qiao Without giving too many spoilers, tell us what your keynote is about? Most AI products are built on rented land. If your competitor can make the same API call, you do not have a moat. I will break down what the teams pulling ahead are doing differently, with real examples from Cursor, Notion, and Vercel, and get into the hard tradeoffs nobody talks about enough. How did you get started in tech/Python? My path into tech started pretty naturally. I studied STEM all through high school and undergrad, so it was always the space I gravitated toward. Python specifically came later, during my PhD, where I started using it to run experiments and support my research papers. What do you think the most important work you've ever done is?...

Welcome to our annual blog series where we're asking each of our PyConUS 2026 keynote speakers about their journey into tech, how excited they are for Pycon US and any tips they can provide for an awesome conference experience! Thank you to Rachell and Tim for this interview! You can learn more about their keynote on the PyConUS Keynote Speakers page and you can also attend their meet and greet at the PSF Booth in the Expo Hall on Friday May 15 from 1 to 2pm PT. Without giving any too many spoilers, tell us what your keynote is about?  Tim: Did Rachell answer this question already? Can I cheat off her response? No? Hmm... Well, it's about Djangonaut Space , a contributor mentorship program for members of the Django community. It'll talk about why the founders created it, what it does, how it works, and why it works. If you're a part of an open-source community or want to be a part of an open-source community, you may find the talk interesting. We've tackled some...

Six Pathways Through the Talks Finding your way through three days of world-class Python content PyCon US 2026 runs May 13–19 in Long Beach, California, and with over 100 talks across five rooms over three days, the schedule can feel like a lot to navigate. The good news: whether you came to go deep on Python performance, level up your security knowledge, get practical Python insights for agentic AI, or finally understand what all the async fuss is about, there's a clear path through the content that's built for you. Register now to get in on the full experience.  We mapped six attendee pathways through the full talks schedule with a bonus tutorial to pair with it, each one a curated sequence of sessions that focuses on a core Python topic. Think of them less as tracks and more as through-lines. Pick the one that matches where you are and what you want to walk away with to integrate into your work. Python Performance: From Memory to Metal If you want to understand why your ...