The PyCon Blog

With a month until PyCon US 2020’s scheduled start, the Python Software Foundation Board and Staff are working through our options for PyCon US 2020, and will keep you updated as decisions are made.

In the meantime, remember that PyCon US will refund any tickets with no questions asked. You do not need to commit to travel to PyCon US at this point in time if you do not want to.

The Foundation is currently exploring options to re-schedule or cancel the conference. Any final decision to cancel or reschedule PyCon US will be made early enough to give you time to cancel or defer your travel plans.

We continue to monitor advice from the Federal, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, and Pittsburgh Governments, and our planning is taking this advice into account.

PyCon continues to closely monitor the Coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) situation.

As of March 6, PyCon 2020 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is scheduled to take place.

As of this morning, there have been two presumptive positive cases of COVID-19 in Pennsylvania. These cases are in Wayne and Delaware Counties, in eastern Pennsylvania. They are not near Pittsburgh, which is in western Pennsylvania, some 300 miles (480km) away.

At the time of writing, travel or event restrictions have not been put into place anywhere in Pennsylvania.

Our staff continues to work with sponsors, vendors, and speakers. We are proactively planning safety precautions that will be implemented onsite.

We are also working to ensure that people who cannot travel to PyCon will still be able to meaningfully participate: this includes work to convert one talk, tutorial, and sponsor track to handle remote presentations (either live or recorded) as a backup plan.

It is worth reiterating PyCon’s cancellation policy ag…

Read our most recent update on COVID-19: https://pycon.blogspot.com/search/label/COVID-19


The coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) is a new virus that causes respiratory illness in people and can spread from person-to-person. Since PyCon US 2020 is scheduled in April, we want to give our community an update on our status and more information about our policy for attendees pertaining to COVID-19.

As of March 2, PyCon 2020 in Pittsburgh, PA is scheduled to happen.

The staff and board directors are actively watching the situation closely, as it continues to change rapidly. We plan to reassess the situation weekly and more frequently as we get closer to the event. This includes checking in with our Pittsburgh team for updates including from vendors and local authorities.

Currently, there have not been any COVID-19 cases in Pennsylvania and conferences continue to happen at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. On February 28th, the Pennsylvania Department of Health stated “For the general …

Since its start in 2018, the PyCon US Hatchery Program has become a fundamental part of how PyCon as a conference adapts to best serve the Python community as it grows and changes with time. In keeping with that focus on innovation, the Hatchery Program itself has continued to evolve. Initially we wanted to gauge community interest for this type of program, and in 2018 we launched our first trial program to learn more about what kind of events the community might propose. At the end of that inaugural program, we accepted the PyCon Charlas as our first Hatchery event and it has grown into a permanent track offered at PyCon US. PyCon US 2019 presented three new hatchery programs, Mentored Sprints, the Maintainers Summit, and the Art of Python. Those events were quite different from one another, but they all foreshadowed trends we are seeing now. For PyCon US 2020 there were a dozen proposals, which set us to thinking about how we could accommodate as many events as possible. In addition to…