The PyCon Blog

Building the PSF: the Q2 2019 Fundraiser
Thank you to everyone who has donated to our past fundraisers! Donations, memberships, and sponsorships support sprints, meetups, community events, Python documentation, fiscal sponsorships, software development, and community projects.

We can’t do any of this without your financial contributions. We’ve just launched a new fundraiser for 2019! Please donate today and help us meet our goal of $60,000 by May 22nd!
Your donations have IMPACT!The PSF awarded $118,543 in financial aid to 143 PyCon attendees in 2018$324,000 was paid in grants in 2018 to recipients in 51 different countriesDonations and fundraisers resulted in $489,152 of revenue. This represents 15% of our total 2018 revenue. PSF and PyCon sponsors contributed over $1,071K in revenue! We understand the need for transparency and hope to help our community and stakeholders find necessary information about the PSF in a single place. We’re proud to launch our first ever Annual Report. 2…

Introducing Facebook and Instagram PyCon 2019 Principal Sponsors!Facebook and Instagram have been big supporters of the Python language through sponsored development of PyTorch and Pyre. This year the PSF is proud to have Facebook and Instagram as Principal Sponsors of our foundation and PyCon 2019 in Cleveland. They want to share the variety of ways they're not only using Python but how they’ve implemented it in creating, teaching, and developing their programs. We spoke with them to find out more about their recent efforts in the Python community, and here’s what they had to share regarding the integration of Python in their systems by team.Facebook Production Engineering

 There are engineers within Facebook that are 100% focused on maintaining the Python infrastructure of the other developers that use Python.

There's a whole category of software written at Facebook that's basically like the glue that holds all the other software together. The vast majority of that glue…

The PyCon staff is saddened to hear that one of our sponsors, DataCamp, had an incident where one of their employees was sexually harassed. We were also distressed to find it was unclear if Datacamp had addressed this incident with the seriousness it requires. PyCon and the Python Software Foundation take this issue seriously and we want to emphasize---for Datacamp and everyone---that such behavior is not tolerated at PyCon or any Python Software Foundation affiliated event.

The Python community must hold itself to a higher standard. We would like to reemphasize our values of inclusiveness and a willingness to act on behalf of the vulnerable members of our community as written in the Python Software Foundation code of conduct, and our guidelines, as written up in the PyCon code of conduct.

The Python Software Foundation Board, Python Software Foundation Executive Director, and myself have taken time to discuss the situation taking into account the concerns of our community, public discu…

A big welcome and thank you to Capital One for joining the PSF as a Principal sponsor!
Capital One is also a PyCon 2019 Principal sponsor and is excited to share a few things with attendees, including a deeper look at their intelligent virtual assistant, Eno. Eno’s NLP models were built in-house with Python. Eno is a key component of the customer experience at Capital One, proactively looking out for customers and their money. Eno notifies customers about unusual transactions or duplicate charges, helping to spot fraud in its tracks. It also sends bill reminders and makes paying your bill as easy as sending a text or emoji; plus, its new virtual card capabilities let customers shop online without using their real credit card number.

The benefits they’ve seen by developing Eno with Python are numerous: fast time to market, the ability to prototype and iterate quickly, ease of integration with machine learning frameworks, and extensive support for everything we need (like Kafka and Red…

Introducing our 2019 Keystone Sponsor: Microsoft! Our top sponsors — companies who step forward to make the biggest investment in PyCon and its community — not only use Python for their own development but also offer Python as a crucial tool for their own customers. That is certainly true of PyCon’s Keystone Sponsor this year.

I recently caught up with the Python Team at Microsoft to talk about how they're using Python and was excited to hear what they had to say.

Q: Is your organization using Python in any surprising ways?
Yes, and in many surprising ways! To mention just three examples:

We have large swaths of data scientists whose jobs rely around Jupyter Notebooks. This includes our security analysis team, which is constantly working to identify new security threats and protecting literally billions of users of Windows, Office, and our cloud services for consumers and businesses—every day.Python is an important part of the CI/CD pipelines that are executed thousands of times ev…