The PyCon US Blog

I am very pleased to announce the second (and final) PyCon 2012 Keynote speaker - Stormy Peters . Stormy is the Head of Developer Engagement at Mozilla . She is also an advisor for HFOSS , IntraHealth Open and Open Source for America , as well as founder and president of Kids on Computers , a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries. Stormy joined Mozilla from the GNOME Foundation where she served as executive director. Previously, she worked at OpenLogic where she set up their OpenLogic Expert Community as well as founding the Hewlett-Packard Open Source Program Office. Stormy graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science. She is passionate about open source software and educates companies and communities on how open source software is changing the software industry. She is a compelling speaker who engages her audiences during and after her presentations - and has spoken at OSCON, GUADEC and other conferences. Her talk " Would ...

The PyCon team is honored and proud to announce a new  Diamond Sponsor for the conference and also that the record-breaking  call for proposals has closed. We are very proud to announce that  Heroku — a premiere Platform as a Service provider — has joined PyCon as our final Diamond level sponsor. Heroku joins Google and Dropbox as the premier sponsors of PyCon 2012. Heroku recently announced first-class Python support on their platform;  their blog post announcing this support shows that they care about Python and have a long term dedication to the language and its community. We thank and welcome Heroku, and we look forward to their involvement in PyCon and the Python community. Just as amazing as a new Diamond sponsor is the fact the PyCon 2012 Call For Proposals is now closed. Speaking as a team, we can say: “This. Is. Amazing.” We broke all records on the number of talks (374 as of this writing) and tutorials (89) submitted. Further, the quality, breadth, and depth of those...

What a conference. 200 Pythonistas met for the better part of the last week in Leipzig. We started out with a tutorial day. More than 80 people took advantage of the opportunity to attend 13 tutorials covering diverse topics including algorithms, database programming, web frameworks, scientific data analysis and Python introduction. In parallel to the tutorials we had a barcamp with about 30 people that discussed different topics and had lightning talks. Topics included web frameworks and SQL/NoSQL compassions. The core conference had three parallel tracks with 30-minute and 60-minute slots. Our rather rigorous time management worked out: all presenters stayed within their allocated slots. It is a German conference after all. ;) Over three days we had 55 talks. The topics covered a wide range. Web development and scientific applications were the two largest themes but many other topics such as teaching Python, migration to Python 3 or Python compiler were covered. All talks are on vide...

We're pretty lenient around here and don't mind if you start your work the night before, unlike some of our teachers in college. In fact, we don't even mind if you turn in incomplete work by the deadline, as long as you work with us to fill in your details. If it's October 12 somewhere in this world, we'll take whatever proposals you have for PyCon 2012 and we'll start working through them to plan the 2012 conference, taking place March 7-15. PyCon's new home is Santa Clara, CA for the next two years, and we hope you can join! If you want to be a part of the show but haven't nailed down an idea, don't worry, we already did some research. After emailing over 100 Python user groups and other Python related communities, we sifted through the results and came up with lists of talk and tutorial ideas. PyCon is a great platform to share your projects, ideas, thoughts, or whatever else you have. The Wednesday October 12 deadline is for all tutorial and...

Yup! Time is running out for PyCon 2012 talk and tutorial submissions. The call for proposals ends in 4 days! The good news is that if it is Oct 12th anywhere in the world, you will still be able to submit proposals to the system - but you shouldn't wait until the last minute to get your proposal in. Proposals can be in rough draft form - the program committee can, and will help you refine and improve your submission as needed. This includes talks and tutorials. Remember - accepted talk and tutorial speakers/instructors do get guaranteed registration - we've set a hard cap on registrations of 1500 attendees again this year, and by all estimations we're going to hit that cap very quickly! If you need help thinking of ideas - check out our posts on Posters , Talks , and Tutorial ideas - there's also a post about reaching out to people you'd love to have speak at the conference. There's also the #pycontalksiwant search on twitter. We're looking forward...

You really should. The poster session is perhaps the most interactive portion of the conference, putting the presenters and the audience on the same stage (well, the floor). As the audience comes and goes amongst the rest of the posters, your presentation could go in any direction. The creator of one of your dependencies might show up. One of your competitors might show up. People who don't know anything about your project might show up. People who maximize your project to its fullest extent might show up. Guido van Rossum might show up. You never know. The layout of the event is very open, with rows of 4'x4' poster boards, leaving plenty of room for gatherings at each board and allowing attendees to flow from poster to poster. Find one you like? Stop by, listen in on the conversation, and chime in with your questions and comments. Not interested in one? Grab a snack and check out another poster. (The delicious daily snack stations usually run near the poster room.) W...

As we step within one week of the PyCon proposal deadline , we're hoping the community can help make sure we put together the best conference possible. We've been reaching out to plenty of groups and people we know around the world, and Doug Hellmann recently posted about another approach: having you, the community, reaching out to the speakers you want to see. His post, titled Choose Your Own (PyCon) Adventure , explains his experience as editor of Python Magazine and how he went about getting writers. One of his most successful ways was to win over potential writers was contacting them directly as individuals. With that said, suggest away. Got a speaker you want to see? Contact them and see if they'll submit a proposal. Don't know how to get a hold of them? We'll try and track them down and see if they'll propose a talk. Feel free to leave a comment here on the blog, use the #pycontalksiwant tag on Twitter, or email the program committee . We'll see w...