The PyCon US Blog

Today is the last day we're accepting Financial Aid applications for PyCon 2013 ! Apply for Financial Aid here. Whether it's assistance with tickets or travel, hotel or tutorials, the PyCon organizers have a budget that has now been increased twice in order to provide greater assistance for members of our community. We think a trip to PyCon is worth it for everyone, so if assistance would make your trip possible, we hope you'll apply. For more information about our financial aid program, see  https://us.pycon.org/2013/assistance/ .

As of this morning, the registration count is a just short of 1200, putting us very close to halfway sold out. However, if you want to go to PyCon, don’t plan on waiting too long. We typically see two surges in ticket sales: right after the holidays, and right after the schedule is announced. Guess what’s happening soon? The holidays and the schedule announcement. Register today! The list of selected talks was announced a few weeks ago, so check it out. We’ve got talks by the perennial favorites Alex Martelli and Raymond Hettinger and many newcomers. The list features a diverse list of topics and presenters, with many familiar faces and many breaking onto the scene. The selections came from over 450 proposals, and given the excellent quality of proposals we received, we could have made two or three entire conferences out of the submissions. It’s really going to be a great three days of talks. The tutorials are already scheduled and can be added to any existing registrations by lo...

Guest post from FOSDEM Python room organizers Stephane Wirtel . The FOSDEM conference is the biggest open source conference in Europe. Like every year, FOSDEM   will take place the first weekend of February in Brussels, Belgium. This year, Python will have a dedicated developers room in the K building which seats 80 participants. This developer room will be open all day Sunday, February 3rd. If you want to present a talk in the Python devroom, please go to the Python FOSDEM website  to fill the survey. Submissions are being accepted until December 21st, so don't delay! This year, the submissions will be reviewed by the following committee members: Tarek Ziade  (Mozilla) Ludovic Gasc   (Eyepea) Christophe Simonis ( OpenERP) Stephane Wirtel   (OpenERP) Thank you for submitting your session proposals and we hope to see you soon in Brussels to talk Python and/or have some nice Belgian Beers :) Everyone is welcome and we encourage...

As registration continues and we approach 1100 attendees, don’t forget that financial aid applications are due by December 31! Register for the conference here! Apply for Financial Aid here! This year’s financial aid budget has increased significantly to help you, the attendees, make the trip to another great year of PyCon. The organizers provide the slate and fill in a few blanks on the schedule, but PyCon is what you make of it. It’s the hallway chatter, lunch conversations, dinner plans, and the entire other conference that goes on at night - the open spaces. The financial aid program can assist ticket, travel, and hotel expenses, and there are questions for all of the above for you to estimate your plane or train tickets and to choose how long you’ll be staying. We want to make PyCon a possibility for as many people as we can help, so please be accurate with your requests! PyCon 2013 also includes a grant program run by PyLadies to help more women join the fun at PyCon. Thi...

The following is a guest post by Paul Hildebrandt of Walt Disney Animation Studios . Hi! I'm Paul Hildebrandt, Senior Software Engineer at Walt Disney Animation Studios.  The Studio has been a PyCon sponsor for several years.  We highly value the relationship and love being part of the community.   Recruiting You want talent; go to the community passionate about the technology.  There will be 2500 attendees that are interested in Python.  In 2012 they held a jobs fair and are hosting one again in 2013.  I worked the jobs fair table with 2 other engineers (attendees) last year and we talked to hundreds of attendees.  We've found good candidates because of our involvement in PyCon and the Python community. Influence It's nice to get credit for doing the right thing.  Our sponsorship of PyCon has helped us open the conversation with people in the open source world.  You move from just being a user to a contributor.  It's nice to get a “...

In coordination with the  Postgres  community and PyCon US 2013,  PyPgDay  is occurring in Santa Clara on March 13 from 9am-6pm. PyPgDay will be a full-day event with seven talks about PostgreSQL and Python, including talks by contributors to PostgreSQL, Django, PostGIS, and Python. Half the talks will help PostgreSQL DBAs, and the other half will focus on developing Python applications using Postgres features. Why Postgres and Python are more vibrant communities that have much in common. Both at their core are open communities that believe in making the world better through the software they release. Beyond just similarities in the communities many Python users are Postgres users and vice-versa. Because of the overlap in users among many of these communities allowing the opportunity for both to benefit from closely timed and coordinated events it makes it easier on attendees of both. Topics While there are a couple of Postgres talks at PyCon PostgreSQL for P...

As we happily join the celebration of Ada Lovelace’s 197th birthday, we’re also happy to announce that Women Who Code is joining our community sponsorship list! Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer in the early 1800’s, became known as the first computer programmer through her work on Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine”. Without her foresight into what the engine could do, namely operations on things other than numbers, who knows what might be different today? She unfortunately passed away at the young age of 36, long before her ideas on advancing the use of calculating machines came to fruition, but her impact lives on and is celebrated each year in a mid-October “Ada Lovelace Day”. She’s also celebrated in today’s Google Doodle and around the tech news world! Women Who Code is a San Francisco-based meetup to provide a low-key environment for women to get together and hack on whatever projects they choose. Their schedule includes upcoming events to hack on Scala, Java...

The long awaited tutorial schedule has been released! This year’s accepted tutorials include several returning veterans and a great group of newcomers, so take a look - there’s a lot to learn. Now that the tutorials are available, those of you who have previously registered can log back into the site and begin to add tutorials to your existing registration. If you’re about to register, tutorials are easy to add to your package as you go along. Each tutorial costs $150, which is an absolute steal, especially when you consider that many of these instructors are full-time educators whose regular courses cost significantly more. Plus, they’re brought to you right at PyCon! We also have several instructors who are domain experts or even the creators of the software being taught. New for this year is a tutorial intended for attendees with not only zero Python knowledge, but no programming knowledge at all. Jessica McKellar will be teaching "A hands-on introduction to Python for beginn...

Right now is your last chance to get a discount on PyCon 2013 tickets! We've sold 985 tickets so far and have only 15 remaining at the discounted early bird prices. We had 100 left just over a day ago so tickets are moving quickly. Buy your PyCon tickets here! If you hurry up, you could save up to 25% on the three day conference passes. Corporate tickets are reduced by $150 to $450, so why not register today and put that $150 towards a tutorial (you can add tutorials later on - they are not yet available)? If you're buying your own ticket, buying early saves you $50 and gets you in for $300. Try to find a better deal than that - you can't. Students can save $25 on top of the $100 they already save, as we've cut student rates in half for 2013. If you don't get your tickets today, don't worry, there's still 1500 more tickets available at the regular conference rates which are already a pretty great deal when you take a look at what other large confer...

For the past two years, one of our most successful and impressive experiments has been the creation of "Startup Row", where we let Python powered startups apply for free booth space, registrations and coverage. Like all things, this has only gotten better and more impressive with time. We knew that a lot of startups used Python, but we were astounded and excited to see the number and quality of new companies that were eager to participate at PyCon and show off what they were doing. At PyCon itself, we've continually got a lot of comments from attendees that Startup Row was their favorite part of the Expo Hall. From meeting and talking with the founders of so many great companies, it was obvious that they would go far. Last year alone, we heard from several Startup Row participants that they were even approached by potential investors  - that's right, we had Angel Investors and "big boy" VCs at the conference, and the conversations that they had with the pa...

pyArkansas photos on Flickr This fall marked the fifth year for pyArkansas . It's hard to believe that it was only a little over five years ago that Greg Lindstrom and I crossed paths on a email thread about getting a Python user group together in Arkansas. Greg also had the idea for putting on a small Python conference. I think we would both admit that we've struggled at starting a user group, but we have been very successful with pyArkansas. We never kept any attendance records (we probably never really saw a need to), so we don't know for sure how many people we've had over the years, but I think our first year in 2008, we had about 30 or so folks show up. That first year was very informal, our website was a wiki that Jeff Rush set up for us, and our budget was $1800 (which we thought was huge), funded completely by Novasys Health , and went almost completely to bringing in speakers. The University of Central Arkansas (UCA) Department of Computer Science gracio...

On the heels of the long awaited list of accepted talks for PyCon 2013 comes news that early bird registration is nearly sold out. For 2013 a new approach was taken, shifting from a time-based early bird window to a ticket-based one, where the first 1000 tickets sold receive discounted rates. Registration information can be found at https://us.pycon.org/2013/registration/ . There are about 100 early bird tickets left That’s right, we just hit our 900th registered attendee for PyCon 2013, so after the next 100 tickets are sold, the regular rates will apply. Sales then continue up to our cap of 2500 attendees. If your employer is paying for your tickets, they can receive a 25% discount if they make the purchase soon. After the early bird rate ends, the $450 discounted ticket price goes up to $600, which is the same rate PyCon has kept going back several years. If you’re paying for yourself, save $50 by buying one of the remaining early bird tickets. The regular rate takes a slight incr...

On behalf of the PyCon Program Committee, I'm thrilled to announce the list of talks for PyCon 2013 ! It's an amazing program that's a true testament to Python's reach: we'll have talks covering everything from robotics to REST; from Chef to cloud computing; from PostgreSQL to PyPy; and everything in between. There are some incredibly deep technical talks as well as talks for people completely new to Python and programming in general. Whether you're into web development, relational or non-relational databases, design, testing, debugging, high performance, or scientific computing – PyCon 2013 has you covered. As you may already know, this was an incredibly hard decision for the Program Commitee: we had over 450 submissions for only 114 slots on the program. Further, the quality of submissions was very high; the committee debated each and every talk very closely. I want to sincerely thank everyone who submitted a talk: the quality of PyCon comes fro...