The PyCon US Blog

tl;dr:  PyCon Australia early bird registrations are now open! Find out more at  http://2013.pycon-au.org/register/prices , including details of our accommodation programme. PyCon Australia is excited to announce that  early bird conference registrations are now available  for our 2013 conference, to be held on Saturday 6 and Sunday 6 July in Hobart, Tasmania. Early bird registration will be extended to the first 80 confirmed conference registrations, or until Friday 3 May, whichever comes first. PyCon Australia is the national conference for students, enthusiasts and professionals working with the Python programming language; it represents a unique opportunity for Python developers to meet fellow developers, and gain knowledge from experts and core Python developers from around Australia and the world. Securing your registration during the early bird period ensures your place at all of the events that PyCon Australia has to offer. Early bird registration comes with a substantial di...

Spending a few days at a conference isn’t cheap. If you’re really lucky, it’s in your hometown or a short drive away. For a majority of the attendees, it’s a plane ride away and a few nights or even a week in a hotel. For many, it’s a plane ride across an ocean, from a different hemisphere. For André Augusto of Brazil, travel alone was almost a full month’s salary, but PyCon’s Financial Aid committee helped paved the way to bring him to his first PyCon in the US. “I really am grateful for the PSF and PyCon team for helping me out on this,” said André of his grant. “I am already saving for attending PyCon next year,” he says of PyCon 2014 which takes place April 10-17 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. For 2013, the financial aid budget started with a slight increase from years past, around $50,000. As the organizers began to put all of the parts together, we quickly saw that this was going to be a huge conference. More talks, more events, more of everything. What we needed was more mo...

With a conference theme of "Change the Future," as seen in the logo and marketing materials for the event,  PyCon 2013  made good on its bet on the future by providing all 2,500 attendees with their own Raspberry Pi personal computer. The device, a fully functional computer about the size of a deck of cards, is a popular teaching tool used to get children interested in computers. At the center of it all is Python. Raspberry Pi Foundation founder and trustee Eben Upton  delivered a keynote speech  to open the conference, explaining Python's place on the computer, including its use in developing the processor at Broadcom. "The wonderful thing for us about Python as a teaching language is it gives us a story that we can tell children. We can say, learn this language in which 'hello world' is 'print 'hello world,''" said Upton. "This puts a space program in the budgetary reach of every primary school in the world," said Upt...

In a first-ever event, the PyCon organizers hosted a charity auction with the proceeds benefitting PyLadies , a mentorship group to help bring more women into the Python and open source community. Held on Saturday March 16, the evening event brought in $9,284 in two hours by auctioning items donated by many of PyCon’s sponsors. After the event, the Python Software Foundation contributed the difference to make an even $10,000. The group also raised $900 through t-shirt sales at the conference. “I was stunned at the amount we raised,” said PyLadies member and volunteer auctioneer Katie Cunningham. Just days before, with the help of Barbara Shaurette, Cunningham was running a free two-day tutorial series for children titled “Young Coder: Let’s Learn Python”, which has been covered on the PyCon blog . “It was great to see people having to stand in the room, all seats were taken,” said organizer Lynn Root of the event’s attendance. While PyCon’s formal schedule only lasts until the ea...

Throughout the planning phases of PyCon 2013, for everything we did, we did it bigger than last year. Attendance? We raised the cap to 2500 and sold it out. Talks? We added a sixth track, packing on 19 more presentations. Financial Aid? We doubled the budget to $100,000. When it came to outreach, we went bigger than ever by reaching down to the little ones: children. For the first time, we offered two days of free tutorials for kids, titled “ The Young Coder: Let’s Learn Python ” Taught by Barbara Shaurette and Katie Cunningham , the duo partnered up to introduce Python to two groups: Wednesday’s group were under 12, and Thursday’s were 13-16. As a conference center full of professional developers were busy sharpening their knowledge of web frameworks, signal processing, and computer vision, a room full of kids were peeking over their monitors to learn about algorithms constructed of peanut butter and jelly. The lab was stocked with monitors, keyboards, and mice, but no fami...

As of yesterday, PyCon's Code of Conduct is now available on GitHub at  https://github.com/python/pycon-code-of-conduct ! Even though the 2013 conference has passed and the code has gone unchanged, we invite you to contribute to the future of the code. As we start our efforts on PyCon 2014, taking place in Montreal, putting the code on GitHub has already resulted in many comments and several adjustments. These changes benefit not only PyCon 2014, but the many conferences who use our document for their events.

On Sunday March 17th an incident occurred involving some inappropriate comments made during a crowded plenary session. Per the stated guidelines for  attendees  and  staff  the issue was reported to the PyCon 2013 staff and resolved privately. Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied. PyCon values the privacy of all attendees above everything. Except in cases wherein law enforcement must or could be involved, all reports and actions taken are kept confidential by PyCon staff. If anyone has additional questions or concerns about this event or these sanctions, please contact Jesse Noller at <jnoller@python.org>.

On Saturday night we recieved several reports that an attendee was using an illicit substance during a scheduled event at PyCon. This is illegal, and runs directly counter the family-friendly environment we ask attendees to help us create. We spoke to the attendee in question and informed them that their behavior showed poor judgement and was inappropriate and unacceptable at PyCon. They were expelled from PyCon 2013, and will not be allowed to attend PyCon US in 2014 or 2015. If anyone has additional questions or concerns about this event or these sanctions, please contact Jacob Kaplan-Moss at <jacob@jacobian.org>.

One of our great sponsors, LadyCoders , is running a contest throughout the conference! There are two parts to the contest: Scavenger Hunt - pick up an item list from their booth and put together a team up to 10 people and win some prizes. Programming Challenges - they're running a series of challenges with points awarded for the number of questions completed and for time. See their blog post about it, and stop by their booth for more information!

For those of you staying at hotels outside of the Hyatt (attached to the conference center), and the Hilton (across the street), there will be shuttle bus service through Sunday. The bus will wait for 10 minutes at each stop before proceeding to the next hotel. Morning Schedule: 7:00 am: Best Western 7:30 am Biltmore 7:45 am Avatar 8:00 am Marriott Arrive at the Santa Clara convention center around 8:15 The shuttle will do a second round, roughly 90 mins after the first round. Evening Schedule: 5:00 pm: Leave Santa Clara Convention Center 5:15 pm: Mariott 5:30 pm: Avatar 5:45 pm: Biltmore 6:00 pm: Best Western The shuttle will to a second round, roughly 90 mins after the first round.

PyCon kicks off in under 24 hours, and it’s kicking off at all thanks to our generous community of sponsors. We hope you’ll browse the expo hall and see what they’re all up to, chat with their developers, learn about their products, and maybe even pick up a job lead. Here’s what a few of them have been up to lately. Metacloud “ At Metacloud, we live and breathe OpenStack which means we also live and breathe Python,” says Todd Cranston-Cuebas of Metacloud . Their Python and Django expertise go a long way when it comes to building up their private cloud product. The combination gives them the ability to build, deploy, and support their OpenStack-based solutions for enterprise-level clients. The service runs on the client’s hardware, with a lot of care put into security, redundancy, and high-availability. “A big part of what drives open source projects is the fostering of an altruistic environment, a community that is driven by many different unique needs leading, ultimately to a refined ...

MongoDB and Python are buds. That is why we are excited to have MongoLab , the popular MongoDB cloud database service, at Pycon this year. MongoLab makes the deployment and management of MongoDB super easy. Backups, monitoring, alerting, and web-tools are all part of the package, and much of it is built on - you guessed it - Python! MongoLab's cloud and database automation layers are built on top of Python and Fabric . Furthermore, MongoLab open sources many of the Python tools that comprise MongoLab so that developers can use them in their own deployments. According to Will Shulman, CEO of MongoLab,  "At the end of the day, the MongoDB community is new and undergoing tremendous growth, especially among Python developers.  We released our open-source tools because we hope others can benefit from our knowledge of running tens of thousands of databases worldwide across every major cloud provider. Regardless of whether you are running your own stack or using a cloud database, th...

Once again, the Python community came out in full force with a lot of great applicants to our Startup Row event, taking place Friday and Saturday at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Row includes seed-stage startup companies that are using Python to build their business. We were looking for interesting ideas and we came across a lot, so we think you’ll enjoy what these teams are up. Take a look at what they’re up to from 10 AM through 5 PM in the expo hall. Friday’s group: Coherent , your own personal shopper, picking out the coolest clothes LiteStack , makers of ZeroVM and enablers of interactive cloud analytics Orvant , a free online network vulnerability scanner, keeping all of your devices safe Plotly , making web-based plotting easier and much, much more beautiful Repustate , providing social media tools like sentiment analysis and predictions Wello , bringing fitness to your living room with live training sessions over two-way video Saturday’s group: Forge , a ...

PyCon moves around PyCon North America travels from one city to the other every two years.  After Santa Clara in 2013, we'll go to Montréal for two years.  Where we go from there is entirely up to you.    Do you want PyCon to come to your city?  This may seem very far away but it's already the time to start looking for our next venue for 2016 and 2017.  Here is how you can make it happen. The bidding process The next host city will be nominated by the site selection committee in the months following PyCon 2013.  Even though the deadline for proposing a city has not been set yet, interested cities should start working on their bid documents as soon as possible.  After all the bid documents are received, a shortlist of potential host cities will be picked and site inspection surveys will follow. What goes into the bid document The bid document should present your city, describe why it would be a great location for PyCon and highlight th...

The sprints are one of the best parts of PyCon. It's a great environment to meet up with old friends, make new friends, and hack on open source projects. Each year, projects around the Python world sketch out their next releases, introduce new contributors, and write a lot of code. Taking place on the second floor of the Hyatt, the hotel attached to the Santa Clara Convention Center where the tutorials and talks are happening, the sprints run from Monday March 18 through Thursday the 21st. Following the closing address on Sunday, from 4:30-5:00 will be an introduction to how the sprints work, where they'll be, and introductions to the projects who are attending given by the leader of the sprint. It's a great chance to get a quick look at what's happening and who's participating. Video by Tim Ansell After that, the sprints are on! Many sprints start right there at 5:00 with the projects heading to their respective areas over in the Hyatt, getting started ...