The PyCon US Blog

The EuroSciPy conference will have its sixth edition this year August 21 - 25 in Brussels, Belgium. Two days of tutorials, two days of talks and one day of sprints make a great gathering of Pythonistas with diverse scientific backgrounds in Europe. While the tutorial program is already online, the deadline for the call for abstracts just got extended to May 5, 2013.  So there is still about a week to submit an interesting topic for a talk or a poster. You use Python for interesting scientific projects? Please consider presenting your work in Brussels.

At PyCon, we sprint . That is, once the conference is over, rather than peacefully going back home to recover from three hectic days of learning and networking at an unhealthy pace, we stick around and start coding with the people that we meet only once a year. Sprints are fun, and different people attend for different reasons, but they all agree that there is something special about the sprints that would be hard to replicate from the comfort of your office or your living room. Here's what some of the sprint leaders have to say about the PyCon sprints this year. Proximity One benefit of sprinting that is often reported by project leaders is the proximity of other hackers. It can be people working on the same project who get to hammer out the specification of a complex feature. Sometimes it's the availability of sprinters working on other projects who have experience with something that's common to multiple projects: porting to Python3, setting up a continuous depl...

PyCon 2013’s “Change the Future” theme was a nod to Python’s growing use in education, and to devices like the Raspberry Pi and their targeted child audience. Before 2,500 attendees descended upon the Friday through Sunday conference, which gave each of them a Raspberry Pi , kids filled a lab for two days of free tutorials on the tiny computer that taught them the basics of Python. They, too, took home a Raspberry Pi. Not only did the “ Young Coder: Let’s Learn Python ” tutorials lay the foundation for many children to go on and learn to program, they sent at least one father down that same path. 9-year-old Havana Wilson of Denver, Colo., made the trip to PyCon with her father, Bruce. After she showed interest in building video games, dad looked around the web for how to get her involved. “It was my job to turn her desire into action, so I did research on the most intuitive programming language that has the ability to produce games but also could be a wonderful gateway into progra...