The PyCon US Blog

While PyCon has some of the more affordable ticket prices around, at rates that haven't changed in a million years, a lot of other expenses go into conferences. For a lot of our attendees, travel and hotel costs add up. For that reason, we offer financial aid! When we include all types of attendees - tutorial, conference, and expo - there were 2660 people registered for something at PyCon 2014. Around 715 of them registered at the hobbyist rate and 185 at student rate, together comprising a third of our delegation as people paying their own way. Even some at our corporate rate end up footing the bill beyond their entry ticket. While some of them may be local, a significant majority of our attendees have to travel and stay in a hotel. When you look at where everyone's coming from, 10% of our attendees are from one of 50 countries outside of the US and Canada. Last year, 14 people came from literally the other side of the world: Australia. That's not a cheap flight. If

The Third Annual  Python Education Summit , held during  PyCon  on Thursday  April 9th 2015 , is coming together. We are gathering some excellent talk ideas (click here to see some of the proposed talks). Thanks to those who have summited talks so far. As with any event, the Education Summit can't be pulled off alone, so we are asking for volunteers. Some of the roles that you can help with include: Keynote Speaker Team : help us identify and invite Keynote speakers(s) Call for Proposal Manager : help us support the call for proposal process (answer questions, process submissions, etc) Emcee : help emcee for our second track in the afternoon Publicity Rep(s) : support us in advertising via the twitters/facebooks/etc Ushers/go-fers : help ensure that the actual event runs smoothly If you would like to help,  please contact  Chalmer Lowe  or  Jessica Nickel .  NOTE : Even if your schedule doesn't allow you to support through volunteering, please feel free to sign u

Tutorials Schedule After a busy few months of competitive reviews, the tutorials team within our program committee has completed their process and have come up with an awesome schedule… ta da!  https://us.pycon.org/2015/schedule/tutorials/ Led by Stuart Williams and Ruben Orduz, a fantastic team came together to shape this schedule, including Carol Willing, Ian Cordasco, Harry Percival, Allen Downey, Richard Jones, and Kenneth Love. Thanks to everyone for their efforts, both in reviewing and in submitting! Register for Tutorials On April 8 & 9, the two days preceding the conference talk dates, attendees have an opportunity to attend up to four different tutorials. Each day offers both a morning and afternoon session, each providing three hours of learning split by a snack break, with lunch in between the sessions. Our instructors come from a variety of backgrounds, including full time educators or trainers, authors, domain experts, and in a lot of cases, they've cre

A guest post by  Chalmer Lowe . PyCon 2015 Education Summit The  Python Education Summit , held during  PyCon  on Thursday  April 9th 2015 , is gathering of teachers and educators focused on bringing coding literacy, through Python, to as broad a group of audiences as possible.  We invite educators from all venues to consider joining the discussion, share insights, learn new techniques and tools and generally share their passion for education. We are looking for educators from many venues: authors; schools, colleges, universities; community-based workshops; online programs; and government. If you are interested in attending this summit, presenting or have questions, please contact  Chalmer Lowe  or  Jessica Nickel . Invitations are subject to availability. Education Summit - Call for Proposals Do you have a story to share on education and Python? We are actively looking for presenters for the Python Education Summit and have extended the submission deadline. If you are int

We are now down to the final 50 discounted tickets, and we expect them to sell pretty quickly! If you buy now, you can save up to 25% on corporate tickets or 15% on individual tickets. Student tickets are $25 off if you buy early, coming in at just $100. After these 800 early bird tickets are sold we'll be onto the regular rates, and we're expecting our fourth consecutive sell out. Don't wait too long or you may miss out. See  https://us.pycon.org/2015/registration/ for all of our registration details and buy your tickets today! Our program committee is wrapping up the talk and tutorial selections, which we're hoping to have available soon, with the schedule to follow.

Some people love the stuff that goes on before PyCon, and with good reason. The tutorials are probably the best tech training value around, the language summit and education summit (my baby!) are amazing chances to connect with the movers and shakers, and the young coder sessions are exploding with energy and learning. So if you find yourself showing up at PyCon earlier and earlier each year, who could blame you? But as cool as the pre-conference stuff is, we all know the main conference is even better. So many quality talks that everyone wants to be in at least two places at once the entire time, the keynotes, the lightning talks, the expo hall, the posters, not to mention the open spaces, hallway track, parties, dinners, and lunches. It just goes on and on. So it's no wonder that by the time Sunday afternoon rolls around everyone is a bit overloaded. People start filtering out, to catch planes, drive home, etc., and by Sunday evening things are definitely much sparser, and on M