The PyCon US Blog

Each July, the launch of the upcoming year's conference website is a huge moment for the PyCon team and community. It's a beacon to everyone that another PyCon is on the way, and a sign that the various teams that shape the event are already hard at work to prepare for it. For yet another year, we have a beautiful site in front of us: https://us.pycon.org/2015 , designed and implemented by long time sponsor Caktus Group . As with years past, the site is built on Django and Symposion, a conference management framework in use by several conferences in the Python community and otherwise. Caktus' prior involvement with that combination of technologies meant "we were able to concentrate on bug fixes and small features that make a big difference to the conference organizers," according to Rebecca Muraya, Caktus' lead developer on the PyCon 2015 site. Having been around the block with that stack has resulted in a higher quality site, and left more time to spend on ...

A guest post by  Django Girls . Django Girls  is a non-profit organization that organizes free, one-day workshops to teach women who have never programmed before how to build their first web application using Python, Django, HTML and CSS. You are invited to the  PyCon 2015 Django Girls Workshop  on  April 9th , just before  PyCon 2015  starts, at the  Palais de Congres  in Montreal. As a Django Girls workshop attendee, you will be provided a free ticket to PyCon which takes place from  April 10th to  April 12th , so you can dive deeper into the wonderful world of programming and get to know our amazing community. You don’t need to have any programming experience - All you need to do is bring your laptop and your motivation to learn. You will work at your own pace in groups of 4 (3 attendees and one coach) Your coach will walk you through the Django Girls tutorial ( http://tutorial.djangogirls.org ) If you would like ...

The wait is over: PyCon 2015's schedule is available! The tutorial schedule has been available for several weeks now, and we made poster selections a while back as well, but we've completed the biggest part: scheduling 95 talks across three days in five rooms. https://us.pycon.org/2015/schedule/ It takes a lot of people to come up with this schedule, starting with those of you who submitted the 542 talk proposals we received. PyCon has always been a "what you make of it" sort of event, with so many people to talk to and things to do that it'd be hard to replicate the same experience twice, and that starts with these proposals. Thank you to everyone who submitted proposals this year. Another huge year for submissions means another great crew of volunteers gave a lot of their time to evaluate them. As with all things PyCon, a mixture of returning veterans worked with a set of first-timers, giving a lot of different viewpoints to bring us to this schedule. L...

A guest post by Stephen Jacobs . How many of you would be interested in a Friday night Passover Seder at PyCon? PyCon  overlaps this year with an eight day-long Jewish holiday ( Passover ) that commemorates the Biblical exodus of Egypt. For those of you who’ve never been to one, a  Seder  is a table-side, family run service with a period of story and prayer, a big meal and a shorter wrap up section interspersed with song and wine. The Seder is a teaching service, so you don’t need to know what to do before you get there. Non-Jews welcome :-) If we went forward with this, we’d try to hold it at the Hyatt (walking distance from the  Palais Du Congress ). It would be more expensive than the other  PyCon Dinners  (Kosher food and wine for the Seder raises the price considerably). A similar one held in San Francisco a few years ago ran about $80 a head, and that had sponsors defraying the costs. We can’t set it up, or cost it out, until we know how ma...