The PyCon US Blog

Have you ever dreamed of speaking in front of a conference crowd? Or of teaching a several-hour PyCon tutorial, that gives you the opportunity to lead an audience deep into the details of a technology so that they emerge with new and useful skills? Or have you wanted the chance to present a poster, regaling passers-by with the details of your project while being able to answer their questions one-on-one instead of under time pressure in front of a big group? Then know that the PyCon 2016 conference has issued its official Call For Proposals! PyCon 2016 — Call For Proposals Everyone, from veteran Python community members to newcomers who might never have attended a conference, is welcome to propose their idea for a talk, a tutorial, or a poster that will help share ideas, technologies, and experiences with the conference and the wider community. Note that the tutorial deadline this year is earlier than the talk and poster deadline. Because tutorials are 4 to 6 times longer t

South Africa’s fourth PyCon kicks off in just three days' time in Johannesburg! The conference takes place at the Witwatersrand University on the 1 & 2 October, with sprints at JoziHub on the 3 & 4 October. Schedule highlights include: Pragmatic Programming for Social Change by Greg Kempe from Code4SA Python in Production -- a panel discussion on deploying and using Python in production environments Python @ CloudFlare by Gideo n  Redelinghuys Boost.Python by Bruce Merry, recent winner of Google's first Distributed Code Jam How PyPy runs your Python Programs by Maciej Fijałkowski Pycon Montréal in 30 minutes  by PJ van Rensburg  ... and, of course, lightning talks ! See  za.pycon.org for all the details and the full schedule.

The new PyCon 2016 website is now live! The conference volunteers have worked hard to include all of the essential details about the schedule, venue, and hotels ahead of the Call for Proposals next week and the opening of Registration in mid-October. Our launch-day sponsors this year — those organizations that have already pledged support toward keeping PyCon affordable for as wide a range of attendees as possible — are from a broad array of fields that illustrate just how widely Python is used in today’s world: Our launch-day Diamond sponsor is the Caktus Consulting Group , a Django consultancy who not only supports the PyCon conference but who built our new site! Their designer Trevor Ray drew upon the colors and depths of the Portland skyline for the site’s look , while their engineers made numerous back-end feature improvements that will help our volunteer staff. At the Platinum level are two sponsors. SurveyMonkey has leveraged Python as one of their most effective tool

The long months of summer are finally at an end — for those of us in northern climes — and this Wednesday, on the first day of Autumn, the new PyCon website for Portland 2016 will launch! The conference is a bit more than eight months away, and it is time for us organizers to start sharing the details that will help community members plan their travel schedules, time, and involvement in the largest annual gathering dedicated to the Python programming language. In case your organization is interested in sponsoring PyCon and wants to already be listed as a sponsor on Launch Day when the website goes live, we have gone ahead and opened up the prospectus and application a few days before the rest of the site! https://us.pycon.org/2016/sponsors/prospectus/ https://us.pycon.org/2016/sponsors/apply/ Interested sponsors can also contact us at pycon-sponsors@python.org with any specific questions. And please do not panic if your company’s budget process or organization’s schedule does