The PyCon US Blog

[A guest post by Kushal Das, one of the 2016 Sprint Coordinators] So — you have already decided to join in the PyCon development sprints! The sprints run for four days, from Thursday to Sunday after the conference. You do not have to be registered for the conference to attend the sprints! Some teams plan to write code over all four days, while some projects plan a shorter sprint if the organizers cannot stay for all four days. Can you start getting prepared for the sprint ahead of time? Yes! There are several things you can do ahead of time, that can save effort once you arrive at the sprints — and some preparations can even be made at home, before you arrive at PyCon: Have your operating system updated and patched — whether Mac, Windows, or Linux. This eliminates one possible source of problems with getting software up and running. Go ahead and install the version control system that will be used by the projects you are interested in. If you install both git and Mercurial on

A venue as exciting as the city of Montréal in 2014–15 and now Portland in 2016–17 often tempts attendees with children to want to go ahead and bring them along, turning what could have been simply a business trip into a full family vacation to a new city. Other attendees are in circumstances that make it impossible to leave their children at home, threatening to rule out PyCon entirely unless children can be accommodated. For both of these reasons, PyCon is proud to be offering childcare again for Portland 2016 — our third year of being able to offer this service to parents who are attending the conference. And we are especially grateful to our 2016 Childcare Sponsors: Facebook and Instagram ! Without the generous support of these Childcare Sponsors, parents would be facing a bill four times greater than the $50 per child per day that we are able to offer this year. By providing this generous subsidy, Facebook and Instagram are working to make the conference possible for paren

[A guest post by Startup Row coordinator Yannick Gingras:] What in the world could be more exciting than fantastic startups using Python to help change the world? The answer, simply put, is nothing. Come visit the Startup Row in PyCon 2016’s Expo Hall to see some of the best young companies pitch their startup ideas, and to learn how they are using Python to make an impact.  These are the best Python startups in North America, many of whom had to win a previous pitch competition in their home market to make it to Startup Row.  It’s this next generation of Python startups who will continue to build up our community, so let’s show them the support they deserve. The moment you’ve all been waiting for — drumroll, please — Announcing the 2016 Startup Row Selections for PyCon: UtilityAPI — An energy data infrastructure company that specializes in facilitating communication between utilities, account holders, and third parties. Metabrite — Provides consumer and behavioral insight

We organizers of PyCon 2016 are grateful that, amidst a roiling stock market and uncertain economy, so many sponsors have stepped forward to assert that their relationship with the Python community is worth investing in. And we are particularly happy to announce that our highest level of sponsorship has been filled. That’s right — a Keystone sponsor has stepped forward: Heroku is our Keystone sponsor for PyCon 2016! If you have attended a recent PyCon, you might remember visiting Heroku’s elegant booth in the Expo Hall . And many more of you in the community have used Heroku before to deploy web projects large and small — in their own words: “Heroku is a cloud platform that lets you build, deploy, manage and scale apps. We’re the fastest way from git push to a live app, because we let you bypass infrastructure and deployment headaches. You just focus on your code, and we make the rest easy.” Speaking from personal experience, when I helped build a Django app for a non-p