Only one month from today, PyCon will be almost over! The conference will be on the third and final day of its program. The sponsor booths will all have been packed up the night before and the Expo Hall re-purposed for a morning full of Poster presentations and Job Fair tables. Only one quick afternoon of talks will stand between us and the closing ceremonies.
Here in the present, the hatches are nearly all battened down. The schedule is set. The conference is completely sold out of registrations. The sponsor lineup is nearly finished, with only a few booths still left to be claimed. Almost everything is now in place — though, we do still need more attendeees to sign up as volunteers, a topic about which we will blog in further detail next week.
Meanwhile, the time has come to announce this year’s keynote speakers, who will be addressing the conference during our plenary sessions! They are:
- Kelsey Hightower
- Katy Huff
- Jake Vanderplas
- Lisa Guo & Hui Ding
We look forward to hearing from each of them!
You might be wondering: where on this list is Python’s fearless leader and perpetual keynote favorite, Guido van Rossum? Don’t worry! Guido will definitely be on stage this year as part of a special Sunday morning plenary session — the details of which we will be announcing soon. Intrigued? Watch for our announcement next week!
Here are more details about 2017’s keynote speakers:
Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower is an open source advocate and recovering sysadmin who is currently serving the application container and distributed systems community as an educator and toolsmith. He is currently employed by Google.
Katy Huff
Dr. Kathryn D. Huff is an unapologetic advocate for open reproducible scientific computing and for emissions-free base-load nuclear energy. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she leads the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group. She holds an affiliate faculty position with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and is one of the University of Illinois' most recent Blue Waters Professors.
Her current research focuses on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles. She is currently the elected chair of the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division of the American Nuclear Society. Through leadership with the Hacker Within, Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Journal of Open Source Software, and other initiatives, she strives to advocate for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing. With colleagues, collaborators, and friends, she has co-authored two books to help scientists with these practices: Effective Computation in Physics, O’Reilly, 2015 and The Practice of Reproducible Research, UC Press, 2017.
Jake Vanderplas
Jake VanderPlas is an astronomer by training, and a long-time user and developer of the scientific Python stack. He currently works as an interdisciplinary research director at the University of Washington, where he writes, teaches, collaborates on research, and spends time consulting with local scientists from a wide range of fields.
Lisa Guo
Lisa Guo is a networking, platform, and scalability software engineer with over 20 years experience. She has been working with the Instagram Infrastructure team since 2014, where she led efforts to expand from a single to multiple data centers and improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Prior to joining Instagram, Lisa worked on Facebook’s Software Defined Networks strategy and deployment. She was also Director, Engineering at Juniper Networks in charge of software development for EX switching series. She joined Juniper through its acquisition of NetScreen, and held core infrastructure development roles at Shasta Networks, Tahoe Networks.
Hui Ding
Hui Ding is Head of Infrastructure org at Instagram, where he oversees the scaling of Instagram backend platform that supports hundreds of millions of concurrent users on a daily basis. Hui has been with Instagram since 2012, and has led the development of many Instagram product launches as well as all infrastructure efforts.
Before joining Instagram, Hui was a core member of the Facebook infrastructure team, building its distributed data store for the social graph. Hui holds a PhD in computer engineering from Northwestern University.