Who is at the sprints?
Sprints at PyCon US are organized by the attendees. The conference provides the space with tables, power strips, Internet connectivity, and, for the first two days, catered lunches. The attendees band together to work on their open-source and community projects of choice.
You can expect bigger projects like CPython, Django, Flask, or BeeWare, to have their own dedicated rooms to hack on their stuff. Smaller projects either group together topically or just join a random friendly room with empty seats.
You’ll find project maintainers, seasoned contributors, community organizers, and first-time contributors alike. Everybody’s welcome!
Which project should I join for sprints?
This is a question worth answering before coming. Sprints work best for contributors who are already users of a given project. If you know a project like, say, CPython or Django well enough, you probably stumbled upon a bug in that software in the past. Maybe you looked into how some internals of that software work. Maybe you thought about making a change to it in the past. Or maybe you at least saw enough tracebacks that you feel somewhat familiar with the software you’re using.
The most impactful way to participate in sprints is to choose a project you’re familiar with, at least as a user. The project maintainers who come to sprints are helpful people and want you to succeed with your contribution. Meet them halfway and choose a project you already use. There’s not enough time during the sprints for maintainers to install software for the first time and explain how it works on somebody else’s laptop.
First PR to CPython
For CPython in particular, the maintainers at the sprint recommend that sprint attendees have at least 2 years of experience as users of the Python programming language. A sprint isn’t the best place to learn the basics of programming. But it’s totally okay to be new at contributing to Python. This year we’ll be continuing to host a dedicated space for first-time contributors to CPython to make sure the experts around you are best-equipped to help you get your first pull request merged. Look for the dedicated “First PR to CPython” signage on the sprint room list.
Are there any easy issues to work on?
This depends on the project. Some issue trackers contain issues marked as “easy” or “help wanted”. You can look at those first. Sometimes such issues are a bit of a trap. When an “easy” issue is still open 3+ years later, it often means there’s something not particularly easy about it.
Asking the maintainers present at the sprint for an issue to fix is another way to get something to work on. That will often mean that you’ll get involved with whatever that maintainer already planned to work on. This might be super interesting or pretty boring to you, depending on what that particular topic area is.
Speak up!
Sprints are different from tutorials and talks. Everybody, including the experts in the room, hunker down and work on something. If you get stuck with an issue, others around you will probably not notice. A good rule of thumb is to fight with an issue for 45 minutes, and if you’re not making progress, let others know where you’re stuck. They might be able to help unblock you.
Have fun!
Sprints are fun, surprisingly productive, and sometimes spark big things! We also can’t overstate the importance of putting a face to a name. “Don’t be a stranger” is good advice. Connecting a GitHub account name with a good experience you had at a conference is a great way to build trust and fast-track online collaboration in the future!
And that’s that. The mysterious sprints demystified! Come and see for yourself whether they’re really the best part of PyCon US.
(Abridged from Łukasz Langa’s 2025 post)
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