The PyCon US Blog

The third PyCon DE October 14 - 19, 2013 in Cologne, Germany is calling for proposal for talks and tutorials . The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2013. Talk about what you do with Python. The range of topics is very wide. Talk presenters will get a ticket discount and tutorial instructor free conference entry.

We are glad to announce that PyCon India would be held this year during August 30 to September 1 at NIMHANS Convention Centre , Bangalore. A purely volunteer effort, it is being hosted for the fifth time in India. The last edition was conducted at Bangalore, India during Sep 2012. The Call for proposals (CFP) is open till July 15. Please submit your talk/workshop proposals and spread the word. Registrations are also open and early bird registrations at discounted prices are available till 30th June. Any questions, email us at (contact AT in DOT pycon DOT org) .

The 4th annual PyCon APAC 2013 will be held at Kogakuin University in Tokyo. The first three events were hosted in Singapore, and this year’s event for the first time in Japan. The schedule is as below. Tutorial: 2013-09-13(Fri) Conference: 2013-09-14(Sat)-15(Sun) Development Sprints: 2013-09-16(Mon / Publich Holiday in Japan) Now, we are seeking proposals for talks for this year’s PyCon APAC. Visit the PyCon APAC 2013 CFP page for more information. Submission deadline is 30 June . Since we are holding PyCon APAC, which is a conference for the entire Asia-Pacific region, we are expecting many international participants. Therefore, we are seeking a large number of English talk proposals. This is your chance to introduce your topic to Pythonistas in Asia! For more information on http://apac-2013.pycon.jp/index.html . Any questions and comments are welcome, email to us (2013 at pycon dot jp).

PyCon Canada 2013 https://2013.pycon.ca Heads up! You have just three more weeks to submit your talks, tutorials, and 5 minute lightning talks to PyCon Canada 2013. The deadline is June 21st 2013. Create an account and submit a talk! The second annual PyCon Canada will be held in  Toronto  on  August 9th - 13th 2013 .  We sold out a full month in advance last year, so be sure to buy your tickets soon! Student/Étudiant ($25.00) Individual/Individu ($99.00) Corporate/Entreprise ($199.00) We'll be announcing our featured speakers and keynotes , one at a time, over the coming weeks. Here are just a few to pique your curiosity: KAREN BRENNAN Karen Brennan is Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard University in the Graduate School of Education, having completed her PhD at the MIT Media Lab. Her research is primarily concerned with the ways in which learning communities support young people's development as co...

French translation:  http://montrealpython.org/fr/2013/05/pycon-day-sponsors/ It's that time again! Planning for PyCon 2014 is well underway, and we're currently preparing for the launch of our new site. With the launch comes a unique opportunity: Is your organization interested in being a launch day sponsor? PyCon 2013 launched on July 9, 2012 with 21 sponsors pledging support, leading the charge that drew over 150 organizations to pitch in to the biggest and best Python conference yet. We're planning a similar go-live date for the 2014 site, and we're building up our cadre of supporters for the April 9-17 conference taking place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Your organization's support enables PyCon to do the awesome things that it does. 2013 introduced a number of new events that we've heard great feedback on, so we'd like to keep doing those things and more. For example, the inaugural Young Coders tutorial was such a hit that there are already plans...

The EuroSciPy conference will have its sixth edition this year August 21 - 25 in Brussels, Belgium. Two days of tutorials, two days of talks and one day of sprints make a great gathering of Pythonistas with diverse scientific backgrounds in Europe. While the tutorial program is already online, the deadline for the call for abstracts just got extended to May 5, 2013.  So there is still about a week to submit an interesting topic for a talk or a poster. You use Python for interesting scientific projects? Please consider presenting your work in Brussels.

At PyCon, we sprint . That is, once the conference is over, rather than peacefully going back home to recover from three hectic days of learning and networking at an unhealthy pace, we stick around and start coding with the people that we meet only once a year. Sprints are fun, and different people attend for different reasons, but they all agree that there is something special about the sprints that would be hard to replicate from the comfort of your office or your living room. Here's what some of the sprint leaders have to say about the PyCon sprints this year. Proximity One benefit of sprinting that is often reported by project leaders is the proximity of other hackers. It can be people working on the same project who get to hammer out the specification of a complex feature. Sometimes it's the availability of sprinters working on other projects who have experience with something that's common to multiple projects: porting to Python3, setting up a continuous depl...

PyCon 2013’s “Change the Future” theme was a nod to Python’s growing use in education, and to devices like the Raspberry Pi and their targeted child audience. Before 2,500 attendees descended upon the Friday through Sunday conference, which gave each of them a Raspberry Pi , kids filled a lab for two days of free tutorials on the tiny computer that taught them the basics of Python. They, too, took home a Raspberry Pi. Not only did the “ Young Coder: Let’s Learn Python ” tutorials lay the foundation for many children to go on and learn to program, they sent at least one father down that same path. 9-year-old Havana Wilson of Denver, Colo., made the trip to PyCon with her father, Bruce. After she showed interest in building video games, dad looked around the web for how to get her involved. “It was my job to turn her desire into action, so I did research on the most intuitive programming language that has the ability to produce games but also could be a wonderful gateway into progra...

tl;dr:  PyCon Australia early bird registrations are now open! Find out more at  http://2013.pycon-au.org/register/prices , including details of our accommodation programme. PyCon Australia is excited to announce that  early bird conference registrations are now available  for our 2013 conference, to be held on Saturday 6 and Sunday 6 July in Hobart, Tasmania. Early bird registration will be extended to the first 80 confirmed conference registrations, or until Friday 3 May, whichever comes first. PyCon Australia is the national conference for students, enthusiasts and professionals working with the Python programming language; it represents a unique opportunity for Python developers to meet fellow developers, and gain knowledge from experts and core Python developers from around Australia and the world. Securing your registration during the early bird period ensures your place at all of the events that PyCon Australia has to offer. Early bird registration comes with a substantial di...

Spending a few days at a conference isn’t cheap. If you’re really lucky, it’s in your hometown or a short drive away. For a majority of the attendees, it’s a plane ride away and a few nights or even a week in a hotel. For many, it’s a plane ride across an ocean, from a different hemisphere. For André Augusto of Brazil, travel alone was almost a full month’s salary, but PyCon’s Financial Aid committee helped paved the way to bring him to his first PyCon in the US. “I really am grateful for the PSF and PyCon team for helping me out on this,” said André of his grant. “I am already saving for attending PyCon next year,” he says of PyCon 2014 which takes place April 10-17 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. For 2013, the financial aid budget started with a slight increase from years past, around $50,000. As the organizers began to put all of the parts together, we quickly saw that this was going to be a huge conference. More talks, more events, more of everything. What we needed was more mo...

With a conference theme of "Change the Future," as seen in the logo and marketing materials for the event,  PyCon 2013  made good on its bet on the future by providing all 2,500 attendees with their own Raspberry Pi personal computer. The device, a fully functional computer about the size of a deck of cards, is a popular teaching tool used to get children interested in computers. At the center of it all is Python. Raspberry Pi Foundation founder and trustee Eben Upton  delivered a keynote speech  to open the conference, explaining Python's place on the computer, including its use in developing the processor at Broadcom. "The wonderful thing for us about Python as a teaching language is it gives us a story that we can tell children. We can say, learn this language in which 'hello world' is 'print 'hello world,''" said Upton. "This puts a space program in the budgetary reach of every primary school in the world," said Upt...

In a first-ever event, the PyCon organizers hosted a charity auction with the proceeds benefitting PyLadies , a mentorship group to help bring more women into the Python and open source community. Held on Saturday March 16, the evening event brought in $9,284 in two hours by auctioning items donated by many of PyCon’s sponsors. After the event, the Python Software Foundation contributed the difference to make an even $10,000. The group also raised $900 through t-shirt sales at the conference. “I was stunned at the amount we raised,” said PyLadies member and volunteer auctioneer Katie Cunningham. Just days before, with the help of Barbara Shaurette, Cunningham was running a free two-day tutorial series for children titled “Young Coder: Let’s Learn Python”, which has been covered on the PyCon blog . “It was great to see people having to stand in the room, all seats were taken,” said organizer Lynn Root of the event’s attendance. While PyCon’s formal schedule only lasts until the ea...

Throughout the planning phases of PyCon 2013, for everything we did, we did it bigger than last year. Attendance? We raised the cap to 2500 and sold it out. Talks? We added a sixth track, packing on 19 more presentations. Financial Aid? We doubled the budget to $100,000. When it came to outreach, we went bigger than ever by reaching down to the little ones: children. For the first time, we offered two days of free tutorials for kids, titled “ The Young Coder: Let’s Learn Python ” Taught by Barbara Shaurette and Katie Cunningham , the duo partnered up to introduce Python to two groups: Wednesday’s group were under 12, and Thursday’s were 13-16. As a conference center full of professional developers were busy sharpening their knowledge of web frameworks, signal processing, and computer vision, a room full of kids were peeking over their monitors to learn about algorithms constructed of peanut butter and jelly. The lab was stocked with monitors, keyboards, and mice, but no fami...

As of yesterday, PyCon's Code of Conduct is now available on GitHub at  https://github.com/python/pycon-code-of-conduct ! Even though the 2013 conference has passed and the code has gone unchanged, we invite you to contribute to the future of the code. As we start our efforts on PyCon 2014, taking place in Montreal, putting the code on GitHub has already resulted in many comments and several adjustments. These changes benefit not only PyCon 2014, but the many conferences who use our document for their events.

On Sunday March 17th an incident occurred involving some inappropriate comments made during a crowded plenary session. Per the stated guidelines for  attendees  and  staff  the issue was reported to the PyCon 2013 staff and resolved privately. Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied. PyCon values the privacy of all attendees above everything. Except in cases wherein law enforcement must or could be involved, all reports and actions taken are kept confidential by PyCon staff. If anyone has additional questions or concerns about this event or these sanctions, please contact Jesse Noller at <jnoller@python.org>.

On Saturday night we recieved several reports that an attendee was using an illicit substance during a scheduled event at PyCon. This is illegal, and runs directly counter the family-friendly environment we ask attendees to help us create. We spoke to the attendee in question and informed them that their behavior showed poor judgement and was inappropriate and unacceptable at PyCon. They were expelled from PyCon 2013, and will not be allowed to attend PyCon US in 2014 or 2015. If anyone has additional questions or concerns about this event or these sanctions, please contact Jacob Kaplan-Moss at <jacob@jacobian.org>.

One of our great sponsors, LadyCoders , is running a contest throughout the conference! There are two parts to the contest: Scavenger Hunt - pick up an item list from their booth and put together a team up to 10 people and win some prizes. Programming Challenges - they're running a series of challenges with points awarded for the number of questions completed and for time. See their blog post about it, and stop by their booth for more information!

For those of you staying at hotels outside of the Hyatt (attached to the conference center), and the Hilton (across the street), there will be shuttle bus service through Sunday. The bus will wait for 10 minutes at each stop before proceeding to the next hotel. Morning Schedule: 7:00 am: Best Western 7:30 am Biltmore 7:45 am Avatar 8:00 am Marriott Arrive at the Santa Clara convention center around 8:15 The shuttle will do a second round, roughly 90 mins after the first round. Evening Schedule: 5:00 pm: Leave Santa Clara Convention Center 5:15 pm: Mariott 5:30 pm: Avatar 5:45 pm: Biltmore 6:00 pm: Best Western The shuttle will to a second round, roughly 90 mins after the first round.

PyCon kicks off in under 24 hours, and it’s kicking off at all thanks to our generous community of sponsors. We hope you’ll browse the expo hall and see what they’re all up to, chat with their developers, learn about their products, and maybe even pick up a job lead. Here’s what a few of them have been up to lately. Metacloud “ At Metacloud, we live and breathe OpenStack which means we also live and breathe Python,” says Todd Cranston-Cuebas of Metacloud . Their Python and Django expertise go a long way when it comes to building up their private cloud product. The combination gives them the ability to build, deploy, and support their OpenStack-based solutions for enterprise-level clients. The service runs on the client’s hardware, with a lot of care put into security, redundancy, and high-availability. “A big part of what drives open source projects is the fostering of an altruistic environment, a community that is driven by many different unique needs leading, ultimately to a refined ...

MongoDB and Python are buds. That is why we are excited to have MongoLab , the popular MongoDB cloud database service, at Pycon this year. MongoLab makes the deployment and management of MongoDB super easy. Backups, monitoring, alerting, and web-tools are all part of the package, and much of it is built on - you guessed it - Python! MongoLab's cloud and database automation layers are built on top of Python and Fabric . Furthermore, MongoLab open sources many of the Python tools that comprise MongoLab so that developers can use them in their own deployments. According to Will Shulman, CEO of MongoLab,  "At the end of the day, the MongoDB community is new and undergoing tremendous growth, especially among Python developers.  We released our open-source tools because we hope others can benefit from our knowledge of running tens of thousands of databases worldwide across every major cloud provider. Regardless of whether you are running your own stack or using a cloud database, th...