The PyCon US Blog

A post by Don Sheu, one of our Startup Row Coordinators PyCon 2016’s Startup Row got our campaign on the road on March 9th in San Francisco, meeting with the local SF Python user group at Yelp headquarters. Six early-stage companies that use Python gave their pitches, competing for an opportunity to exhibit in the PyCon Expo Hall on Startup Row. The roster of candidate startups included Alpaca , Bauxy , Beansprock , Opsulutely , Watt Time , and UtilityAPI . UtilityAPI won! They convinced the judges that its services for the new energy economy held the most promise, edging out their high quality competitors. Founded by Daniel Roesler and Elena Lucas, UtilityAPI provides easy access to usage data for customers like PG&E, ConEdison, and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. An outstanding panel of judges selected our winner. On the panel were several entrepreneurs with successful exits like Bethanye McKinney Blount , Bebe Chueh , and  Leah Culver . Kat Manalac, ...

We are nearly out of booths! While PyCon does continue to accept new sponsors once we run out of Expo Hall booths, and those final sponsors enjoy almost every benefit of their sponsorship level, they are placed on a waiting list for a booth and can miss out on one of the most exciting ways to connect with attendees at PyCon. If you haven’t yet applied to sponsor PyCon 2016 because you have been eyeing the larger sponsorship levels — Platinum, Diamond, and Keystone — but have not yet reached a decision, then this year presents a special opportunity. With the markets uncertain and PyCon sponsorship down at every level, we have run out of Silver and Gold booths before running out of premium ones! Here is what remains in our inventory: 3 Platinum Level 10′×10′ booths 1 Keystone Level 10′×20′ booth You can snag one of these last booths by filling out our Sponsorship Form or can learn more details by reading our Sponsorship Prospectus . If instead of staffing an Expo Hall booth ...

By Jackie Kazil One of the privileges of becoming a PyCon sponsor is that you have the chance to contribute to one of the most creative events at the conference — the PyCon charity auction ! Contributing an item to the auction is a great way to get your name recognized, to receive a tax deduction, and to support PyLadies, a group of women developers worldwide who love the Python programming language. Auction details: Benefits PyLadies Tuesday, May 31, 2016, 6:30 to 9:00 pm Room F149–F152 in the Oregon Convention Center Thanks to the combined generosity of our sponsors and the audience, last year’s auction raised more than $12,000! Unique items are a way to for attendees to remember you. For example, Disney has donated concept art year after year since the auction was first held . Their donations have had a huge impact, and rank as PyCon’s consistently highest-bid item — the painting illustrated above, for example, was from the early work for Frozen . Donatio...

A guest post by  Naomi Ceder, one of our 2016  Sprint Coordinators. Sprinting has always been one of the hidden gems of PyCon, a part of every PyCon from the beginning, back in 2003. Hundreds of programmers stay one or more extra days after the conference to collaborate on open source projects large and small. The people who’ve done it treasure the experience. Not only do the projects that participate benefit from fresh eyes and ideas, but the sprinters usually find that they gain enormous insights into a particular problem or library, into the Python language, and even into coding in general. This year will be no exception, with many established projects sprinting and new projects joining. Given how cool sprinting is, many of us have been puzzled that more people don’t join the PyCon sprints. Why could that be? Well, we know that everyone has their own reasons behind what they choose to attend, but in case any of the following apply, we wanted clear a few things up. Re...

by Chalmer Lowe We are pleased to announce the speakers/talks for the   2016 Python Education Summit .  Held during   PyCon  on Sunday   May 29th, 2016 , the summit is a gathering of teachers and educators focused on bringing coding literacy, through Python, to as broad a group of audiences as possible.  We invite educators from all venues to consider joining the discussion, share insights, learn new techniques and tools and generally share their passion for education. We are looking for educators from many venues: authors; schools, colleges, universities; community-based workshops; online programs; and government. Talk Schedule Please take a look at the full list of talks .   If you are interested in joining us please visit our  registration page . We hope to see you there! Note:   All Scheduled Speakers are eligible for Early Bird pricing for attendance at PyCon! Lightning Talks In addition to the scheduled talks, we wi...

Everything is ready! You can now register for tutorials . You can sign up for free sponsor workshops . The list of accepted posters is now available. With these final three releases, the PyCon 2016 schedule is now complete — thanks to the long hours worked by the program committee chairs and co-chairs and reviewers. The tutorial chairs particularly wish to thank Allen Downey, Carol Willing, Jake Vanderplas, and Harry Percival for their help in selecting this year’s slate of tutorials. Tutorials are 3-hour classes that take place over the two days before the main conference. They are a great way to dive deep into subjects that PyCon’s talks cannot cover in as much depth. Signing up is easy, whether you have already registered for the main conference or not: visit our registration page , click the big red button, and select the “Tutorials and Sponsor Tutorials” add-on. Sponsor workshops are offered over the same two days as the paid tutorials, but are free! You do have to...

PyCon’s Startup Row kicks off our 2016 season with a pitch event March 9th , hosted by SF Python at Yelp! HQ. This continues a tradition started for PyCon Montreal 2014, where Startup Row held pitch events around North America to select participants. A benefit of this approach is to guarantee geographic diversity in our featured startups. On March 9th, early-stage startups will present at SF Python’s audience of over 200 for a chance to connect with the global Python community at PyCon Portland. Joining on the judging panel are Bebe Chueh Chief Marketing Officer of Legalzoom Local, bethanye McKinney Blount founder of Cathy Labs, Christine Spang founder of Startup Row alumnus Nylas, Jessica Scorpio founder of Getaround, and Kat Manalac partner at Y Combinator. Startup Row will award the winner selected by our judges with a free booth in the expo hall and two PyCon badges, so that they can join the 11 other early-stage startups on Startup Row in our Expo Hall at the Oregon ...

We are excited to announce our keynote speakers for PyCon 2016! Each speaker will be featured at one of our plenary sessions, of which there are four — a plenary session that opens each of the three main conference days at PyCon, and a final plenary session at the close of the main conference at the end of the third day. All of the following details are also available on our main conference web site on the Keynotes page, if you want to reference them there: https://us.pycon.org/2016/events/keynotes/ Parisa Tabriz Security Princess Parisa Tabriz has worked on information security for over a decade and as a (self-appointed) “ Security Princess ” of Google for the last 8+ years. She started as a “hired hacker” software engineer for Google’s security team. As an engineer, she found and closed security holes in many of Google’s products, and taught other engineers how to do the same. Today, Parisa manages Google’s Chrome security engineering teams , whose goal is to make C...

The Talks committee has been hard at work since the Call For Proposals closed 5 weeks ago, and today we are thrilled to present the result — here are the talks that the committee has chosen for PyCon 2016 in Portland, Oregon! https://us.pycon.org/2016/schedule/ Every committee member is a volunteer who has given the conference many hours of their own time to make PyCon an event that serves the Python community. They were helped along in the process this year by the new talk selection web app that the committee chair wrote. The app lets people read proposals and cast votes whenever they find the time, instead of making them attend pre-scheduled meetings online. We hope this made participation possible for Python community members whose work schedule, family situation, or time zone made it difficult or impossible to help select talks in previous years. As always, the committee faced a daunting task with determination: The talks committee received 528 talk proposals They knew t...

If you compare the ticket prices that we charged at PyCon 2011 in Atlanta a half-decade ago to our prices today , you will notice something remarkable — that not only have we kept our Individual and Corporate prices stable as the conference has moved into larger and more expensive venues, but we have slashed our Student ticket prices by more than 40% over five years! The Python Software Foundation works to make PyCon affordable for as many users of the Python language as possible. But PyCon attendees who don’t live in Portland face many expenses beyond simply paying the registration fee. Travel can cost hundreds of dollars from within the United States, and more than a thousand for community members who fly from overseas. Lodging can be an equally weighty expense. And while the conference does provide breakfast and lunch on the three main conference days, that still leaves several meals that the traveler will have to pay for on their own. Because these registration and travel e...

Here are two crucial reminders as we head into the final weekend of our Call For Proposals: Talk  and Poster  proposals are due  this Sunday , January 3rd! The first of PyCon’s three main conference days will fall on  Memorial Day  this year (May 30th), which we wanted to reiterate in case that affects your plans. Recall that the dates of PyCon 2016 were a compromise that we faced because of the intense competition for venues in the cities that bid to host the conference. We are working to plan the conference ever farther ahead so that we can select more favorable dates from future cities. In the meantime, the compromise only affected 2016 — we are happy to report that in 2017, PyCon will return to its normal schedule of being a bit earlier in the Spring and also not falling on a national holiday. We do hope that college students will appreciate 2016 as an exception to the normal rule that PyCon falls late in the school year when you are busy with papers ...

A community conference like PyCon is run by volunteers. There are many ways to get involved if you are interested in serving the community as part of the team who makes the conference possible. Here is what the volunteer calendar looks like for PyCon 2016: The two major opportunities to volunteer  before the conference  are happening right now — we need volunteers for the two program committees who work to put together PyCon’s schedule! The  Talks Program Committee  votes on which talk proposals get to become part of the conference schedule. They are currently working on the 300 talk proposals that have already been received, and will probably have several hundred more to evaluate by the time the Call For Proposals ends on Sunday January 3! If you have watched PyCon talks before and you are planning on attending PyCon 2016, then the program committee would love your help.  Volunteers get to use the cool new voting app  that the committee chair has wr...

We know that many of you will want to see more of Portland than just a conference center and the inside of a hotel room. You will walk downtown and visit Powell’s . You will hike mountains and canyons . You will find a cozy bed & breakfast in the Oregon wine country . You will visit the Pacific coast and watch the gray whales swim past on their way back north to Alaska from their breeding grounds off the Baja peninsula. And some of you are looking forward to the marijuana. Following the 2014 legalization of recreational marijuana in Oregon, and of direct sales from dispensaries in 2015, Portland has become a popular destination for those who wish to partake. So let’s be specific about what this means for the conference: You can’t consume at PyCon.  Don’t show up at PyCon high, just like you wouldn’t show up drunk.  Simple enough. You might expect me, at this point, to quote the Code of Conduct. Or to talk about my own deep pride in the fact that we run a...

Tutorial proposals for PyCon 2016 are due today.  The submission form will close once it has passed midnight in every time zone. If you have dreamed of giving an in-depth 3-hour class to your fellow PyCon attendees, it is time to write up a description and get it submitted! What is a Tutorial? https://us.pycon.org/2016/speaking/tutorials/ The main CFP. https://us.pycon.org/2016/speaking/ The “Submit a new proposal” button is on your dashboard. https://us.pycon.org/2016/dashboard/

There are only two weeks left before PyCon tutorial proposals are due! If you have ever dreamed about delivering a valuable 3-hour tutorial in front of dozens of fellow PyCon attendees, you can read more about the proposal process here: https://us.pycon.org/2016/speaking/tutorials/ You might have been pondering a question as you finished reading my post last week. It celebrated PyCon 2016’s more aggressive schedule, which moves the proposal deadlines closer to the date of the conference. But you might have been puzzled that there are now two separate dates: Tutorial proposals are due:  2015 November 30 Talk and poster proposals are due:  2016 January 3 The difference between the two dates is more than a month. Why aren’t talks and tutorial proposals simply due on the same day? The answer is that the tutorial selection process is not as compressible as the process for talks. To understand the difference, first consider the task faced by the talk committee: Talks...

“Why does PyCon make us submit proposals six whole months before the conference? They expect us to start thinking of topics for PyCon 2016 while it is still 2015!” To be honest, I used to ask the same question about PyCon myself. Now that I am the conference chair, I have the privilege of working directly with the volunteers who make the conference possible! They have been generous with their time in bringing me up to speed on how each of their committees operate, helping me see the big picture of how the conference schedule is negotiated each year. And better yet, they have proved willing to accept a challenge: we have made the schedule more aggressive this year, to close some of the gap between the close of the Call for Proposals and the start of the conference itself! I am excited about the results of their hard work: Tutorial proposals are due on 2015 November 30, which is 25 days closer to the conference than the same deadline last year. Talk proposals are due on...

PyCon’s Registration and Financial Aid forms are now open! Their soft launch a few days ago revealed a form formatting problem on some Firefox versions, but the issue is now resolved and registration should work for everyone. Key facts: PyCon has sold out 4 times in a row. We expect PyCon 2016 in Portland to sell out as well! The first 800 tickets sell with an Early Bird discount, and go fast. If you need financial support to be able to attend PyCon, apply for financial aid. Here are the links: Registration Information Registration Form Financial Aid (Deadline: 2016 March 1) PyCon offers tremendous value for both individuals and businesses. PyCon’s three main conference days offer keynote speeches, nearly a hundred talks, Open Space rooms for meetings and workshops, and an Expo Hall where you can meet dozens of sponsor companies and open source non-profits. More than 3,000 fans and contributors to Python are expected to attend the conference! Both breakfast and lunch...

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...