The PyCon US Blog

PyCon 2017 is in full swing. The last four days of the conference will be development sprints . If you've never heard about sprints before, this is the time when developers, maintainers, regular users/contributors, AND complete newcomers get together and develop features or fix bugs in their favorite projects. Many projects will be sprinting throughout various rooms. Last year there were roughly 500 people sprinting on many different projects. If you ever thought of contributing to Open Source projects, but did not know where to start, PyCon sprints are a great place to learn new skills. Having the maintainers of the projects sit at the same table with new contributors always helps to solve issues fast. I am a complete newcomer, don’t know where to start. Is joining development sprints a good idea for me? Quick answer: yes, of course . Not only do the experienced mentors help new developers at the sprints, we also have some extra help for beginners: * We try to ident...

It has been a trend over the past several years that our top sponsors — the companies who step forward to make the biggest investment in PyCon and its community — tend to be companies that not only use Python for their own development, but who turn around and offer Python as a crucial tool for their own customers. And that is certainly true of PyCon’s biggest sponsor this year. PyCon 2017’s Keystone Sponsor is Intel Corporation ! Did you see Intel’s booth in the Expo Hall at PyCon 2016 last year? It was a phenomenon. I remember remarking to a fellow volunteer that Intel was making stunningly good use of their space. Their booth was very nearly a small self-contained conference of its own. It featured a large display and space for a speaker to stand, which Intel used to run a busy schedule of quick presentations and tutorials that focused on both Intel hardware and their support tools for developers. There always seemed to be an attentive crowd gathered whenever I would pass by. G...

[A guest post by PyCon 2017’s Open Spaces Chair, Anna Ossowski!] Open Spaces are one of the most often overlooked activities at the PyCon conference. PyCon is not merely a 5-track conference — it’s true there are 5 tracks of talks, but there are also 5 tracks of Open Spaces that run alongside the talks. What are Open Spaces? Open Spaces are self-organizing meetup-like events which occur in parallel with main conference talks. There are actually more hours of Open Spaces, in total, than there are of talks! While most of the conference is planned months in advance, Open Spaces are created on-site by PyCon attendees. They offer groups the ability to self-gather, self-define, and self-organize in a way that often doesn’t happen anywhere else at PyCon. Open Spaces are one-hour meetups during the three main conference days, held in meeting rooms within the PyCon convention center. Some people reserve spaces to discuss a favorite technology — like web frameworks, neural nets, or na...

(A guest post from Jason D. Rowley, one of 2017’s Startup Row Coordinators!) What could be more exciting than startups who use Python and are poised to change industries and help build the future? We are very pleased to announce the seventh batch of companies that get to present on Startup Row. Come and visit Startup Row in PyCon 2017's Expo Hall to see some of the most interesting and innovative new technologies and business models out there, and to hear the engineers and other founders of these leading early-stage companies pitch their ideas and discuss how and why they use Python. And without further ado, here they are — PyCon 2017’s Startup Row batch: KITT.AI (Seattle, WA) – A chatbot authoring platform offering conversational understanding as a service, focusing on multi-turn dialog. Precognitive Inc (Chicago, IL) – Multidimensional fraud protection using device intelligence and behavioral analytics to detect illicit transactions on-the-fly. Astrohaus (New York,...

It’s back. Thanks to generous sponsorship from Heroku , we are excited to announce that PyCon 2017 will feature the return of the legendary Testing BOF! If you want to attend, all that’s necessary is to sign up for free on Eventbrite (the link is below) and then be sure to be at McMenamins Crystal Ballroom at 9:30pm on Friday evening — the first night of the main three PyCon 2017 conference days. From 9:30pm–11:30pm that Friday night, McMenamins Crystal Ballroom will be sparkling with the wit and technical wisdom of quick talks covering Python, testing, and the terrain in between at this high-velocity lightning-talk-style event. This popular birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session provides a late evening of lightning talks and socializing for those who write tests, maintain testing frameworks, complain about testing frameworks, or who are simply testing-curious. This is an official PyCon event and is governed by our Code of Conduct . Thanks to Heroku, drink tickets and snacks w...

We are happy to announce PyCon 2017’s Sunday morning plenary event — the final day of this year’s main conference will feature Guido van Rossum on a panel of Python programmers who attended the first-ever Python conference back in 1994! Paul Everitt will moderate the panel as they answer questions and share their memories about that first Python conference when the programming language was still young. At the beginning of 1994, the World Wide Web consisted of less than 1,000 sites. There was no distributed version control. No public issue trackers. Programmers communicated their ideas, issues, and patches in plain text on mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. The small community of Python programmers were connected through both a mailing list and the comp.lang.python newsgroup, which was busy enough that several new messages were appearing each day. An exciting announcement blazed out to subscribers of the Python mailing list in September 1994: Guido van Rossum, the Dutch researche...

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 forw...

It seems hard to believe, but two months from today PyCon 2017 will be underway in Portland! Attendees will be enjoying a full day of scheduled talks, self-organized Open Spaces, and visits to our many sponsors the Expo Hall. Only a little more than eight weeks remain until we meet in Portland. As PyCon’s volunteers put the finishing touches on their plans, talk slides, and rosters, here are several updates on the conference: Less than 100 tickets now remain! Soon the conference will be sold out and unable to accommodate any further attendees. If attending is crucial for you, we recommend signing up immediately while there is still time. All the major schedules are available on the site. The program committees who select talks , tutorials , and posters have completed their hard work for the year — thank you, volunteers! — and you can already start planning what you want to see. Several Sponsor Workshops are already scheduled. Attendees can register for free for these sessio...

The deadline for applying to PyCon 2017 for Financial Aid is this coming Wednesday, February 15th! The link to the application is on our main Financial Aid page: https://us.pycon.org/2017/financial-assistance/ Given that international travel to the United States has become a greater risk for many in the international community, PyCon wants to make an extra stipulation this year to try to protect our Financial Aid recipients in case they are turned away upon arrival in the United States. But, first, let’s get clear about the risks and duties of those who are awarded Financial Aid. For many people, airline tickets and nights at a hotel are never routine expenses. They are frightening blows against a bank account — large, exceptional purchases for special occasions. But what if a person becomes too ill to travel, cannot get a full refund, and the money is simply lost? What if a missed flight adds hundreds of dollars of extra expense that were not in the budget and for which they are...

On Thursday, January 26th, the PyCon Startup Row hosted its first local pitch event of the 2017 season! Braintree hosted the Chicago event at their headquarters in Merchandise Mart. Lagunitas donated beer, while Braintree provided food and soft drinks. ChiPy — Chicago’s official Python user group — joined as a community sponsor. Our panel of judges included Tamim Abdul Majid, Marcy Capron-Vermillion, and Keith Vermillion. Our panel selected Precognitive to represent Chicago in Portland at PyCon 2017 — congratulations! Precognitive scans user behavior and other analytical factors to identify and flag fraudulent transactions on-the-fly. Will your city have a company on Startup Row this year? The best way to guarantee representation of your local startup community at PyCon 2017 is to host a pitch event. We want a startup from your city to join us on Startup Row in 2017. Here’s a kit explaining what’s involved in holding a local pitch event. Contact Startup Row organizers Jason Rowle...

Starting at the 2011 conference in Atlanta, the PyCon Expo Hall has offered a special event for startups: “Startup Row,” a row of booths that features interesting startups built with Python. We’re happy to announce that applications to Startup Row at PyCon 2017 in Portland, Oregon, are now open! You may have questions about Startup Row, so here we provide some basic answers. How do I apply? There is information about applying at the end of this post, but if you’re the “do first, ask questions later” type, go to our application form . What do Startup Row companies get? We give founders a unique opportunity to connect with the vibrant, diverse community of engineers, data scientists, speakers, investors and enthusiasts who come to the world’s largest Python programming conference. Startup Row companies get: Free booth space Admission to PyCon for two startup team members Coverage here on the PyCon blog and elsewhere A couple of fun events exclusively for Startup Row companies...

Teachers, educators, Pythonistas, come and share your projects, experiences, and tools of the trade as you teach coding and Python to your students. The “Call for Talks” to speak at the Annual Python Education Summit, which is held in conjunction with PyCon, is open until January 3rd. We want to hear from you! Go here for more details: https://us.pycon.org/2017/speaking/education-summit/ We are looking for ideas and experiences and best practices: how teachers and Python programmers have implemented Python instruction in their schools, communities, and other places of learning. Have you implemented a program that you’ve been dying to talk about? Have you tried something that failed, but learned some great lessons that you can share? Have you been successful implementing a particular program? Then we urge you to submit a talk! You do not need to be an experienced speaker. We want you to share knowledge; we want to learn from your experiences. This year, talks that focus o...

With the holidays nearly here, this is the moment to ask yourself: are you really — when you return groggily to work on Tuesday January 3rd following the “New Year’s (Observed)” holiday on Monday — going to remember to write and submit your Talk, Poster, and Education Summit proposals for PyCon 2017? Waiting until the last minute is very tempting. After all, the whole reason that we worked with the Talk and Poster committees to move the deadline as close to PyCon as we dared was to let you submit as current and as up-to-date a proposal as possible. But — are you sure that you want to risk starting your first work day of the New Year (if your schedule even puts you back at work by the 3rd!) with a conference deadline looming only hours later? I myself am adopting a safer approach this year: I will be going ahead and submitting all of my proposals this week, ahead of the holidays. Then, if I do remember the deadline, I can always log into the PyCon web site on January 3rd and us...

This is the time of year when the upcoming PyCon really starts to feel closer, with the close of our earliest CFP (Call for Proposals) tomorrow on November 30. This is the first of several milestones for the conference that start arriving more and more frequently through the late autumn and winter. Each milestone ratchets PyCon one step closer to its arrival. Our earliest CFP is for our Tutorials, which closes tomorrow — at the end of the day on November 30 anywhere on Earth . So if it is still November 30 in your time zone, then the CFP will not yet be closed! What are the main features of Tutorials? Tutorials are 3-hour-long courses that pack the first two days of the PyCon conference schedule. Students register ahead of time and pay separately for each 3-hour tutorial they attend. We end the Tutorials CFP a full month earlier than for Talks and Posters, so the tutorials committee has extra time to fully vet each proposal and to generate a solid line-up of valuable topics ...

The PyCon 2017 call for proposals (CFP) first opened about a month ago, and the team who will be bringing the conference to Portland have been excited to watch the first wave of submissions roll in. Exciting topics from across the PyCon community have already been proposed for our talks, tutorials, and poster schedules. But we know that many of you are brimming with ideas that you have not yet submitted, so we wanted to remind you of this year’s deadlines: Talk proposals will be due on 2017 January 3. Poster proposals will be due on 2017 January 3. Tutorial proposals are due on 2017 November 30. Yes, that’s right — tutorial proposals are due in three weeks! Last year we explained the one-month difference between the talk and tutorial deadlines in a detailed blog post that we invite you to review this year if you want to understand why the Tutorial review process takes more time for its committee. Entrusted with the one PyCon schedule for which attendees pay an individual f...

This year our conference registrar is happy to offer a sleek and more modern interface for registering and getting your hotel room for PyCon 2017 in Portland, Oregon! There were a few technical kinks involved so we took the process slowly. We started with a soft launch to iron out any problems, and are now ready for everyone to sign up! PyCon has now sold out 5 years running, and we expect it to sell out again this year. Portland proved to be a wonderful venue for the conference, and we look forward to our upcoming return there for a second and final year. Remember that the first 800 tickets sold receive our Early Bird discount , and that they are likely to sell fast. We have also opened our Financial Assistance application. It stays open until 15 February — so speakers will have time to apply after we announce the program schedule — but please feel free to go ahead and sign up now if you know that attending PyCon will present you with financial difficulty. Here are the links: ...

The new PyCon 2017 web site recently went live, and the conference volunteers have worked hard bring the new site up-to-date with all of the essential details about 2017’s schedule, venue, and hotels. We are very happy with the new logo and banner that Beatrix Bodó crafted to help the conference celebrate its second and final year in beautiful Portland, Oregon! With the release of the site we have also opened up the proposal forms for Talks, Tutorials, Posters, and Education Summit presentations. Visit our “Speak at PyCon” page to read the details of our Call For Proposals (CFP) and to learn about becoming part of the 2017 conference schedule. Our launch-day sponsors this year — the organizations who have gone ahead and pledged to support and attend PyCon 2017, helping keep the conference affordable for as wide a range of attendees as possible — are from a broad array of fields that illustrate just how widely Python is used in today’s world. Two of our Launch Day sponsors this...

  PyCon JP is a conference where Python users, or people interested in Python, gather to learn from each other and meet other members of the community. We will hold PyCon Japan on September 20-24 this year in Tokyo and are looking for talk proposals. This conference web site https://pycon.jp/2016/en/ We are pleased to invite the Pythonista to submit your proposal to PyCon JP 2016. Important Dates for Proposal Submissions Submission deadline: 2016 June 13(Mon) Author notification: 2016 June late Proposal Submission process Register an account at the site of PyCon JP 2016 Register the speaker profile To submit a new proposal Click https://pycon.jp/2016/en/account/login/ to submit Proposal Best regards and hope to see you at PyCon JP 2016

[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...