Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2016

Python Education Summit — in its 5th year in 2017!

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

Talk, Poster, Education Summit proposals due January 3rd — but feel free to submit them now!

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

The new, simpler Tutorial proposal form closes tomorrow!

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

Tutorial proposals are due in three weeks

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

Registration is open for PyCon 2017!

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 PyCon 2017 site has launched — thank you to our Launch Day Sponsors

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 2016 Call for Proposals

  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

How to get ready for the PyCon development sprints

[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

Childcare spots are still available for PyCon 2016!

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

Announcing the Startup Row 2016 Companies

[A guest post by Startup Row coordinator Yannick Gingras:] What in the world could be more exciting than fantastic startups using Python to help change the world? The answer, simply put, is nothing. Come visit the Startup Row in PyCon 2016’s Expo Hall to see some of the best young companies pitch their startup ideas, and to learn how they are using Python to make an impact.  These are the best Python startups in North America, many of whom had to win a previous pitch competition in their home market to make it to Startup Row.  It’s this next generation of Python startups who will continue to build up our community, so let’s show them the support they deserve. The moment you’ve all been waiting for — drumroll, please — Announcing the 2016 Startup Row Selections for PyCon: UtilityAPI — An energy data infrastructure company that specializes in facilitating communication between utilities, account holders, and third parties. Metabrite — Provides consumer and behavioral insight

Introducing our 2016 Keystone Sponsor: Heroku!

We organizers of PyCon 2016 are grateful that, amidst a roiling stock market and uncertain economy, so many sponsors have stepped forward to assert that their relationship with the Python community is worth investing in. And we are particularly happy to announce that our highest level of sponsorship has been filled. That’s right — a Keystone sponsor has stepped forward: Heroku is our Keystone sponsor for PyCon 2016! If you have attended a recent PyCon, you might remember visiting Heroku’s elegant booth in the Expo Hall . And many more of you in the community have used Heroku before to deploy web projects large and small — in their own words: “Heroku is a cloud platform that lets you build, deploy, manage and scale apps. We’re the fastest way from git push to a live app, because we let you bypass infrastructure and deployment headaches. You just focus on your code, and we make the rest easy.” Speaking from personal experience, when I helped build a Django app for a non-p

Open Spaces — plan a day ahead this year at PyCon 2016!

What’s so awesome about PyCon’s Open Spaces? Open Spaces are spontaneous, grassroots, and attendee focused. While most of the conference is scheduled months ahead of time, Open Spaces are created on-site by the participants themselves! 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 little one-hour meetups during the three main conference days, held in free meeting rooms that PyCon provides at the convention center. Some people reserve spaces to talk about a favorite technology, whether web frameworks, neural nets, or natural language processing. Academics and scientists plan spaces around topics like astronomy, data science, and weather forecasting. Other attendees schedule actual activities during open spaces like yoga, nail painting, and board games! Any topic that two or more attendees are interested in, or an activity that more than two people would like to do, is a great

Sign up now to volunteer at PyCon 2016!

While commercial programming languages often enjoy large and spectacular conferences from their beginning — think of the elaborate JavaOne conference, staged barely a year after Java’s first release — languages without corporate backing tend to accrete their community more slowly and organically. The first conference often takes place without dozens of paid staff to dash back and forth behind the scenes and make sure that the event happens. Instead, that first event is possible because of volunteers. PyCon is proud to be part of the long tradition of events that take place because the attendees themselves care and are willing to put forward hours of volunteer work to ensure that new arrivals are greeted at the registration desk, that speakers are guided to and from their session rooms, and — yes — that swag bags are all properly stuffed. If you are already registered to attend PyCon and are interested in serving as part of the team that makes the conference happen in 2016, simpl

Registration is open for our Young Coders tutorial!

PyCon is excited to once again offer a free full-day tutorial for kids! We invite children 12 and up to join us for a day of learning how to program using Python. The class is running twice, on each of the two final sprint days: Option 1. Saturday, June 4, 2016 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM. Option 2. Sunday, June 5, 2016 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM. The sign-up page is here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pycon-2016-young-coders-tickets-24319019843 The Young Coders tutorial was first offered at PyCon 2013 in Santa Clara. It was an immediate hit, and has been an important part of every PyCon since — including a French edition for the two years that PyCon was held in Montréal! Whether you and your family are local to Portland, or you are traveling to PyCon and bringing your family along, this class is a great way expose kids to programming. The Young Coders workshop explores Python programming by making games. It starts with learning Python's simple data types, including number

PyCon’s Sponsor Workshops

Now that PyCon 2016 is sold out, we want to highlight the events that you can still sign up for — events that take place outside of the three main conference days, and which are not yet at capacity: Tutorials Sponsor Workshops Sprints The two Tutorial Days are a familiar and longstanding feature of the PyCon conference. Coding sprints are not only familiar, but were invented by the Python community! But you might be less familiar with our Sponsor Workshops! Workshops let a sponsor communicate with attendees on a deeper and more sustained level than is usually possible. While sponsors do tell their story and share what they are doing with Python through conversations at their Expo Hall booth, Job Fair table, and even through chance encounters in hallways and at lunch, those conversations are usually short. A workshop, by contrast, provides either a 1½ hour or a 3 hour session for attendees to receive a more thorough understanding of how a sponsor is using and advancing a tec

Startup Row: UtilityAPI won the SF Python pitch event

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, a p

Only a few sponsor booths are left

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

Call for PyCon Charity Auction Donations

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

Why not join the sprints this year at PyCon?

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. Reasons you

2016 Python Education Summit

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 will have a round of Lightning Talks. Sign-ups for

Full schedule is up — and Financial Aid closes tomorrow!

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

Startups will soon be pitching to join 2016’s Startup Row!

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

Announcing the Keynote Speakers for PyCon 2016

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