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Python Education Summit celebrates its 6th year in 2018

Teachers, educators, and Python users: come and share your projects, experiences, and tools of the trade you use to teach coding and Python to your students. The Annual Python Education Summit is held in conjunction with PyCon 2018, taking place on Thursday May 10. Our Call for Proposals is open until January 3rd, and we want to hear from you! See  https://us.pycon.org/2018/speaking/education-summit/  for more details. What we look for in Education Summit talks are ideas, experiences, and best practices on how teachers and programmers have implemented instruction in their schools, communities, books, tutorials, and other places of learning by using Python. 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? We urge anyone in this space to submit a talk! We’re looking for people who want to share their knowledg

Tutorials Due Friday, Ticket Sales Moving Quickly

Tutorial Deadline Approaching! We’re only a few days away from the deadline for PyCon tutorials—November 24—so be sure to get your submissions in by the end of the day Friday! We’re looking for all sorts of tutorials to help our community learn and level up, so be sure to check out our Call for Proposals for more details and enter your proposal in your dashboard soon! Talk, Poster, and Education Summit proposals are due January 3. See https://us.pycon.org/2018/speaking  for all of your proposal needs. Registration We opened our registration a few weeks ago and are 40% of the way through our Early Bird pricing, which gives discounted rates to the first 800 tickets sold. For corporate tickets, you’ll save over 20% by buying early, and individuals save over 12%. The regular $125 student tickets are dropped to $100 during early sales. Click here  for more details and to register! If our Financial Aid program can help you attend PyCon, we encourage your application. We’ll be acc

Startup Row Launches With Events in Chicago and London

Startup Row provides free booth space in PyCon’s expo hall to early-stage startups building products and services with Python. In our first year, Solomon Hykes—founder of Docker—joined. Famous Pythonistas previously featured on Startup Row include Wes McKinney, Andrew Godwin, Audrey Roy Greenfeld, and Danny Roy Greenfeld. This year, Startup Row launches our road show with pitch events in both Chicago and London. On November 13th, Braintree hosts PyCon Startup Row at their Chicago headquarters. Joining as special guests are Naomi Ceder, chair of the Python Software Foundation, and Ewa Jodlowska, the PSF’s Director of Operations and an Officer Director of the PSF Board. For Chicago, we are featuring the following companies: 4Degrees – A data-driven, contextually-aware discovery and management platform for professional relationships. Monument – A secure, connected hard drive for personal photo storage and backups, with AI-powered tagging and search. NextHealthChoice – Reducing

PyCon 2018 Registration is Now Open!

We’re thrilled to announce the opening of registration for PyCon 2018 in Cleveland, Ohio! The prior six PyCons have sold out, so prepare for another one and get your tickets early. The first 800 tickets sold are priced at an early bird discount , saving over 20% on corporate tickets and over 12% on individual tickets. Students save $25 if they purchase early! To get started, create an account and head to https://us.pycon.org/2018/registration/ to get your tickets! You get a package that is hard to beat when you register for PyCon. The conference itself is three days worth of our community’s 95 best talks, amazing keynote speakers each morning, and our famed lightning talks to close out each day, but it’s much more than that. It’s having over 3,000 people in one place to learn from and share with. It’s joining a conversation in the hallway with the creators of open source projects. It’s taking yourself from beginner to intermediate, or intermediate to advanced. For some, it’s get

Introducing the PyCon Hatchery Program

PyCon is known around the world as the Python community’s premier event, attracting people from 39 countries. Outside of the main track of talks, PyCon is home to a growing number of additional events such as Young Coders, the Education Summit, Language Summit, Poster Session, among others. The conference strives to be globally representative by promoting diversity and inclusion through these additional events and outreach programs. Our community works to meet these goals year on year. In the past, we have received requests to add events to PyCon but have not had the resources to make them work. Although we are still limited on staff resources, we are proposing a stepping point that may lead us in the right direction. What is the end goal? We want to support our community and enable them to add events to PyCon that are important to our community. The long-term goals of this program are to support and grow sustainable events that will become a recurring part of PyCon itself or f

PyCon Opens Financial Aid Applications

Even though PyCon prides itself on being an affordable conference, registration is one of several expenses an attendee must incur, and it’s likely the smallest one. Flying, whether halfway around the world or from a few hundred miles away, is more expensive. Staying in a hotel for a few days is also more expensive. All together, the cost of attending a conference can become prohibitively expensive. That’s where our Financial Aid program comes in. We’re opening applications for Financial Aid today, and we’ll be accepting them through February 15, 2018. Once you have an account on the site, you can apply here or through your dashboard . We offer need-based grants to enable people from across our community to attend PyCon. The criteria for evaluating requests takes into account several things, such as whether the applicant is a student, unemployed, or underemployed; their geographic location; and their involvement in both the conference and the greater Python community. Those

PyCon 2018 Call for Proposals is Open!

It’s here! PyCon 2018’s Call for Proposals has officially opened for talks, tutorials, posters, and education summit presentations. PyCon is made by you, so we need you to share what you’re working on, how you’re working on it, what you’ve learned, what you’re learning, and so much more. Before we dive in, the deadlines: Tutorial proposals are due November 24, 2017 . Talk, Poster, and Education Summit proposals are due January 3, 2018 . Who should write a proposal? Everyone! If you’re reading this post, you should write a proposal. PyCon is about uniting and building the Python community, and we won’t advance as an open community if we’re not open with each other about what we’ve learned throughout our time in it. It isn’t about being the smartest one in the room, so we don’t just pick all of the expert talks. It’s about helping everyone move together. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” if you will. We need beginner, intermediate, and advanced proposals on all sorts of topics

PyCon 2018 Launches New Site, Sponsorship Search

After two great years in Portland, PyCon is shipping off to Cleveland for the 2018 and 2019 renditions of the Python community's largest gathering. PyCon 2018 will take place May 9 through 17 with two days of tutorials, three days of talks, and four days of development sprints. For more information, check out our newly refreshed website at  https://us.pycon.org/2018/  and follow us here on  the blog  and at  @pycon  on Twitter. New Website The new site features a design centered on the historic landmark Terminal Tower, a 52 story skyscraper that overlooks downtown Cleveland. When it opened in 1930, the tower was the fourth tallest building in the world and the tallest building outside of New York City. Though its height no longer tops the charts, the tower and surrounding Tower City area remain highly important to the city. What once was a beacon to guide ship captains to Cleveland's port and airplane pilots to its airport, the tower now includes 508 LEDs that light up fo

Come contribute to open source, come sprint!

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

Introducing Our 2017 Keystone Sponsor: Intel!

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

Don’t Overlook the Open Spaces at PyCon this Year

[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

Announcing The Batch of Startup Row Companies At PyCon 2017

(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,

The Return of the Testing BOF

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

Python 1994: Recollections from the First Conference

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

Announcing the PyCon 2017 Keynote Speakers

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

PyCon will be underway in just two months — and is nearly sold out!

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

Financial Aid deadline is February 15! But what about international travel?

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

Precognitive Selected as Chicago’s Startup Row Company; Application Deadline Extended

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

PyCon Startup Row 2017 Applications Are Now Open!

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