The PyCon US Blog

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).

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

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

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>.

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

Once again, the Python community came out in full force with a lot of great applicants to our Startup Row event, taking place Friday and Saturday at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Row includes seed-stage startup companies that are using Python to build their business. We were looking for interesting ideas and we came across a lot, so we think you’ll enjoy what these teams are up. Take a look at what they’re up to from 10 AM through 5 PM in the expo hall. Friday’s group: Coherent , your own personal shopper, picking out the coolest clothes LiteStack , makers of ZeroVM and enablers of interactive cloud analytics Orvant , a free online network vulnerability scanner, keeping all of your devices safe Plotly , making web-based plotting easier and much, much more beautiful Repustate , providing social media tools like sentiment analysis and predictions Wello , bringing fitness to your living room with live training sessions over two-way video Saturday’s group: Forge , a

The sprints are one of the best parts of PyCon. It's a great environment to meet up with old friends, make new friends, and hack on open source projects. Each year, projects around the Python world sketch out their next releases, introduce new contributors, and write a lot of code. Taking place on the second floor of the Hyatt, the hotel attached to the Santa Clara Convention Center where the tutorials and talks are happening, the sprints run from Monday March 18 through Thursday the 21st. Following the closing address on Sunday, from 4:30-5:00 will be an introduction to how the sprints work, where they'll be, and introductions to the projects who are attending given by the leader of the sprint. It's a great chance to get a quick look at what's happening and who's participating. Video by Tim Ansell After that, the sprints are on! Many sprints start right there at 5:00 with the projects heading to their respective areas over in the Hyatt, getting started

Volunteering Once again, the volunteer staff of PyCon is in search of... more volunteer staff !  Please check out the Volunteer page and see if there is anything that sounds interesting to you. Even if there is nothing specific you would like to help out with, and you just want to help out in general, fill out our Volunteer Form and join the on-site volunteer mailing list; which you can opt out of if yet more e-mail is not your thing. Registration and Swag Handout The Registration Desk and the Swag Handout are in need of some extra help during the peak registration times. This is a great way to help out and not miss any of the core talks. Any time you can give to help out the other attendees would be greatly appreciated. Just add your name to the open slots for the Registration Desk and/or Swag Handout . Please also fill out the Volunteer Form . Session Staff We are in desperate need of people willing to be a part of the PyCon Session Staff , being Session Chairs, and Se

PyCon US 2013 is just 19 days away  - scary! It feels like only yesterday we were in Santa Clara with 2300+ other Python Hackers from all over the world! Just a few announcements: PyData Registration still open We want to make sure everyone knows that PyData , which is happening during our sprints, is still open for registration. PyData is an excellent event that lets users and developers of Python tools share ideas and learn from each other how data challenges are being solved. See the PyData talk and tutorial schedule and register for the conference at pydata.org. Follow them on Twitter @pydataconf . Tutorial Registration still open That's right! Our main conference may be sold out - but the  stunning line up of tutorials  we have from seasoned instructor are far from full! You can still join us an expand your mind with this awesome lineup -  register now . Young Coders Tutorial still open Somehow, we haven't run out of tickets for " The Young Coder: Let'

Last year was a busy one for PyCon tutorial and talk presenter Brandon Rhodes . His conference trips took him from Santa Clara to his home state of Ohio and up to Toronto, with talks at all of them. PyCon was particularly busy with two tutorials as well as two talks, going with single talks at PyOhio and PyCon Canada later in the year. He also made a busy 2011 for himself with three talks at PyOhio in 2011 after his PyCon tutorial, and gave great dictionary talk the year before at PyCon 2010 with the tutorial that started it all. Save for the tutorials, you can check out those presentations on pyvideo . He’s kicking 2013 off right with a redux of his well received “ Documenting Your Project in Sphinx ” tutorial, giving its fourth run on Thursday March 14 at 9 AM. Started at PyCon 2010 in Atlanta, the tutorial introduces the widely used Sphinx documentation framework, a staple of the Python community. Sphinx lets you focus on writing great documentation rather than inundating the write