PyCon 2016: A look back, my take away, and thank you!

Portland, Oregon

photo credit: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

A quick look back at PyCon 2016

I am writing this during my flight home to Chicago as I reminisce about PyCon, which officially ended yesterday in Portland, Oregon. This was yet another successful conference! We had over 3200 pythonistas check in! The 2016 tutorials and talks sold out in March, which is much sooner than previous conferences. Both committees did a great job reviewing and providing guidance to those that needed it. Personally I only found time to watch Lars' talk, but thanks to our efficient AV crew, I will watch the rest in the comfort of my home over the next few weeks. Hearing the positive feedback from our sponsors, even when logistical issues popped up, tells me the companies that helped make PyCon happen, are just as dedicated to our community as we are. I appreciate their support and understanding. 

PyCon 2016 was my ninth PyCon. I have enjoyed organizing each one of those nine conferences. Over the last nine years I have seen the Python community grow and become a respected community. PyCon is, for many, the central time of the year and I know it is for me and the PSF. Through our learning experiences at PyCon, we are able to help the Python community all around the world. We are able to offer others insight on conference childcare, our financial aid system, and volunteer involvement amongst other things. We also learn from others within our community and welcome guidance for how processes could be more effective and less overwhelming. On a larger scale, PyCon's revenue helps us (the PSF) fund hundreds of other PyCons and teaching workshops around the world per year. But those are not the only ways that PyCon impacts our community.

My main take away

I have noticed that it is easier for us to improve and grow as a community when we meet in person from time to time. Over the years I have learned through my own experiences that emailing about community relations is not always easy nor productive. When I come to PyCon and see the many interactions, I understand the reasons why conferences are so vital to any community. When we are face to face, we are able to put our differences and opinions aside. It is easier for us to put ourselves into someone else's shoes. When we find common ground, we become a stronger community. Watching Twitter the last few days has been my evidence for this happening at PyCon. I have seen so many moving "good-byes" and appreciations for our community. I have seen attendees publicly thanking our community for its openness and acceptance. Witnessing this energizes me and inspires me to further support the community through my PSF and PyCon work. Thank you PyCon 2016 for motivating me and making me a stronger individual in so many ways. Let us keep this inspirational motivation going all year round!

My long list of thank yous

• Betsy Waliszewski (psf event coordinator): Welcome to the PSF & PyCon community! Thank you for all of the time and energy you put into the pre-planning and onsite work. Having you at PyCon 2016 was a tremendous help that I have never had before. I look forward to developing your role as event coordinator!


• Kurt Kaiser (psf treasurer): Thank you for all of the work you do for PyCon, especially for financial aid. The work you do impacts hundreds of PyCon goers every year.


• Brandon Rhodes (conference chair): Thank you for being such a wonderful person. It was a pleasure working with you and seeing the way you work. Working with you has taught me much more than you know.


• Ruben Orduz, Carol Willing, Allen Downey (tutorial chairs): Thank you for all of your work reviewing tutorial proposals and helping those that needed guidance.


• Ned Jackson Lovely, Karen Rustad Tölva (program chairs), and the program committee: Thank you for all of your work reviewing hundreds of talks. Thank you for coming together as a community when needed. I admire your strength and ability to work through certain situations.


• Ashwini Oruganti and LVH (financial aid chairs): Thank you for continuing to improve our financial aid process. I know this task needed a lot of time, but we will continue to work to make it better for the volunteers as well as the recipients. 


• Barry Warsaw and Larry Hastings (language summit chairs): Thank you for working to put together a great language summit. I look forward to seeing the evolvement of the summit and the python language.


• Chalmer Lowe, Jessica Ingrassellino, Ria Baldevia (education summit chairs): Thank you for continuing to grow the education summit. This year, the event was a huge success and I look forward to what it will bring to PyCon 2017!


• Rami Chowdhury and Yarko Tymciurak (volunteer chairs): Thank you for helping organize our volunteer efforts. Our volunteers make our conference significant and special. I am sure they all appreciate you two also :)


• Felix Crux (mobile guide chair): Thank you for helping with the mobile guide. Your attention to detail helped us put together an awesome guide that many attendees took advantage of.


• Anna Ossowski, Kinga Kięczkowska and Hobson Lane (open space chairs): Thank you for putting so much effort into improving Open Spaces. I look forward to seeing what you will bring to 2017!


• David Wolever and Julia Duimovich (session staff chairs): The work you two put forth onsite is immeasurable. Without you both, the talks would not happen like clock work! The session chairs give our speakers the attention they deserve. Thank you all who volunteered to be a session chair and/or runner!


• Brian Costlow (CART coordinator): Thank you for taking on this task this year. Your thorough feedback will definitely help us make the process better going forward!


• Hannes Hapke and Gustavo Pinto (poster session chairs): I enjoyed seeing the posters get so much attention this year. Thank you for making that event run so smoothly!


• Lynn Root and Thursday Bram (lightning talk chairs): Thank you for putting together the lightning talks daily and moderating the 5 minute talks. 


• Don Sheu and Yannick Gingras (startup row chairs): Thank you for working so hard to give startups a chance to market their work and to meet awesome pythonistas!


• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel and Nick Lang (5k coordinators): Mathieu - thank you for helping us pre-plan the 5k. Also, your dedication to wake up that early and get everyone organized is appreciated! Nick - thank you for helping us onsite and giving us pointers on how we can improve the process!


• Doug Napoleone, Jackie Kazil and Lynn Root (pyladies auction chairs): Thank you for making the PyLadies Auction such a fun event and raising so much money for a great cause.


• Luke and Meagan Sneeringer (young coder setup and other volunteer tasks): Thank you for all of your support onsite. Having you both there makes us a stronger team. I really appreciate you both being up so early every day to help registration!


• Kushal Das and Naomi Ceder (sprint chairs): Thank you for the help you both provided to get the sprinters informed and organized. Your work at the Sprints impacts so many in our community!


• Barbara Shaurette and Andrew Dupont (young coder teachers): Thank you for staying strong and teaching the Young Coders classes this year. Your dedication is appreciated by me and the children! 


• Noah Kantrowitz (general volunteer): Thank you for just being there to help us with random tasks that needed attention. Having someone there with institutional knowledge that can jump in to help with anything is very useful.  


• Jon Henner (accessibility chair): It was unfortunate that you could not join us onsite, but we look forward to seeing you at 2017! Thank you for working with us to make PyCon more accessible. I am grateful for your guidance and I look forward to seeing the impact you will have on PyCon 2017.


• Jessica McKellar (diversity chair): Thank you for helping PyCon increase its diversity year after year! I look forward to seeing what 2017 will bring!


• Paul Hildebrandt (swag coordinator): Not only do you bring awesome gifts for our speakers year after year, but you also dedicate so much time to get swag organized and distributed. We are all thankful for you!

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PyCon Japan 2015: A Success

Last month PyCon Japan took place from October 9 - 12th at the Tokyo International Exchange Center Plaza Heisei. The PSF has recently received a report from the Chair, Takanori Suzuki, and it appears that the conference was a great success. 

As a bit of background, the first PyCon Japan was held in 2011. The conference was a one-day affair with talks comprising three tracks. 247 people attended. Each year since then, PyCon Japan has grown in size and complexity. Last month’s sold-out conference had 602 attendees, with 80 people attending tutorials, and more than 50 staying for a fourth day to participate in Sprints. 

There were 43 sponsors. Sponsoring at the Diamond level was the Japanese firm MonotaRo. Other sponsors included PayPal, O'Reilly, CodeIQ, JetBrains, Nikkei, and the Japanese online marketplace, Curama. The PSF was happy to contribute as a Gold level sponsor.

There were 32 talks–11 given in English and 21 in Japanese–covering a variety of topics, including Pandas, Data Analysis, Metrics, Grep, Asyncio, Translating code into non-English, Erlang, and more. 

There were two keynotes–one in English by PSF Fellow, Hynek Schlawack, entitled Beyond Grep: Pragmatic Logging and Metrics; and one in Japanese by Haruo Sato, entitled Possibilities of Python, which was also the theme of the conference.

There was also a panel discussion on Diversity and the Future of the Community. Due to outreach efforts, the Japanese Python community has become more diverse – more women are participating in programming, as was clear from the groups represented on the panel: Moderator, Makabi Love, of PyLadies Tokyo, was joined by representatives from RailsGirls, Java Women, Django Girls, and Women Who Code in a discussion about how to increase diversity.Rounding out the conference were a poster session, jobs fair, lightning talks, and a children’s workshop. An additional feature of the conference was an official chat session, set up in both English and Japanese for participants to communicate with each other.

Slides and videos from conference talks can be viewed here,  and at The Possibilities of Python.  For more photos, see PyCon JP Photo Album.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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Register Now for PyCon 2016!

Once again, the PSF is proud to underwrite and produce the largest gathering of the international Python community at PyCon 2016!



The 2016 conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, and will take place from May 28th to June 5th -- a little later in the spring than previous PyCons.



Those of you who have attended previous PyCons know what a fantastic event these are. Education, advocacy, community building. . . all take place at a PyCon. If you've never been, you can check out these talks from last year's PyCon 2015 in Montreal.



But nothing can fully give the full experience, the excitement and flavor, the connections forged and strengthened, the sheer intensity of spending several days with a large community of bright, energetic, and engaged Pythonistas, sharing their knowledge and skills and teaching and learning with each other, as attending a PyCon itself.



The conference schedule will begin on the weekend with tutorials, then there will be five full tracks of talks, over 100 total, during the three main conference days. As usual, development sprints will follow, offering a unique opportunity for developers to work in "dream teams" on open source projects. And of course there will be the Summits, Expo Hall, Poster Session, Sponsor Workshops, Lightning Talks, Open Spaces, Job Fair, PyLadies Auction, and last, but hardly least, the dynamic and inviting "Hallway Track," that make for such a vibrant conference. All of this, along with ample (organized, spontaneous, and even some chaotic) social and cultural activities (including the annual Opening Reception and 5K Charity Run). The venue will be the centrally-located Convention Center which will allow for easy exploration of the fabulous city of Portland, Oregon.

By Another Believer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

As this year's PyCon organizer, Brandon Rhodes, tells us on the PyCon blog,

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!

Another feature of PyCons as opposed to other tech conferences that must be mentioned is the diversity of speakers and attendees. For both 2014 and 2015 in Montreal, a full 33% of talks were given by women. Not only does this make for a more varied range of content and a higher degree of excellence (since the work of women programmers contributes to a greater pool of proposals from which the final talks are selected), but for a truly welcoming community. As someone who has attended the last four PyCons (the first of which, before I even became a Python user), I can tell you with absolute certainty that if you come, you will not be disappointed!



And, please, if you're working on something interesting, or care to share some insights, experiences, project development, or theoretical observations, consider proposing a talk, tutorial, or a poster session.



Registration is now open, and, if you hurry, you can qualify for the reduced cost of an Early Bird ticket. If the past is any indication, these tickets, and all remaining ones, will sell-out quickly. Don't be left out! Register today!

You can also view the announcement on the PyCon Blog, or go directly to Registration and Financial Aid.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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PyOhio Young Coders to receive PSF Funding

The PSF is always thrilled to be able to help introduce young people to the world of programming. As such, Young Coders' Workshops (also see O'Reilly) are especially close to our hearts. Young Coders, for those of you who don’t know, was started in 2013 at PyCon in Santa Clara by Katie Cunningham and Barbara Shaurette (see My Dinner with Katie). Kids ages 12-17 learn to code using Raspberry Pis, which they then get to keep. 

Recently, the PSF has granted funding for PyOhio and for its Young Coders' Workshop. The conference will be held August 1st - 2nd on the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus, Oh, while the YC workshop will take place on Sat August 1 (see PyOhio). 

PyOhio serves as a regional conference for the Midwest with many attendees from surrounding states. Attendance at PyOhio has grown from 150 in 2010 to 400 in 2014. There will be 4 tracks of talks over 2 days and three days of sprints. This year’s schedule include a keynote by Catherine Devlin and talks by Brandon Rhodes and Brian Curtin among others. Registration is free (see PyOhio)!

Brian Costlow, Chair of PyOhio, explains that the Young Coders Workshop targets kids who wouldn’t otherwise get the opportunity. PyOhio organizers reach out to partners to get the word out to those beyond tech circles. They reserve 40% of workshop slots for their partner organizations' for kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods. Last year in 2014, the kids came from one of the most economically distressed neighborhoods in Columbus (see Demographic Info).

This year, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Columbus, OH is helping to recruit kids from poorer neighborhoods. 

According to Brian, 

We’ll pull kids from more than one neighborhood this year, but the highest median household income is $32,000 and all of the neighborhoods have at least 15% of households below the poverty line. By way of contrast, the median income for the Greater Columbus Statistical Metropolitan area is $44,000, but if you exclude the distressed neighborhoods, the household median income is around $80,000 and only 2% are below the poverty line.

The PSF is happy to be able to help with funding for such a worthwhile event. Not only do the kids get to keep the Raspberry Pis, but they also go home with the keyboard, mouse, and cable. This is especially important for underprivileged kids who may not have access to computers outside of school. 

Other sponsors of PyOhio and Young Coders include Level 12, Safari, and Caktus Group, to name a few (see Sponsors). But sponsors are still needed, so there is still an opportunity to help! Please visit Sponsor Prospectus.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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PyCon Singapore

The PSF is happy to report that the third annual PyCon Singapore took place June 17 to 19, 2015. This event, organized by the Python User Group Singapore, is a testament to the robust presence of the Python community in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to three PyCons Singapore, PUGS has held three PyCons Asia-Pacific. Congratulations to Ivan Zimine and the organizing committee for a successful conference. According to Ivan, “Feedback from the participants was mostly positive. Out of 18 responses, 7 people gave 4 out of 5 stars, and 6 people gave 5 out of 5 stars for the “How did you like PyConSG?” question."

Photo Credit Martin Brochhaus

CC 2.0

The PSF contributed to the event as a Silver Level Sponsor, and we were proud that keynote speakers included our own PSF Director Lynn Root and former PSF Director Jessica McKellar. Django core developer Andrew Godwin also gave a keynote.

The event was attended by 181 people and was held on the campus of Singapore Polytechnic. It consisted of one day of tutorials and two days of talks. Tutorials covered topics such topics as unit testing, data stores, and beginning programming with Python and Django, and were attended by 96 people, of whom 64 were students. Lynn Root’s tutorial, “How to Spy with Python,” explained how the NSA and the UK’s Tempora programs can collect data on citizens' search histories, emails, IRC conversations, PGP usage, etc. As Lynn was clear to point out, however, the talk was not an endorsement of spying or a how-to, but rather a “… way of understanding the current political environment, as well as indirectly understanding how to protect one’s privacy” (see How to Spy).

127 people (of whom 41 were students) attended the two days of conference talks. Featured speakers included Anand Chitipothu, Kristin Nguyen, Ricky Setyawan, Sacha Goedegebure, Colm O'Connor, and others covering a wide range of topics, including interpreters, data processing, educational games, data processing, machine learning, multicore processing, and film production.

A first-time feature of the conference was its edu-summit, which was attended by approximately 40 Computer Science teachers. 

The summit included a talk by Praveen Patil titled Python in my Physics classroomabout how to incorporate computer science into the science curriculum using ExpEYES, an Open Source Pocket Science Lab (https://pycon.sg/schedule/presentation/59/).

Here are some links and pictures of the event: PyCon Singapore, Blog Post, Group Photo, Welcome.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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My Dinner with Katie

Last week at PyCon, I had the pleasure of talking with Katie Cunningham at a dinner party hosted by O'Reilly. Katie is well-known in the Python community. The author of Python in 24 Hours, 2nd edition (Pearson 2013),  Accessibility Handbook (O'Reilly 2012), and a video series Python Guide for the Total Beginner LiveLessons (Pearson 2013), she has also given talks and presentations at a number of conferences. Last year the PSF honored her with its Community Service Award in recognition for her work in founding and providing the Young Coders tutorial (along with co-recipient Barbara Shaurette).

Imagine a room filled with pre-teens and teenagers eager to learn to code. Pretty daunting, huh? That’s the challenge Katie has taken on with Young Coders. This one-day tutorial covers basic Python by starting with simple concepts and then building up. Using Raspberry Pis, Katie says, helps to “demystify the computer,” and by the end of the day, students are doing fairly complex work with loops, and reading others' code. Last week at PyCon Montreal, 41 students attended one of the classes.

You can check out Katie and Barbara’s 2014 PyCon talk about Young Coders.

Katie teaching Young Coders

As we conversed about Python, teaching, and writing, I observed first-hand those qualities that make Katie an effective teacher—passion, clarity, perceptiveness, wit, and humor. With a degree in Psychology, she “stumbled into technology” and found that it paid well. “It’s hard to say ‘no’ to money when the alternative is to get an MA degree and make $40K,” she explained. But I believe that Katie is a natural teacher, so I’m not surprised that once in tech—she’s worked for NASA and Cox Media—she pioneered ways of making it more accessible to others and easier to learn. Her current professional position combines her technological prowess and her pedagogical talents as Senior Applications Developer and Director of Technology at Speak Agent, a provider of customized interactive content for language teachers. 

Some of Katie’s teaching philosophy and techniques come from her experience as a mother. She told me that her kids had access to their own computers at the age of three, in large part because she wanted them to stay away from her computer. The result is that her kids are very fluent—if you give them a computer, they can figure out immediately what to do with it. It’s not, according to Katie, that her seven year old daughter is so smart; rather she’s had four years of informal training. But of course many kids don’t have that advantage—they’ve grown up in homes where there was no computer, or maybe only one, but it was too precious to allow the kids to use it. Katie wants to be able to formalize the informal training—to teach kids such basic ideas as how to generally find something on the computer, or the differences between an email application, a web browser, and the internet (some kids, and even adults, confuse them). 

So Katie finds that using concrete metaphors and teaching basic vocabulary are extremely important in getting kids to understand coding. For example, Katie teaches the logic of and/or by reference to pet stores; in Virginia, in order to buy a fish, a person needs to be at least 18 years old, AND have money to pay for it, AND promise to put it in an aquarium and not into the river (apparently, this was a problem)—all of these conditions must be true. But when paying, you can use cash OR credit OR a data card OR a gift card. She says that her students respond well to these kinds of examples. Teaching this way is not only effective, but it “brings the humanity back into tech”—it shows that these are things that humans do, rather than abstract relations between a person and a machine. 

In the future, Katie would like to teach coding to younger children. Since the Young Coders track is restricted to ages 12 and older, Katie sees this as a real need. We have younger kids coming to PyCon, as more attendees bring their kids and want a class for them. But putting very young kids in a class with older learners doesn’t work well. Their needs and learning styles are quite different. For example, five year olds don’t have the physical control or dexterity to type or to sit still for long. Katie would like to develop a teaching track that is “more kinetic.” Basic concepts, like the logic of if/elif/else could be taught by having the kids get in one line IF their shirt is red, ELSE IF green, get in another; or ELSE, yet another.

I’m happy to report that these and other great ideas are going to be available in Katie’s next book, Kids Code (current working title). It will be an O'Reilly interactive book that has a dual purpose: 

[It] … not only teaches the student how to program, but teaches the mentor how to teach. Through carefully laid and interactive chapters, the student is guided not only through the basics of programming, but all the way up to game development and creating websites. At the same time, the mentor is coached in how to help their student solve problems, warned about where students often have trouble, and explains why lessons are structured in a certain way” (see LinkedIn).

The book sounds like a wonderful tool for teachers and learners (of all ages) and I’m looking forward to reading it. Thank you Katie, for sharing your expertise and insight with the rest of us. Your work is a huge part of what makes the Python community a living, growing, exciting, and powerful entity of awesomeness.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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PSF Python Brochure: Get your free copy at PyCon 2015

PSF Python Brochure PDF (low resolution version)

After having distributed the first 5,000 copies of the PSF Python Brochure to Python conferences and user groups around the world in the last 12 months, we have now finished the second print run with another 5,000 copies just in time for PyCon 2015 in Montreal.



Many thanks go to JetBrains for jumping in as additional ad sponsor to help finance the printing and community order shipping costs for this second print run. We would also like to thank all our initial sponsors and contributors for their hard work.

Promoting Python to new audiences

The feedback we have received for the brochure was positive all around.



Conference attendees were really happy to be able to easily show and prove how Python changes the world, to make the point that learning and using Python is a good investment.



The brochure helps them in promoting Python in their local and professional communities, especially to the many non-technical people we cannot easily reach with our python.org web site.

Get your brochure copy

Come and get your copy at the Python Software Foundation booth (booth number 101) at PyCon 2015 in Montreal.



If you cannot fetch your hard copy in person, you can order copies from our project page:

1. free Community Orders for conferences and user groups


2. paid Company Orders for companies and organizations

The costs for the community orders are sponsored through sponsor ads, the PSF and the company orders.

Meet the Team

I was very happy to work together with our core team members in the last 4 years:

• Jan Ulrich Hasecke who was responsible as editor in chief and managed the contribution side of things together with me.


• Armin Stroß-Radschinski and his company evenios which did the initial coordination of funding, layout concept, artwork, production and distribution.

Our efforts have resulted in a brochure of almost fully CC-3.0-BY-SA content that is reusable by the community. The feedback after one year of circulation is quite promising and we are considering doing a second volume with more success stories and use cases, provided we can get enough support from sponsors and the PSF.

More information

More information on the brochure, the idea and people behind it, media data and ordering links are available on our project page:

• PSF Python Brochure Project Website

Marc-Andre Lemburg

Director, Python Software Foundation

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