PyCon 2014 Begins! Call For Launch Day Sponsors

French translation: http://montrealpython.org/fr/2013/05/pycon-day-sponsors/

It's that time again! Planning for PyCon 2014 is well underway, and we're currently preparing for the launch of our new site. With the launch comes a unique opportunity: Is your organization interested in being a launch day sponsor?

PyCon 2013 launched on July 9, 2012 with 21 sponsors pledging support, leading the charge that drew over 150 organizations to pitch in to the biggest and best Python conference yet. We're planning a similar go-live date for the 2014 site, and we're building up our cadre of supporters for the April 9-17 conference taking place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Your organization's support enables PyCon to do the awesome things that it does. 2013 introduced a number of new events that we've heard great feedback on, so we'd like to keep doing those things and more. For example, the inaugural Young Coders tutorial was such a hit that there are already plans around the world for user groups to replicate it, and we're looking forward to doing a PyCon 2014 rendition. Programs like Financial Aid, which saw its budget increased and then quickly doubled to reach $100,000 USD, are greatly enhanced by the giving of sponsors.

Along with benefiting the community, sponsorship of PyCon brings many benefits to its supporters. We hear it year after year that there is no better place to hire Python developers than at PyCon. We offer sponsors a place on our site to promote their open positions, and we run a job fair on-site that has been a huge success. The Expo Hall is a great place to market your latest projects and to network with 2,000 eager Python developers. The value is unparalleled in the conference scene, especially after considering our flexibility to work with each and every organization. We even offer a 50% discount to organizations under 25 people. See https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/whysponsor/ for more thoughts.

While we're still finalizing the sponsorship prospectus, it will be very similar to the one we used in 2013 at https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/prospectus/. We'll share the details as soon as we complete them, and any questions can be forwarded to our Sponsorship Chair, Jesse Noller.

For 2014, PyCon will have a maximum capacity of 2,000 attendees. We've sold out the last two conferences and we're expecting a third, so mark your calendars for April 9-17, 2014. Other dates to remember are our Call for Proposals in July, and we're looking forward to opening registration in September. We're planning for the conference schedule to be laid out in December, just in time for the holidays.

If you don't have a passport, don't forget that Canada requires one. US residents should see http://travel.state.gov/passport/ for details.

EuroSciPy 2013 - Deadline extension till May 5, 2013

The EuroSciPy conference will have its sixth edition this year August 21 - 25 in Brussels, Belgium. Two days of tutorials, two days of talks and one day of sprints make a great gathering of Pythonistas with diverse scientific backgrounds in Europe. While the tutorial program is already online, the deadline for the call for abstracts just got extended to May 5, 2013.  So there is still about a week to submit an interesting topic for a talk or a poster. You use Python for interesting scientific projects? Please consider presenting your work in Brussels.

Recap of the PyCon sprints

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 deployment system, localizing a framework, ...

The goal of our SchoolTool sprint at PyCon 2013 was to automatically integrate the SchoolTool Quiz component with the SchoolTool Skills tracker by generating skill scores from answers to quiz questions which are already tagged with the skills they evaluate. A rules system was designed for this. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1156385).

The feature was developed and 3 functional Selenium tests were added. At the end of the sprint it was deployed to the production server and has been used since. We also fixed a bug related to deploying quizzes to sections (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1092580). We had one user, acting as "customer", and three developers (two high school seniors and a SchoolTool developer) and received support from the #schooltool channel in IRC.

The sprint provided the first opportunity the team had of working side by side. The benefits of proximity enabled the professional developer / mentor to observe first hand the student's coding practices and to give them pointers. We all thought is was really cool to be sitting in the same room with Luminaries from the Zope and Pyramid communities working on software.

– Douglas Cerna, sprinting on Schooltool

We closed 10 issues, redesigned the documentation, attract and tutor three new coders during all the sprint, a remote Russian contributor wrote a full tutorial on RESTful APIs with CherryPy, a new release and from my perspective a healthy reactivation of the development of the project.

We had around 10 to 12 contributors, varying from day to day.

An sprint is a great way to increase engagement with a project, both for the newcomers and the core contributor both ends feeds from the presence of the other, it accelerates the learning process and creates a closer relationship with your peers and the project itself.

– Joel Rivera, sprinting on CherryPy

With 3 new contributors, [we worked] on fixing Python 3 compat issues. Another scikit-learn contributor also worked on a new pull request to improve the documentation in the afternoon.

In terms of commit it's 57 (including merge commits): https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/pull/1790

The Python 3 support is not yet 100% done but this is already much better than previously.

The PyCon sprints are awesome in general to get to know new people and get new contributors understand the github contribution workflow quickly by mentoring them. It's also a good opportunity to speak face to face with other project members of tricky issues that would require long mailing list discussions to achieve the same understanding.

– Olivier Grisel, sprinting on scikit-learn

• Achieved a handful of ticket closures (maybe ~5-10);
• ~8 contributors onsite;
• At least 2 folks contributed their first OSS pull request with us and another 1-2 contributed their first Fabric pull request.

The most valuable aspect of this year's sprint was a combination of the above (getting new folks involved) and having some non-code-yielding high level discussions with more advanced users.

– Jeff Forcier, sprinting on Fabric

The purpose of django-deployer is to make it easier to configure your Django project to be able to deploy it to a PaaS provider. Currently, there is support for Dotcloud and Stackato and I'm happy to announce that at the sprint we added support for Google App Engine. The code is available on Github and a release was recently made to PyPi, so you can try it out on your project today!

I had two persons working with me at the sprint, Colin Wu from Taiwan and Kyle Kelley. Kevin Grinberg and Wes Winham also provided input but no code contributions.

I love sprinting because it's an fun experience to get to work closely with other talented coders in an intense and compressed 2-5 days. You learn so much about best practices and how other people approach the problem.

– Nate Aune, sprinting on Django Deployer

Bootcamp for new contributors

Becoming a contributor to an open source project can be intimidating. You have to use a common tool chain, you need to learn the accepted way to submit your changes and you need to become acquainted with the quality standards in place. Given all the unwritten knowledge involved, it's no surprise that many project leaders mention sprints as an ideal environment to welcome new contributors.

The PyPy team had a very productive sprints at this years PyCon. We committed 244 patches from 21 developers. We lowered the time needed to run our test suite, improved the support for string arrays in NumPyPy, removed old and unused code, and began some internal refactorings to simplify PyPy's code.

Sprints are a great way to develop open source software because they give a team that is normally totally distributed the opportunity to work with each other face-to-face. They're also a great environment to help get new contributors started.

– Alex Gaynor, sprinting on PyPy

As I said at the sprint announcement session, sprints are as much about bringing developers into a project as they are about creating code: a bunch of established developers hacking together heads-down in a room might be productive, but it doesn't build community in the way a sprint does.

For the Zope / ZODB sprint:

• Prototyped / hammered out designes for a couple of approaches to cross- Python2-Py3k pickling in the ZODB.
• Created a pure-Python reference implementation of Zope2's ExtensionClass module (with the goal of running on PyPy; also opening a long-term option for a Py3k port).
• Various improvements to Py3k compatibility for ZODB.
• Fixes for a number of Zope2-related security issues (releases for 8 projects).
• Contributors: 6 onsite, 4 remote. At least one new contributor for ZODB.

– Tres Savor, sprinting on Zope and Pyramid

OpenHatch contributors, some old-timers and some fresh, hacked on our Django codebase and other web tools we use to help welcome new contributors to open source. Some especially remarkable changes are Marta Maria Casetti finishing a HOWTO guide any project can use for welcoming new contributors -- http://labs.openhatch.org/foss-contrib-guide/ -- and Rajesh Pradhan working over the weeks post-sprint to finish a serious refactoring of our codebase.

In-person sprints are a great way to have newcomers help each other learn git -- as ours did -- and for old-timers to share their knowledge and answer questions quickly so newcomers get unstuck as speedily as possible. Asheesh Laroia and John Morrissey mentored around 10 people in person over the course of sprints, resulting in new bugs filed, commits pushed, and mailing list discussion started from all the new people.

– Asheesh Laroia, sprinting on OpenHatch

The Django project had 25+ sprinters in person at some point during the four days of sprints, plus more via IRC. Sprinters submitted twenty-six pull requests; merged pull requests included addition of a JSONHttpResponse, formset size validation, and several improvements to the documentation and test suite.

At least six sprinters made their first-ever contribution to Django. With experienced contributors and core committers on-hand to help, sprints are a great place for new contributors to get get started!

– Carl Meyer, sprinting on Django

We had well over 10 people at the table on Monday, and dwindled to five by Thursday. Everyone who stayed for the better part of a day had a contribution merged. We also had a number of more experienced Buildbot developers present working on larger projects. Some of these projects are still in progress, and others have been merged, but lots of fruitful discussions took place during the sprints.

We probably had 20 people over the course of the sprints. While I didn't do anything special to encourage off-site sprinters, there was a noticeable uptick in IRC and pull-request activity during and after the sprints ﾖ I think a total of 3 new people contributed code that way.

For Buildbot, sprints are an effective way to bring people together to talk about the project itself, rather than how the project is used. They generate "buzz" and excitement about new work on the project, which helps to keep the overall momentum running.

– Dustin Mitchell, sprinting on Buildbot

Meeting users

Platform and framework developers say that the sprints bring them unmatched opportunities to get in touch with the people using their code.

The best way to describe the value of the sprints for us would be to give the short list of things we've gotten done directly during the sprints (either entirely during sprints, or at least kickstarted):

This year was not as exciting (on paper) as last year, but we managed to:

• Fix a medium-sized bug relating to resubmitting links on reddit
• Prototype integrating Mozilla Persona into our log in system

Last year was more exciting (can't always be this awesome!):

• Prototype OAuth2 support
• Automated API documentation (http://www.reddit.com/dev/api)
• 3-4 small bug fixes

And, in both years, [we welcomed] several new contributors to the reddit code base. The trickiest part of our "open source" efforts has been our limited time to spend supporting users with their local development installs, so getting face-to-face time with people interested in setting it up is helpful in getting them going on helping us (and provides them with experience useful for setting up other projects). Sprints are a great way to encourage and grow our developer community, and provide that same community a chance to quickly work through a small feature or bug they'd like to see on reddit. In several cases, we've been able to roll out those bug-fixes/features to the live reddit.com site before the end of the sprint session (that was in 2012).

– Keith Mitchell, sprinting on Reddit

This year the "Mython, Numba, and more..." sprint focused on making a clear division between the Mython language and the Basil framework. We moved development from Google code to Github, separating our Python pgen implementation into the mythonlang/pgen2 repository, and finished work on a new Mython syntax in the mythonlang/mython repository. We also registered both repositories with Travis-CI, allowing us to verify that pgen2 worked on Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, and PyPy! We registered both projects in PyPI, including releasing a new source distribution for pgen2.

Despite having a single "full-time" contributor involved in the sprint, we benefited from interaction and support from the other sprinters present.

Sprints are a great way to do open source software development. Sprints provide a group with the opportunity to focus on their project, which may otherwise only be developed in small pockets of free time. Sprints also serve as a forum for both teaching and learning from a community of developers in a more personal manner than online. You can evangelize your project, and learn about other projects that could help you solve your problems.

– Jon Riehl, sprinting on Mython and Numba

Spring cleaning

Many sprinters highlighted the fact that the timing of PyCon prompted them to take some time to work on their development infrastructure on cleaning their code rather than focusing on features.

Building momentum

Besides the immediate productivity during the sprints, attendees and project leaders agree that the velocity remains high event after everyone went back home.

pyelasticsearch had an amazing sprint, with 5 new contributors, including a new employee of the Elasticsearch company itself. Our 78 commits culminated in a 0.4 release, delivering Python 3 compatibility, support for 6 new APIs, lots of polish, and docs on migrating from pyes. Progress has continued at an accelerated rate even after the sprint, bringing clearer extensibility of JSON encoding, a new testrunner, and design work on a more flexible bulk API. Thanks to Hanno Schlichting, Honza Kral, Patrick Smith, Brian Jones, and Matt George for their great patches!

– Erik Rose, sprinting on pyelasticsearch

Not just at PyCon

You don't have to attend PyCon to participate in a coding sprint! User groups and projects do it on their own when they have a craving for communal coding. If you want to organize a sprint, the PSF will help you: http://pythonsprints.com/.

Did we miss your project? Mention it in the comments.

Young Coder Tutorial Helps Daughter, Father Get Into Python

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 programming,” he said. A friend lead Bruce to Python, and he later found PyCon.

Havana did her own investigation. “She had seen Full Sail University ads online and wanted a bachelors degree in game design at 8 years old. How could I refuse,” asked Bruce.

While it’s a bit too early for college, the Young Coder tutorial would be perfect for her, and the conference’s financial aid program would make the trip a possibility. Dad booked the trip and they were on their way.

“She is very quiet about her reactions when adults ask her, but we had some good conversations about it afterwards,” he said. After getting home, Bruce stocked up on Raspberry Pi parts to prepare for future hacking. “She is excited to continue this journey.”

“The kids day she totally loved, thanks in part to Richard,” he continued, speaking of Richard Jones. Richard assisted Katie Cunningham and Barbara Shaurette on the first day of Young Coders, then taught the “Introduction to pygame” tutorial the next day. Although the material would be over her head, Richard was happy to have Havana join the pygame tutorial.

“I am excited to help her move forward,” said Bruce of his plan to keep working on games while building up her general programming skills. There’s more to it than that, though.

“I was only going to PyCon to help my daughter, but came away from the experience seriously motivated to dive into programming,” said Bruce. He came into this with minimal HTML experience, but he caught the programming bug like his daughter and is as excited about learning more.

“I am happy to dive into helping Havana progress, but I think it will be more than that for me,” he said. While he currently works in the service industry, his newfound liking of Python could make for a change in direction. “I just never thought it was my thing,” he said of programming, “but I do love Python. I get it.”

“For me it was what I had hoped it would be,” he said of the whole trip. After the tutorials, they made their way around the area to Sunnyvale and down to Santa Cruz, where Bruce spent time in the past. They visited with some old friends, including a few working in the technology world, and got good ideas for how Havana, and Bruce, could progress.

“She will never forget the trip, and she has solid benchmarks to meet when practicing at home,” said Bruce. Havana has referred to her experience several times, proclaiming, “we did that at PyCon, Daddy!”

As for what’s next, Bruce’s hardware purchases have them setup for some fun learning together. “I’m looking forward to geeking out with Havana on hardware/software integration sans GUIs,” he exclaimed. He’s also getting help from some friends who work as electricians for fun ways to use the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO board.

The two are even looking to get a group started in Denver to help build the next generation of programmers. With PyCon 2016-17 looking for a home, maybe they’ll pull together a bid? Bruce had such a positive experience at the conference that he’s interested in making it happen.

Best of luck learning Python, Havana and Bruce. You took our “Change the Future” theme all the way!

PyCon Australia 2013 Early Bird registration and Accommodation deals now available!

tl;dr: PyCon Australia early bird registrations are now open! Find out more at http://2013.pycon-au.org/register/prices, including details of our accommodation programme.

PyCon Australia is excited to announce that early bird conference registrations are now available for our 2013 conference, to be held on Saturday 6 and Sunday 6 July in Hobart, Tasmania. Early bird registration will be extended to the first 80 confirmed conference registrations, or until Friday 3 May, whichever comes first.

PyCon Australia is the national conference for students, enthusiasts and professionals working with the Python programming language; it represents a unique opportunity for Python developers to meet fellow developers, and gain knowledge from experts and core Python developers from around Australia and the world. Securing your registration during the early bird period ensures your place at all of the events that PyCon Australia has to offer.

Early bird registration comes with a substantial discount for tickets at our "Enthusiast" and "Professional" rates. Early bird tickets at both the "Enthusiast" and "Professional" level are guaranteed a seat at our conference dinner. All tickets include access to the CodeWars event on Friday 5 July, and the post-conference sprints on Monday 8 and Tuesday 9 July.

Early bird registration starts at $44 for full-time students; $168 for enthusiasts and $420 for professionals.

This year's conference also features two single-day miniconfs, being held on Friday 5 July: DjangoCon AU, the first national gathering of Australian Django developers; and the Python on OpenStack Day. Entry to these miniconfs is free for professional delegates, and $44 for students and enthusiasts.

PyCon Australia has been working closely with our venue to provide a great conference experience; we're very pleased to be able to offer accommodation to delegates for the duration of the conference. We've secured an allocation of rooms within the Wrest Point complex. Rooms available to delegates start at $135 per night; rooms with wired internet access start at $157 per night.

Information on conference registration, including details on how to book delegate accommodation through our preferred provider can be found at the PyCon Australia website (http://2013.pycon-au.org).

Our conference Call for Proposals is still open, and will close on Friday 5 April.

We can't wait to see you in Hobart in July!

About PyCon Australia

PyCon Australia is the national conference for the Python Programming Community. The fourth PyCon Australia will be held on July 5--7, 2013 in Hobart, Tasmania, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast developers with a love for developing with Python. PyCon Australia informs the country’s Python developers with presentations, tutorials and panel sessions by experts and core developers of Python, as well as the libraries and frameworks that they rely on.

To find out more about PyCon Australia 2013, visit our website at http://pycon-au.org or e-mail us at contact@pycon-au.org.

PyCon Australia is presented by Linux Australia (www.linux.org.au) and acknowledges the support of our Platinum sponsor: Australian Computer Society (Tasmanian Branch) (www.acs.org.au); and our Gold Sponsor, Google Australia (www.google.com.au). For full details of our sponsors, see our website.

Bringing First Timers to PyCon Through Financial Aid

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 money to help bring this conference to people from around the world who needed a hand with the expensive trip, and the Python Software Foundation graciously increased the financial aid budget up to $100,000.

The way financial aid works is that applications are open to all, with a series of questions asked of each applicant such as their background, their experience, contributions to the community, if they’re a student, or if they’re presenting something at the conference. From there, the committee, lead by Peter Kropf, divides up the funds with a goal of helping as many people as possible. Most grants are partial in order to spread the funding, and assistance can cover expenses such as reimbursement for travel, lodging in the various conference hotels, or the conference admission.

For international travelers like André, the organizers help as much as possible to make sure attendees have what they need to get in. “Thanks to the invitation letter Rami gave me, it was easier to get an American visa,” André said of Rami Chowdhury’s role in writing formal invitations make travel plans easier or even possible from some countries.

As for the conference itself, André, “met real good people from US, Poland, France and Brazil as well,” and made “lots of new connections to grow new projects I have in mind and also open source projects to support.”

Marta Maria Casetti, a student from London, made it to her first PyCon thanks to a partial grant for her travel, and cover for her hotel stay. Financial aid recipients who receive lodging support are paired up with other recipients, which is part of the way PyCon is able to spread the help across more people than in the past.

“I am not sure I would have come without a grant,” she said of the expense, especially tough for a student. PyCon helps many students each year, and this year we cut the student rate in half to $100 at the early bird rate. The regular rate was also halved to $125.

“The tutorials were a huge part of my PyCon experience,” said Marta Maria of Jessica McKellar’s beginner tutorial, followed by Matt Harrison’s intermediate tutorial. On Sunday at the conference, she presented a poster titled “Beginners Welcome: From Zero to GUIs in Four Months, via Writing a Tutorial” about her experience working on a GTK+ tutorial through the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. As for how she felt presenting the tutorial, she said it was “empowering, and a great source of ideas for my work, and a chance to meet so many interesting people!”

PyCon is happy to have been able to help people like André and Marta Maria, as well as everyone else who received assistance in 2013. We look forward to seeing them again in 2014!

Raspberry Pi a Hit at PyCon 2013

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 Upton of the $35 computer, shown in an example of photography from a weather balloon.

The conference hosted two days of free tutorials for children in a lab full of monitors, keyboards, mice, and Raspberry Pis. Taught by Katie Cunningham and Barbara Shaurette, children were introduced to basic programming concepts in Python using the tiny computer in a course called "Young Coder: Let's Learn Python." At the end of the day, each child was given their own Raspberry Pi to take home.

The lab, which was stocked with hardware thanks to SparkFun, remained open throughout the weekend for the 2,500 conference attendees to get acquainted with their devices. Each day it was open, people took great advantage of the available hardware and personnel to tinker with their Raspberry Pi.

When it came time for the four days of development sprints that follow the conference talks, the lab rental equipment had to be packed up, but the organizers went out and obtained hardware to create a mini-lab for sprinters. Mathieu Virbel of the Kivy project, a user-interface library with support for multi-touch applications, participated in the development sprints and demoed tilt-sensor support for Kivy on the Raspberry Pi.

"There's so much more we can do to teach, to share -- but there's only so much we can do alone, without all of the community," said conference chairman Jesse Noller. "By doing this, we want your help to inspire the next generation of hackers," he said of the move to give out 2,500 of the devices. The Python Software Foundation purchased the computers for PyCon, and has arranged to donate Raspberry Pis which went unclaimed at the conference, or were explicitly left for donation.

During his opening address, Noller also announced the launch of http://raspberry.io/, a new website created by the Caktus Group to host user-submitted project plans for the device. One of the first projects to be uploaded was a step-by-step tutorial for creating a jukebox that runs off of a USB drive filled with music files. Other projects include integration with the Arduino, reading and writing data via the device's GPIO ports, and creating a lightweight home media server.

From http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/-1772075.htm