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Financial Aid Applications Due Today!

Today is the last day we're accepting Financial Aid applications for PyCon 2013 ! Apply for Financial Aid here. Whether it's assistance with tickets or travel, hotel or tutorials, the PyCon organizers have a budget that has now been increased twice in order to provide greater assistance for members of our community. We think a trip to PyCon is worth it for everyone, so if assistance would make your trip possible, we hope you'll apply. For more information about our financial aid program, see  https://us.pycon.org/2013/assistance/ .

Registration Count Approaches 1200, Financial Aid Closing Soon

As of this morning, the registration count is a just short of 1200, putting us very close to halfway sold out. However, if you want to go to PyCon, don’t plan on waiting too long. We typically see two surges in ticket sales: right after the holidays, and right after the schedule is announced. Guess what’s happening soon? The holidays and the schedule announcement. Register today! The list of selected talks was announced a few weeks ago, so check it out. We’ve got talks by the perennial favorites Alex Martelli and Raymond Hettinger and many newcomers. The list features a diverse list of topics and presenters, with many familiar faces and many breaking onto the scene. The selections came from over 450 proposals, and given the excellent quality of proposals we received, we could have made two or three entire conferences out of the submissions. It’s really going to be a great three days of talks. The tutorials are already scheduled and can be added to any existing registrations by lo

CFP for the Python room at FOSDEM 2013

Guest post from FOSDEM Python room organizers Stephane Wirtel . The FOSDEM conference is the biggest open source conference in Europe. Like every year, FOSDEM   will take place the first weekend of February in Brussels, Belgium. This year, Python will have a dedicated developers room in the K building which seats 80 participants. This developer room will be open all day Sunday, February 3rd. If you want to present a talk in the Python devroom, please go to the Python FOSDEM website  to fill the survey. Submissions are being accepted until December 21st, so don't delay! This year, the submissions will be reviewed by the following committee members: Tarek Ziade  (Mozilla) Ludovic Gasc   (Eyepea) Christophe Simonis ( OpenERP) Stephane Wirtel   (OpenERP) Thank you for submitting your session proposals and we hope to see you soon in Brussels to talk Python and/or have some nice Belgian Beers :) Everyone is welcome and we encourage everyone to submit talks

Reminder: Financial Aid requests due December 31

As registration continues and we approach 1100 attendees, don’t forget that financial aid applications are due by December 31! Register for the conference here! Apply for Financial Aid here! This year’s financial aid budget has increased significantly to help you, the attendees, make the trip to another great year of PyCon. The organizers provide the slate and fill in a few blanks on the schedule, but PyCon is what you make of it. It’s the hallway chatter, lunch conversations, dinner plans, and the entire other conference that goes on at night - the open spaces. The financial aid program can assist ticket, travel, and hotel expenses, and there are questions for all of the above for you to estimate your plane or train tickets and to choose how long you’ll be staying. We want to make PyCon a possibility for as many people as we can help, so please be accurate with your requests! PyCon 2013 also includes a grant program run by PyLadies to help more women join the fun at PyCon. Thi

Why become a PyCon sponsor? A Sponsor's Perspective

The following is a guest post by Paul Hildebrandt of Walt Disney Animation Studios . Hi! I'm Paul Hildebrandt, Senior Software Engineer at Walt Disney Animation Studios.  The Studio has been a PyCon sponsor for several years.  We highly value the relationship and love being part of the community.   Recruiting You want talent; go to the community passionate about the technology.  There will be 2500 attendees that are interested in Python.  In 2012 they held a jobs fair and are hosting one again in 2013.  I worked the jobs fair table with 2 other engineers (attendees) last year and we talked to hundreds of attendees.  We've found good candidates because of our involvement in PyCon and the Python community. Influence It's nice to get credit for doing the right thing.  Our sponsorship of PyCon has helped us open the conversation with people in the open source world.  You move from just being a user to a contributor.  It's nice to get a “Oh, I know you guys, you're a

Announcing PyPgDay at PyCon US 2013!

In coordination with the  Postgres  community and PyCon US 2013,  PyPgDay  is occurring in Santa Clara on March 13 from 9am-6pm. PyPgDay will be a full-day event with seven talks about PostgreSQL and Python, including talks by contributors to PostgreSQL, Django, PostGIS, and Python. Half the talks will help PostgreSQL DBAs, and the other half will focus on developing Python applications using Postgres features. Why Postgres and Python are more vibrant communities that have much in common. Both at their core are open communities that believe in making the world better through the software they release. Beyond just similarities in the communities many Python users are Postgres users and vice-versa. Because of the overlap in users among many of these communities allowing the opportunity for both to benefit from closely timed and coordinated events it makes it easier on attendees of both. Topics While there are a couple of Postgres talks at PyCon PostgreSQL for Pythonistas  and Goi

Announcing Women Who Code sponsorship (and Ada Lovelace’s birthday!)

As we happily join the celebration of Ada Lovelace’s 197th birthday, we’re also happy to announce that Women Who Code is joining our community sponsorship list! Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer in the early 1800’s, became known as the first computer programmer through her work on Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine”. Without her foresight into what the engine could do, namely operations on things other than numbers, who knows what might be different today? She unfortunately passed away at the young age of 36, long before her ideas on advancing the use of calculating machines came to fruition, but her impact lives on and is celebrated each year in a mid-October “Ada Lovelace Day”. She’s also celebrated in today’s Google Doodle and around the tech news world! Women Who Code is a San Francisco-based meetup to provide a low-key environment for women to get together and hack on whatever projects they choose. Their schedule includes upcoming events to hack on Scala, Java

Tutorial Schedule Released, Registration Now Open!

The long awaited tutorial schedule has been released! This year’s accepted tutorials include several returning veterans and a great group of newcomers, so take a look - there’s a lot to learn. Now that the tutorials are available, those of you who have previously registered can log back into the site and begin to add tutorials to your existing registration. If you’re about to register, tutorials are easy to add to your package as you go along. Each tutorial costs $150, which is an absolute steal, especially when you consider that many of these instructors are full-time educators whose regular courses cost significantly more. Plus, they’re brought to you right at PyCon! We also have several instructors who are domain experts or even the creators of the software being taught. New for this year is a tutorial intended for attendees with not only zero Python knowledge, but no programming knowledge at all. Jessica McKellar will be teaching "A hands-on introduction to Python for beginn

Early Bird Tickets Almost Sold Out: 15 left!

Right now is your last chance to get a discount on PyCon 2013 tickets! We've sold 985 tickets so far and have only 15 remaining at the discounted early bird prices. We had 100 left just over a day ago so tickets are moving quickly. Buy your PyCon tickets here! If you hurry up, you could save up to 25% on the three day conference passes. Corporate tickets are reduced by $150 to $450, so why not register today and put that $150 towards a tutorial (you can add tutorials later on - they are not yet available)? If you're buying your own ticket, buying early saves you $50 and gets you in for $300. Try to find a better deal than that - you can't. Students can save $25 on top of the $100 they already save, as we've cut student rates in half for 2013. If you don't get your tickets today, don't worry, there's still 1500 more tickets available at the regular conference rates which are already a pretty great deal when you take a look at what other large confer

Announcing Startup row: PyCon 2013 Edition!

For the past two years, one of our most successful and impressive experiments has been the creation of "Startup Row", where we let Python powered startups apply for free booth space, registrations and coverage. Like all things, this has only gotten better and more impressive with time. We knew that a lot of startups used Python, but we were astounded and excited to see the number and quality of new companies that were eager to participate at PyCon and show off what they were doing. At PyCon itself, we've continually got a lot of comments from attendees that Startup Row was their favorite part of the Expo Hall. From meeting and talking with the founders of so many great companies, it was obvious that they would go far. Last year alone, we heard from several Startup Row participants that they were even approached by potential investors  - that's right, we had Angel Investors and "big boy" VCs at the conference, and the conversations that they had with the pa

pyArkansas 2012 recap - bigger and better than ever

pyArkansas photos on Flickr This fall marked the fifth year for pyArkansas . It's hard to believe that it was only a little over five years ago that Greg Lindstrom and I crossed paths on a email thread about getting a Python user group together in Arkansas. Greg also had the idea for putting on a small Python conference. I think we would both admit that we've struggled at starting a user group, but we have been very successful with pyArkansas. We never kept any attendance records (we probably never really saw a need to), so we don't know for sure how many people we've had over the years, but I think our first year in 2008, we had about 30 or so folks show up. That first year was very informal, our website was a wiki that Jeff Rush set up for us, and our budget was $1800 (which we thought was huge), funded completely by Novasys Health , and went almost completely to bringing in speakers. The University of Central Arkansas (UCA) Department of Computer Science gracio

Early Bird Rates Ending Soon, Save up to 25% Today!

On the heels of the long awaited list of accepted talks for PyCon 2013 comes news that early bird registration is nearly sold out. For 2013 a new approach was taken, shifting from a time-based early bird window to a ticket-based one, where the first 1000 tickets sold receive discounted rates. Registration information can be found at https://us.pycon.org/2013/registration/ . There are about 100 early bird tickets left That’s right, we just hit our 900th registered attendee for PyCon 2013, so after the next 100 tickets are sold, the regular rates will apply. Sales then continue up to our cap of 2500 attendees. If your employer is paying for your tickets, they can receive a 25% discount if they make the purchase soon. After the early bird rate ends, the $450 discounted ticket price goes up to $600, which is the same rate PyCon has kept going back several years. If you’re paying for yourself, save $50 by buying one of the remaining early bird tickets. The regular rate takes a slight incr

Announcing the PyCon 2013 talks!

On behalf of the PyCon Program Committee, I'm thrilled to announce the list of talks for PyCon 2013 ! It's an amazing program that's a true testament to Python's reach: we'll have talks covering everything from robotics to REST; from Chef to cloud computing; from PostgreSQL to PyPy; and everything in between. There are some incredibly deep technical talks as well as talks for people completely new to Python and programming in general. Whether you're into web development, relational or non-relational databases, design, testing, debugging, high performance, or scientific computing – PyCon 2013 has you covered. As you may already know, this was an incredibly hard decision for the Program Commitee: we had over 450 submissions for only 114 slots on the program. Further, the quality of submissions was very high; the committee debated each and every talk very closely. I want to sincerely thank everyone who submitted a talk: the quality of PyCon comes fro

You should present a poster at PyCon 2013!

PyCon 2013 is shaping up to be the largest PyCon ever; not only in terms of attendees but also in terms of opportunities to hear new ideas and meet new people. The conference will have six talk tracks (up from five in 2012), a PyData conference during the sprints, and a large number of the ever popular open spaces. As we move closer to the conference, travel plans get finalized and excitement builds. You may find yourself wishing that you’d presented a talk or got involved in some other way.  Luckily the opportunity is still out there: The 4th annual PyCon poster session ! Why present a poster? The poster session offers a unique experience both for presenters and attendees. As a presenter, you get to interact directly with your audience, share your passion and your idea, and immediately address questions in a more conversational manner. On top of that, the environment is generally less stressful and more easygoing than giving a formal talk. The layout of the event is very open wit

Survey: Subsidized Childcare at PyCon 2013

We’re tossing around a lot of ideas as we dive deeper into preparing PyCon 2013 , and one that came up was the offering of childcare services. We’re planning some big things for the upcoming conference and we want everyone to be involved. Whether you’re a local who would like to spend a few extra days at the sprints or an out of towner who wants to tack PyCon on the end of a family vacation, we’d like to find out who would consider taking advantage of such services. Keep a few dates in mind as you think about this: The tutorials run Wednesday and Thursday March 13 and 14. The main conference dates are Friday through Sunday, March 15-17. The sprints will run Monday through Thursday, March 18-21. If you have children and are considering attending PyCon, we hope you can spare one or two minutes for this quick survey at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE9NTEt0Z1hTU2h5TEo1UVZTY1pEYVE6MQ As the title of this post and the survey say, we’re floating the idea of subsidizing

PyCon US 2013: Big data? How about PyData!

You know what's better than one huge conference? One huge conference, and another on huge data! (Sorry, I couldn't resist) Today, I am proud to publicly announce a new development for PyCon / PyCon 2013 - we're partnering and working with the awesome team behind the PyData Conference to bring PyData Silicon Valley to the Santa Clara Convention Center during the sprints  - that's right, come for PyCon, stay for the sprints and PyData! PyData Silicon Valley will happen in the same building as the PyCon 2013 Sprints: PyData Tutorials: Monday, March 18, 2013 PyData Conference: Tuesday-Wednesday March 19-20, 2013 A bit more about PyData: The PyData conference and workshop is a semi-annual event for scientists, engineers, and data analysts in the Python community. The conference focuses on techniques and tools for management, analytics, and visualization of data of different types and sizes with particular emphasis on big data. Python is already the de-facto langu

PyCon US 2013: How many talk tracks are there?

You're probably wondering where the program is for PyCon 2013 coming in March. The short version is that, well - the program committee is having meetings almost every day trying to go through 459 individual talk proposals.  Yes. Four Hundred and Fifty-Nine. That's astounding . Literally unprecedented in the history of the conference. You can ask the team - I was fretting and hand wringing and pacing all over worrying about not having enough proposals and then the tidal wave hit. 459. Amazing. To top that? 129 tutorial proposals. This is amazing . It also presents the staff, volunteers and program committee a conundrum. With the 5 tracks PyCon's main conference has room for maybe 90 talks . That's if we squeeze and push. With 459 proposals, the majority of which are exceedingly high quality, incredibly interesting and completely community driven, the program committee is under immense stress and an astounding workload. So, to relieve some of it - and to be able to s

PyCon US 2013 Sponsorship - Why it matters, and why we need more.

PyCon is  a lot of things . It’s the largest Python conference around in many aspects, with more talks, more tutorials, more days, and more people than any others. It’s one of the cheapest big conferences around, with ticket prices that haven’t changed in years. It’s the largest gathering of the best minds in the community. With the conference back in Silicon Valley for a second year and an expanded capacity of 2500 attendees, you will not find a bigger gathering of the best Python users around. We’ve had people consider PyCon their vacation. We’ve had people in attendance from all around the world. We’ve had people bring their kids. We’ve had people try to buy next year’s tickets before the current conference was over. This community loves PyCon, and we love working on it. What we need is more  sponsorship . What does the community get out of sponsorship? Financial Aid PyCon prides itself on being an affordable event for attendees starting with the low ticket prices, and extendi

PyCon US 2013: Announcing the Harassment incident handling guidelines.

With PyCon 2012 we happily adopted a  Code of Conduct/Non Harassment Policy . We derived our version from personal experiences within the community and the ten year lifetime of the conference, and the community as a whole. We discussed it with staff, volunteers and debated it publicly. In 2012 we had an internal policy and set of guidelines for enforcement - inspired by the  Ada Initiative's   excellent work  we are publicly publishing our guidelines for Attendee and Staff responses to harassment or Code of Conduct violation incidents. Attendee Procedure for Incident Handling Staff Procedure for Incident Handling We hope that providing these documents and procedures publicly, we reenforce our dedication to providing a safe and welcoming environment to everyone. We also hope to inspire other conferences - big and small - to adopt similar procedures and public documentation. We would like to once again thank the  Ada Initiative  for their work ( donate here ) - as well as all

Early bird tickets halfway sold out. Get yours today!

We’re about halfway sold out of early bird tickets for PyCon 2013 with 463 signed up, so hurry up and register before the rates increase! With discounts up to 25%, purchasing early makes this already affordable conference an even better value. Only the first 1000 of 2500 total tickets will receive the early bird discount, so act fast. The corporate rate for PyCon 2013 remains the same as it has been for years, coming in at $450 USD if you buy early. The regular rate goes up to $600, which is still a steal when it comes to conference tickets. Companies have long been sending their employees to PyCon, and 2013 will be no different. With the conference back in Silicon Valley for another year and all 2500 tickets sure to sell out, the networking potential for attendees is incredible. The maintainers of most major open source projects will be there, and the conference environment is a great place to find out what everyone else is doing. Even outside of the talks and tutorials, PyCon is an