The PyCon US Blog

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

Tutorials Schedule After a busy few months of competitive reviews, the tutorials team within our program committee has completed their process and have come up with an awesome schedule… ta da!  https://us.pycon.org/2015/schedule/tutorials/ Led by Stuart Williams and Ruben Orduz, a fantastic team came together to shape this schedule, including Carol Willing, Ian Cordasco, Harry Percival, Allen Downey, Richard Jones, and Kenneth Love. Thanks to everyone for their efforts, both in reviewing and in submitting! Register for Tutorials On April 8 & 9, the two days preceding the conference talk dates, attendees have an opportunity to attend up to four different tutorials. Each day offers both a morning and afternoon session, each providing three hours of learning split by a snack break, with lunch in between the sessions. Our instructors come from a variety of backgrounds, including full time educators or trainers, authors, domain experts, and in a lot of cases, they've cre...

You may have heard the news that conference tickets have sold out , but you know what’s not sold out? Tutorial tickets ! These three-hour courses are taught by Python experts and cost only $150. Take for example the “ IPython in depth: high productivity interactive and parallel python ” tutorial. Fernando Perez, creator of IPython and recipient the Free Software Foundation’s 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software , will walk you through the many uses of the great IPython project. IPython’s use as a shell has recently been shown off in the recently redesigned python.org , which includes an embedded version of the shell. The tutorial goes far beyond the shell’s capabilities. The graphical console goes a step beyond, offering features such as inline images, such as those generated by matplotlib. One of the most popular features of late is the notebook , providing a document-like view, combining code with results, all displayed in a browser. The high-performance features of...

Although conference tickets are sold out, tutorial tickets are not. Whether you got a conference ticket or not, you’ll want to check out our tutorials, as our tutorials are perhaps one of the best values that PyCon offers. Some of the tutorial instructors are full-time educators, and some are the creators of the software they’re teaching. In any case, you’re getting expert instruction by some of the best in the community. Tutorials cost $150 each, which gets you three hours of classroom instruction, and includes a coffee break. Both Wednesday April 9 and Thursday April 10 have two sets of tutorials: a morning session and an afternoon session, split by a provided lunch. For Django Beginners Kick off Wednesday morning with Kenneth Love’s “ Getting Started with Django, a crash course .” Kenneth created a popular series of the same name, available at http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com/ , featuring video tutorials to walk you through building websites with Django. At PyCon, h...

Registration for our tutorials is open and ready for signups! If you're ready to sign up, head to  https://us.pycon.org/2014/registration/ and get started. The tutorials take place April 9 and 10, the two days preceding the conference, with four opportunities to learn from some of the Python community's best teachers. Each day has two sessions; a morning and an afternoon offering, split by lunch, with each of the sessions having a short snack break. The cost is $150 per session, which is a steal when you look at who is teaching these classes. This year we have a good mix of full time trainers, experienced presenters, and a couple of first time tutorial givers. The amount of experience we have on stage teaching these classes all in one space is hard to top. All together, it makes for a wide selection of topics that we hope the community finds beneficial. If you're interested in learning about popular web frameworks, we have tutorials on Django, Pyramid, web2py, and Fla...

The wait is over: selections for PyCon 2014's talks, tutorials, and posters are now available! It took a lot of effort from a lot of people to review another record breaking year of submissions, but once again, the result is a stunning set of presentations. Both the tutorial list and schedule are now available, with tutorial registration expected to be available later this week (we'll post/tweet when it's up). The 36 slots available on the schedule were filled from 71 proposals, making up yet another set of courses to get beginners started, and to help each type of Python user level up their skill set. The tutorials take place Wednesday April 9 through 10, and the schedule is comprised of morning and afternoon sessions over those two days. Each tutorial costs $150 and gets you three-hours of teaching and includes a 20 minute snack break. The list of accepted posters is also available. Taking place on Sunday April 13, the poster session is a great event for both pres...

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...

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...

If you’re interested in learning to program, PyCon 2013 is the place to be. Each year the conference draws a wide range of individuals, including those who work on and teach the Python language. The tutorials are an especially great place to be as they’re an affordable way to gain the freshest knowledge from the best in the community. That’s where Jessica McKellar comes in. She’s a PSF board member, Twisted contributor, and organizer of the hugely successful Boston Python Workshop . The group hosts weekend training sessions in Boston, and they’ve been so popular that the methods are being applied around the country. The courses have gotten countless people up and running with Python, and that’s what her PyCon 2013 tutorial aims to do. At 9 AM on Wednesday March 13th, her “ A hands-on introduction to Python for beginning programmers ” gets attendees on their way to loving programming via the Python language. “Thanks to the ‘batteries included’ philosophy and rich package ecosystem, ...

We just hit our capacity of 2,500 attendees for the conference, so registration is now closed! You know what isn't closed? Tutorial registration! We have some excellent tutorials on our schedule this year that you should definitely check out. If you're already registered for the conference, you can add tutorials to your existing account by going to the registration page . If you're not registered for the conference but are interested in coming for the tutorials, you can get started at  https://us.pycon.org/2013/registration/ !

PyCon Argentina 2012 , the 4th  National Spanish-speaking Python Conference will be held from November 12th to 17th , in  Buenos Aires  at the main venue of the  National University of Quilmes  (Bernal City, in the Great Buenos Aires metropolitan area), Urban Station  and  EducacionIT  (Buenos Aires City downtown). The detailed conference program schedule is available at:  http://ar.pycon.org/2012/schedule Admittance  is free of charge  ( web registration is required  as venue capacity is limited).  To get a conference T-shirt, promotional items and catering, early bird registration  is open up to September 30th , 2012 ( 30% off ). Speakers are eligible for a 50% special discount.  Additional donations are accepted thorough the payment process  (fundraising). First time attendees, students and general public can also opt to register at the "gratis" rate (free, no...

The following was an email sent to all known Python local user groups -- a list totaling 108 locations around the world. If you're in a user group and *haven't* seen this information, please email brian@python.org or comment on the post if your group would be interested in receiving this type of "newsletter" format. We don't send them often and we won't spam you, we just want to reach the community for which PyCon exists to serve. We are now 63 days away from PyCon 2012 in Santa Clara — it's hard to  think about how quickly time has flown since PyCon 2011! We've lined  up some great keynote and plenary speakers, announced the tutorial and  talk selections, opened ticket sales, and have expanded financial aid  opportunities. The community and our amazing array of sponsors have  helped us break several records already, so we hope you're as excited  about PyCon 2012 as we are. The conference runs March 7-15 at the  Santa Clara Convention Center...

The period for submitting tutorial proposals for Pycon 2009 (US) is now open and will continue through Friday, October 31th. This year features two "pre-conference" days devoted to tutorials on Wednesday March 25 & Thursday March 26 in Chicago. This allows for more classes than ever. Tutorials are 3-hours long on a specific topic of your choice. Last year we featured classes on Learning Python, Web Development, Scientific Computing, and many more. Class size varied from 10 to over 60 students. The extended time spent in class allows teachers to cover a lot of material while allowing for interaction with students. The full Call for Tutorial Proposals , including submission details, an example proposal as well as a template, is available at: http://us.pycon.org/2009/tutorials/proposals/ . Tutorial selections will be announced in early December to give you time to prepare your class. PyCon will compensate instructors US$1,500 per tutorial. If you have any questions, please c...