PyCon Startup Row 2017 Applications Are Now Open!

Starting at the 2011 conference in Atlanta, the PyCon Expo Hall has offered a special event for startups: “Startup Row,” a row of booths that features interesting startups built with Python.

We’re happy to announce that applications to Startup Row at PyCon 2017 in Portland, Oregon, are now open!

You may have questions about Startup Row, so here we provide some basic answers.

How do I apply?

There is information about applying at the end of this post, but if you’re the “do first, ask questions later” type, go to our application form.

What do Startup Row companies get?

We give founders a unique opportunity to connect with the vibrant, diverse community of engineers, data scientists, speakers, investors and enthusiasts who come to the world’s largest Python programming conference.

Startup Row companies get:

• Free booth space
• Admission to PyCon for two startup team members
• Coverage here on the PyCon blog and elsewhere
• A couple of fun events exclusively for Startup Row companies and the community.

And in a first for Startup Row, this year we’ll be giving our companies access to the Jobs Fair at PyCon, so they can recruit from the same quality pool of engineering talent that the likes of Google, Facebook, Dropbox and other big companies have recruited at PyCon for years.

All in, if selected, your company receives a few thousand dollars worth of access to the best PyCon has to offer, all for free because you’re doing cool stuff with Python.

What are the rules?

1. Your startup has to be 2.5 years old or less.
2. Including founders, there have to be less than 15 people on the team at the time you apply.
3. Obviously, you have to use Python somewhere in your stack. (Open source, proprietary, front end, back end, data analysis, devops — it all counts.)

How does the selection committee pick companies?

• We strongly favor engineer-founders, people who can build both valuable software and valuable businesses.
• The technology or product has to be interesting. Are you solving a tough engineering problem? Building a version control system to replace git? Using a new technology in a unique way? Something that scratches your own itch as a domain expert in some field? Great!
• Traction. Is your company reaching a lot of people, either now or in the near future? Do you have a good sales pipeline? Lots of signups? MAU stats that would make Facebook jealous? Be sure to tell us about it in your application.

Which companies have been on Startup Row before?

In the past six years, Startup Row has featured over 75 companies, some of which you’ve probably heard of or even used.

Pandas, the popular data science library, was created by Lambda Foundry. 

DotCloud (which would become Docker), ZeroVM, X.ai, Mailgun, Mixpanel, AppThwack, and many others were all featured on Startup Row back when they were early stage startups.

I’ve heard something about local pitch events. Tell me more!

Yes, we’re hosting pitch events in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. If you’re interested in pitching or hosting your own local Startup Row pitch event, email one of Startup Row’s organizers at don [at] sheu [dot] com, or jason [at] jdr [dot] fyi for more information.

Currently, we've scheduled events in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle, and we're adding more dates. The Chicago event is on January 26 at Braintree HQ in collaboration with the Braintree team and ChiPy, the local user group. The San Francisco event is on March 8, and as of the time of publishing a venue is TBD. Finally, Avvo offered to host the Seattle event in collaboration with PuPPy, the Seattle and Puget Sound Python user group.

We’ll be announcing the local events schedule and additional dates on the Startup Row page.

Where can I learn more about Startup Row?

Startup Row has its own page on the PyCon 2017 site, where you can learn more about the history of Startup Row at PyCon (fun fact: it started as a collaboration between Y Combinator and the PSF) and just how well Startup Row alumni have performed (another fun fact: nearly 20% have had successful exits so far).

If you have any quick questions up front for the organizing team, you can find us @ulysseas and @jason_rowley on Twitter, or at the email addresses listed above.

Okay, I’ve read all this. Now, how do I apply?

First off, we commend you for sticking it through to the end! You can click here to go to the application form for Startup Row.

We’re looking forward to learning a little more about what you’re working on!

Python Education Summit — in its 5th year in 2017!

Teachers, educators, Pythonistas, come and share your projects, experiences, and tools of the trade as you teach coding and Python to your students. The “Call for Talks” to speak at the Annual Python Education Summit, which is held in conjunction with PyCon, is open until January 3rd. We want to hear from you!

Go here for more details: https://us.pycon.org/2017/speaking/education-summit/

We are looking for ideas and experiences and best practices: how teachers and Python programmers have implemented Python instruction in their schools, communities, and other places of learning.

• Have you implemented a program that you’ve been dying to talk about?
• Have you tried something that failed, but learned some great lessons that you can share?
• Have you been successful implementing a particular program?

Then we urge you to submit a talk! You do not need to be an experienced speaker. We want you to share knowledge; we want to learn from your experiences.

This year, talks that focus on the challenges and triumphs of implementing code education are especially encouraged.

About the Python Education Summit

The Education Summit was started by Naomi Ceder in 2013: https://us.pycon.org/2013/events/edusummit/

The goal of the Summit was to form a coalition of teachers and educators from various walks of life who believe in teaching programming and using Python as a tool to do so. Since then, the Education Summit has become an integral part of PyCon, and 2017 will be its 5th year!

The structure of Education Summit has changed since its inception. In 2013 the Summit was by invitation only — it consisted of three discussion panels focusing on curriculum, teaching and engagement. Following lunch, the Summit transformed into a workshop where attendees could mingle and discuss topics from the morning sessions.

But from 2014 onwards the Education Summit became a whole-day event, with both morning and afternoon talks. The proposals for these were invited via a CFP. Some topics that were presented were on Teaching Data Science with Python, FOSSBox, et cetera.

You can check out the list of talks presented at Pycon 2015. Some that stood out to me were an uplifting talk about Women in Peru and how the outreach activity there is encouraging young women to take Python. Another one was how to use Trinket to create games! There is a recent article on Eliot Hauser who presented this talk, and how his product is now benefiting K-12 students and being used in schools.

In 2016, the talk list grew even further! There were two tracks, and the talks were recorded. A variety of talks were presented. This led to some great discussions, friendships, and engagements that went beyond PyCon. An excellent keynote on the Python Education Working Group and the micro:bit was presented by Nicolas Tollervey. This gave us insight on Python and Education activities in the United Kingdom. We learnt how one can attract younger minds to coding through games, with a talk on Pygame Zero and Minecraft. Teachers gave us excellent insight into their Python curricula and methods of teaching. The unconference sessions that followed further fueled the discussions and filled us all with renewed vigor and motivation to do something and make a difference!

Personally, I am full of gratitude to the Python Community and the Python Education Summit. My participation and learning has led to fruition and I was able to launch PyKids in the Summer of 2016 with the goal of teaching Python to grade schoolers. I have had much success — 7 after-school sessions this Fall with 5th graders, and a promise of new students in early 2017!

We hope to see you at the Education Summit this year. Hurry! January 3rd is the Talk Submission deadline — so pen down your thoughts and ideas and send them to us now.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Talk, Poster, Education Summit proposals due January 3rd — but feel free to submit them now!

With the holidays nearly here, this is the moment to ask yourself: are you really — when you return groggily to work on Tuesday January 3rd following the “New Year’s (Observed)” holiday on Monday — going to remember to write and submit your Talk, Poster, and Education Summit proposals for PyCon 2017?

Waiting until the last minute is very tempting. After all, the whole reason that we worked with the Talk and Poster committees to move the deadline as close to PyCon as we dared was to let you submit as current and as up-to-date a proposal as possible.

But — are you sure that you want to risk starting your first work day of the New Year (if your schedule even puts you back at work by the 3rd!) with a conference deadline looming only hours later?

I myself am adopting a safer approach this year: I will be going ahead and submitting all of my proposals this week, ahead of the holidays. Then, if I do remember the deadline, I can always log into the PyCon web site on January 3rd and use the “Edit” button to make all of the last-minute revisions that I want. But if I forget? Then at least an early version of each proposal will be in the system and can be considered by the Program Committee!

As was true last year, our schedule is designed to allow Financial Assistance submissions to include any Talk, Tutorial, Poster, or Education Summit proposals that you get accepted:

• January 3 — Talk, Poster, and Education Summit proposals due, as long as it is January 3rd Anywhere on Earth (AoE).
• February 1–12 — Talks, Tutorials, Posters, and Education Summit schedules announced.
• February 15 — Financial Assistance applications due.
• March 3 — Financial Assistance grants awarded.
• March 30 — Your deadline to respond to offer of Financial Assistance.

One final note: more than 90% of our Early Bird tickets are now gone, with only a few dozen remaining. If you have hoped to purchase your Student, Individual, or Corporate ticket at our discounted rate, then your time is almost up — register as soon as you can, and we look forward to seeing you in Portland in May 2017!

The new, simpler Tutorial proposal form closes tomorrow!

This is the time of year when the upcoming PyCon really starts to feel closer, with the close of our earliest CFP (Call for Proposals) tomorrow on November 30. This is the first of several milestones for the conference that start arriving more and more frequently through the late autumn and winter. Each milestone ratchets PyCon one step closer to its arrival.

Our earliest CFP is for our Tutorials, which closes tomorrow — at the end of the day on November 30 anywhere on Earth. So if it is still November 30 in your time zone, then the CFP will not yet be closed!

What are the main features of Tutorials?

• Tutorials are 3-hour-long courses that pack the first two days of the PyCon conference schedule.
• Students register ahead of time and pay separately for each 3-hour tutorial they attend.
• We end the Tutorials CFP a full month earlier than for Talks and Posters, so the tutorials committee has extra time to fully vet each proposal and to generate a solid line-up of valuable topics that will repay the students’ investment to attend them.
• In return for providing this value to the conference, we compensate each instructor. The amount can vary each year depending on the conference budget, but in 2016 we were able to reward them each with $1,500 for the instruction they provided our attendees.
• You can learn more at our Proposing a Tutorial page, which includes links to long lists of topics in case you need inspiration!

If you proposed a tutorial last year, you will be happy to learn that we have streamlined the form to only four fields beyond the title itself:

1. The Description is the public advertisement for your Tutorial and will be visible on the PyCon web site — replacing what used to be separate Description and Abstract fields. The other fields below are private and shared only with the committee.
2. The Audience field lets you write a free-form description of who you think will be interested in and benefit from your tutorial. It replaces the old Audience, Category, and Perceived Value fields.
3. The most detailed information, as before, belongs in the Outline that you write up for the committee.
4. Finally, the Additional notes let you describe your previous experience as an instructor and mention any special setup or materials that your tutorial will require. It replaces the old fields Additional Notes, Additional Requirements, More Info, and Handout.

Hopefully the new form means that you spend less time puzzling over what the difference between a Description and an Abstract is, and more time focusing on your ideas about your course!

Does teaching at PyCon interest you? There is only one day left to submit your proposal! Head on over to the Proposing a Tutorial page and get your idea submitted before the end of the day on November 30 anywhere on Earth.

Tutorial proposals are due in three weeks

The PyCon 2017 call for proposals (CFP) first opened about a month ago, and the team who will be bringing the conference to Portland have been excited to watch the first wave of submissions roll in. Exciting topics from across the PyCon community have already been proposed for our talks, tutorials, and poster schedules.

But we know that many of you are brimming with ideas that you have not yet submitted, so we wanted to remind you of this year’s deadlines:

• Talk proposals will be due on 2017 January 3.
• Poster proposals will be due on 2017 January 3.
• Tutorial proposals are due on 2017 November 30.

Yes, that’s right — tutorial proposals are due in three weeks!

Last year we explained the one-month difference between the talk and tutorial deadlines in a detailed blog post that we invite you to review this year if you want to understand why the Tutorial review process takes more time for its committee. Entrusted with the one PyCon schedule for which attendees pay an individual fee per course, the Tutorial Committee takes extra time to make sure that courses are going to live up to the conference’s high reputation. As the Tutorials Chair, Ruben Orduz, reminded us last year:

“It’s a very time-consuming process, but it helps in selecting the best lineup while making sure every tutorial that had potential was given a fair chance. Compressing the timeline would mean only selecting from the top well-known proposers and forgetting the rest. That would be against our philosophy of giving chances to new instructors and increasing diversity.”

So we hope those of you with dreams of offering a tutorial will find the time within the next two weeks to get your proposal written up and submitted. Just visit our “Proposing a Tutorial” page for a guide to writing up your idea and getting it submitted — before November 30, when our Tutorials CFP will close once it is midnight and the day is over in every time zone. Good luck!

Registration is open for PyCon 2017!

This year our conference registrar is happy to offer a sleek and more modern interface for registering and getting your hotel room for PyCon 2017 in Portland, Oregon! There were a few technical kinks involved so we took the process slowly. We started with a soft launch to iron out any problems, and are now ready for everyone to sign up!

PyCon has now sold out 5 years running, and we expect it to sell out again this year. Portland proved to be a wonderful venue for the conference, and we look forward to our upcoming return there for a second and final year. Remember that the first 800 tickets sold receive our Early Bird discount, and that they are likely to sell fast.

We have also opened our Financial Assistance application. It stays open until 15 February — so speakers will have time to apply after we announce the program schedule — but please feel free to go ahead and sign up now if you know that attending PyCon will present you with financial difficulty.

Here are the links:

Registration Information
Registration Form
Financial Assistance

PyCon 2017 is more than a week of events! Two days of tutorials offer classroom-style instruction, the three main weekend conference days are packed with talks and open spaces and events, and then the conference finishes with four full days of sprints where volunteers work together on open source projects. More than 3,000 fans and contributors to Python are expected to attend!

Both breakfast and lunch are included in the price of registration, along with refreshments and coffee breaks.

Note that tutorials are not covered in the price of a normal registration. Instead, each 3-hour tutorial class costs $150, and you can attend up to four classes if you book both a morning and an afternoon class during the two tutorial days. We will open tutorial sign-ups once the tutorial schedule is announced next year!

The PyCon 2017 site has launched — thank you to our Launch Day Sponsors

The new PyCon 2017 web site recently went live, and the conference volunteers have worked hard bring the new site up-to-date with all of the essential details about 2017’s schedule, venue, and hotels. We are very happy with the new logo and banner that Beatrix Bodó crafted to help the conference celebrate its second and final year in beautiful Portland, Oregon!

With the release of the site we have also opened up the proposal forms for Talks, Tutorials, Posters, and Education Summit presentations. Visit our “Speak at PyCon” page to read the details of our Call For Proposals (CFP) and to learn about becoming part of the 2017 conference schedule.

Our launch-day sponsors this year — the organizations who have gone ahead and pledged to support and attend PyCon 2017, helping keep the conference affordable for as wide a range of attendees as possible — are from a broad array of fields that illustrate just how widely Python is used in today’s world.

Two of our Launch Day sponsors this year are supporting the conference at the Platinum level:

• Platinum sponsor Microsoft “is proud to support the Python community through sponsored development of Python Tools for Visual Studio, Jupyter, CPython, Azure Machine Learning and organizations such as the PSF and NumFocus.” Millions of programmers around the world find themselves with support for Python already sitting on their desktop because their team or workplace uses Visual Studio.
• Platinum sponsor Anaconda from Contiuum Analytics “is the leading Open Data Science platform powered by Python.” Any of you who, like me, now use Anaconda as your go-to method for installing Python — and all the best data science libraries — will appreciate how crucial the tool has become to our community’s ability to get new users up and running quickly.

Our launch-day Gold sponsors range from large Fortune 100 companies to small consultancies providing boutique consulting and programming:

• Wingware — An IDE designed specifically for Python.
• Stormpath — An identity management API for software teams.
• Sentry — Real-time error tracking for your web apps, mobile apps, and games.
• Nylas — A new platform for email-powered apps.
• Lincoln Loop — A full-service software development agency specializing in Python and Django.
• Leadpages — Helps businesses grow by collecting more leads and driving more sales.
• Fusionbox — A custom software development agency specializing in Python/Django, ETL, and application security.
• Demonware — The online services behind some of the world’s most popular game franchises.
• Capital One — A Fortune 100 Company with the levels of innovation and agility that you’d typically find at a start-up.
• Caktus Group — Django web application development done right.
• American Greetings — A leading creator and manufacturer of innovative social expression products.

And, finally, we have already signed our first Silver sponsor!

• O'Reilly — The media company that first put open source on the map for many programmers, providing shelves of books and references to help orient them to a world of operating systems and tools that they had not known existed.

For more details about each sponsor, see the detailed sponsor descriptions on our Sponsors Page and follow the links to their web sites. We look forward to seeing every one of these sponsors in the Expo Hall on Friday and Saturday of the main conference!

Subscribe to our blog here for regular updates as the conference approaches. To get you started, here are the most important dates for the conference through the rest of the year and up to PyCon itself:

2016

• October 3 — Call For Proposals (CFP) for Talks, Tutorials, Posters, and the Education Summit
• October 14 — Financial Assistance application opens
• October 17 — Registration opens
• November 30 — Tutorial proposals due

2017

• January 3 — Talk, Poster, and Education Summit proposals due
• February 1–12 — Talks, Tutorials, Posters, and Education Summit schedules announced
• February 15 — Financial Assistance applications due
• March 3 — Financial Assistance grants awarded
• March 30 — Deadline to respond to Financial Assistance offer

In Portland, Oregon

• May 17–18 — Two days of Tutorials
• May 19–21 — Three main conference days including Talks, Expo Hall, Job Fair, and Posters
• May 22–25 — Four days of Sprints