The PyCon Blog

It’s back.Thanks to generous sponsorship from Heroku, we are excited to announce that PyCon 2017 will feature the return of the legendary Testing BOF! If you want to attend, all that’s necessary is to sign up for free on Eventbrite (the link is below) and then be sure to be at McMenamins Crystal Ballroom at 9:30pm on Friday evening — the first night of the main three PyCon 2017 conference days.From 9:30pm–11:30pm that Friday night, McMenamins Crystal Ballroom will be sparkling with the wit and technical wisdom of quick talks covering Python, testing, and the terrain in between at this high-velocity lightning-talk-style event.This popular birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session provides a late evening of lightning talks and socializing for those who write tests, maintain testing frameworks, complain about testing frameworks, or who are simply testing-curious.This is an official PyCon event and is governed by our Code of Conduct.Thanks to Heroku, drink tickets and snacks will both be provided!A…

We are happy to announce PyCon 2017’s Sunday morning plenary event — the final day of this year’s main conference will feature Guido van Rossum on a panel of Python programmers who attended the first-ever Python conference back in 1994! Paul Everitt will moderate the panel as they answer questions and share their memories about that first Python conference when the programming language was still young.At the beginning of 1994, the World Wide Web consisted of less than 1,000 sites. There was no distributed version control. No public issue trackers. Programmers communicated their ideas, issues, and patches in plain text on mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. The small community of Python programmers were connected through both a mailing list and the comp.lang.python newsgroup, which was busy enough that several new messages were appearing each day.An exciting announcement blazed out to subscribers of the Python mailing list in September 1994: Guido van Rossum, the Dutch researcher who …

Only one month from today, PyCon will be almost over! The conference will be on the third and final day of its program. The sponsor booths will all have been packed up the night before and the Expo Hall re-purposed for a morning full of Poster presentations and Job Fair tables. Only one quick afternoon of talks will stand between us and the closing ceremonies.Here in the present, the hatches are nearly all battened down. The schedule is set. The conference is completely sold out of registrations. The sponsor lineup is nearly finished, with only a few booths still left to be claimed. Almost everything is now in place — though, we do still need more attendeees to sign up as volunteers, a topic about which we will blog in further detail next week.Meanwhile, the time has come to announce this year’s keynote speakers, who will be addressing the conference during our plenary sessions! They are:Kelsey HightowerKaty HuffJake VanderplasLisa Guo & Hui DingWe look forward to hearing from eac…