A new conference: Python Namibia!

The Python community has been fortunate to experience a lot of growth over the last few years, especially when it comes to user groups and conferences. A lot of these meetings have seen huge attendance, with PyCon having sold out the last three years, regional conferences seeing sharp growth, and some monthly meetups occasionally "selling out" (they're free, but attract more than the venue can hold). On top of those existing events growing, we're seeing more events pop up around the world.

We just got word that another new conference is starting up: Python Namibia, taking place February 2-5. This first time conference is taking place in Windhoek at the University of Namibia, with collaboration from Cardiff University, giving a group of students an opportunity to attend as part of their studies!

"Open-source software represents an opportunity for developing nations to become owners and producers of the software that they need; it's a key to their future prosperity," said organizer Daniele Procida. "There's an enormous benefit to software developers in being part of a supportive community."

The conference plans to start with two days of talks, a day of workshops and tutorials, and concluding with collaborative activities like sprints, as well as planning work for hosting a PyCon Namibia in 2016.

"We hope that this event will help programmers in Namibia feel that they belong to a welcoming international community that values their participation - and that it will help set a series of virtuous circles into motion," says Daniele.

Keep an eye on http://python-namibia.org/ and follow @PythonNamibia for more info!

Matching Donations to PyPy in September!

We're thrilled to announce that we will be matching donations made to the PyPy project for the month of September. For every dollar donated this month, the PSF will also give a dollar, up to a $10,000 total contribution. Head to http://pypy.org/ and view the donation options on the right side of the page, including general funding or a donation targeted to their STM, Py3k, or NumPy efforts.

We've previously given a $10,000 donation to PyPy, and more recently seeded the STM efforts with $5,000. The PyPy project works with the Software Freedom Conservancy to manage fund raising efforts and the usage of the funds, and they'll be the ones notifying us of how you all made your donations. At the end of the month, we'll do our part and chip  in to making PyPy even better.

The matching period runs today through the end of September.

Portland Chosen as PyCon 2016/2017 Location

After a thorough evaluation of several potential host cities, the Python Software Foundation has chosen Portland, Oregon as the next location for PyCon. Following PyCon 2015, taking place in Montréal for the second time, Portland will play home to PyCon for 2016 and 2017.

"This was the first site I had visited where all of the vendors knew of open source software before I arrived. Because Portland is so familiar with the OSS world, I became confident that as a city, they can help make PyCon 2016/17 very successful," said PSF Event Coordinator Ewa Jodlowska.

Portland edged out several other cities in the running, and will make for a great home to PyCon. Several other technology conferences call Portland home, including OSCON, which hosted the last International Python Conference, the precursor to PyCon.

The conference will take place in May of 2016 and 2017, a departure from the recent March and April events of the past. "This will be a great time to visit the Lan Su Chinese Garden, Japanese Garden, Rose Garden, and Arboretum," remarked Jodlowska. The city's wide array of restaurants and entertainment will make for an all around great time. "The city offers great coffee roasters, microbreweries, bakeries, pizza, fine dining, crazy donuts, and best of all FOOD CARTS!"

Following PyCon's trip into Canada, the Portland PyCons will represent the seventh location of PyCon, coming after Washington, D.C.; Dallas, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; Atlanta, Georgia; Santa Clara, California; and Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

As the final dates for the Portland events become available, we'll be sure to announce them here and on the PyCon blog.

Barbara Shaurette and Katie Cunningham earn Community Service Awards

On Friday, July 18th the board of the Python Software Foundation voted to award both Barbara Shaurette and Katie Cunningham a Community Service Award for Q2 2014.

The award is given in recognition of their work to create and run their Young Coders classes, along with freely distributing their teaching materials.

The program began at PyCon 2013 and was an immediate success. The followup blog post is the second most popular post in PyCon's history by a wide margin, and the event was one of the most talked about topics of the conference.

“I don't think you'd ever see that kind of experimentation in a classroom full of adults, who would more likely do everything in their power not to break their computers,” Barbara wrote of the kids’ ability to learn, write, and run code.

Since it's beginnings in Santa Clara it has been run at several other conferences, including again at PyCon 2014 - complete with one day having been taught in French, PyTennessee, and most recently at PyOhio.

We thank Katie and Barbara for their work in actively promoting and teaching Python to a new generation of programmers.

PSF Sponsors the 10th Python Brasil Conference

The Python Software Foundation donated $4,552 USD to Python Brasil 2014. This amount corresponds to their Gold Level sponsorship. The conference will take place in Recife and Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco. They will have tutorial days November 4-5 with the main conference taking place November 6-7. On November 8th, they will host a sprint day. The event is being organized by the Pernambuco Python User Group (PUG-PE) with the help of Apyb( PythonBrazil Association)

The organizer's behind the event had the following to say:

Python Brasil is one of the main events about technology at Brazil and Latin America related to open-source software and specially about the programming language Python and its derived applications. This is special year for us, since it is the 10th edition, a milestone in the set of events of this magnitude and celebrates your first release at the Northeast region of Brazil, which it reflects the popularity of the language spreading over all Brazil. The previous editions were all hosted at Southeast and south of Brazil. 

The event will host several success cases of organizations using Python at their activities and business, even more, it attracts to Brazil a heterogeneous audience from all over Brazil and foreign countries. More than 300 participants are expected to participate at this meeting, which it will be distributed in several activities such as the conference, desconference also known as Open Spaces, Job Fair, Sprints, lighting talks, tutorials, keynotes and exposition. 

The PythonBrasil is a traditional event that happens once a year. In the last editions several cities already hosted the event such as Brasilia (2013), Rio de Janeiro (2012), São Paulo (2011), Curitiba (2010), Caixas do Sul (2009), Rio de Janeiro (2008), Joinville (2007), Brasilia (2006) and Campinas (2005). Through the organizations that supported the event we already had several federal universities, companies and recently the commitment of the Government and the federal parliament at Brasilia.

The last edition was one of the largest joining more than 400 Python developers and open-source enthusiasts for all over Brazil. It was a special edition since the event was co-hosted with the International Plone Conference. 

We believe this year it will be special, first it will be held at Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, an amazing beach located 37 mi south of the city of Recife, Pernambuco. With great environment for joining our old friends and even making some new ones even doing lots of network. In our opinion, the best part of the event will be between the talks and keynotes with the discussion happening at the open-spaces and our lounges covered by coffee (yeah Brazilian developers loves coffee). We host several events post-conferences. For instance, our Django Day, that it will be our second one, that usually happens at one bar with beer, appetizers and lighting talks. We are planning many other joint events, like the first Brazilian meeting of the PyLadies Brazil, that started this year at Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. 

With great technical talks, many invited python references coming to our event and lots of opportunities to meet and learn with many other developers, we believe this year will be quite exciting, specially an event in one of our main touristic points at Brazil.

November is a wonderful time of year to head South and visit Latin America. Traveling internationally can take time to plan, so now is a great time to start!

PSF Sponsors SciPy 2014

SciPy 2014, taking place July 6-12 in Austin, Texas, will be the thirteenth rendition of the scientific community’s annual Python conference, and the Python Software Foundation is a proud Gold sponsor. With an expanded schedule to include a third day of talks, the growing conference is expecting to reach nearly 500 attendees.

"Last year we had about 330 register for the tutorials and conference. This year we are expecting over 450,” said organizer Brett Murphy. “Last year we had to shut off registration for the main conference when it hit 300 attendees. This year we can handle up to 800, so we'll see where we end up!"

The keynote schedule includes three great speakers: Lorena A. Barba, Nick Coghlan, and Greg Wilson. Lorena is an associate professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at George Washington University, and a renowned speaker on high-performance computing. Nick is a CPython core developer, PSF Fellow, and software developer at Red Hat, where he works on testing and integration systems. Last but not least, Greg works for the Mozilla Foundation and is the creator of Software Carpentry, a crash course in computing skills for scientists and engineers.

The PSF supports the conference at the Gold level, pledging $4000 in support of the event. This sponsorship will help to defray the cost of lodging and travel for students attending the conference, reduce the cost of attendance for all members, provide time and rooms for development sprints, and more.

SciPy 2014 includes several sub-events, including:

• SciPy John Hunter Excellence in Plotting Contest
• WSSSPE Workshop
• Women in Scientific Computing Luncheon
• Sponsor Happy Hours on Wednesday and Thursday evenings
• Sprint Dinner for Sprint participants

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This post was co-authored by Kushal Das

PSF Python Brochure now available! Get your copy in Montreal!

After three long years, the PSF Python Brochure is finally printed. The first batch was shipped to PyCon 2014 in Montreal. We would like to thank all our initial sponsors and contributors for the hard work and the impressing result.

Promote Python to non-developers

Please help spread the word about how great Python is and how useful it can be to learn Python by taking the brochure to your friends, teachers, professors, managers and team leaders.

We believe it provides some very convincing arguments and hope that it can serve as useful tool in furthering the PSF's mission to grow Python and its community by reaching out to the non-developer world.

Get your brochure copy

Come and grab your copy at the Python Software Foundation table (table #5, "Startup Row") at tonight's opening reception at PyCon 2014 in Montreal.

If you cannot come to fetch your hard copy, you can have a look at the PDF version:

• PSF Python Brochure PDF (low resolution version)
  

More information

More information on the brochure, the idea behind it, media data and ordering links are available on our project page:

• PSF Python Brochure Project Website

Marc-Andre Lemburg
Director, Python Software Foundation

Sponsoring the Kivy App Contest

The Python Software Foundation is thrilled to support Kivy on their upcoming developer contest, the second of its kind. The contest begins by accepting entries, either for teams or individuals, on April 2. However, the topic of the contest won't be known at that time. On April 15, the Kivy Project releases the topic and the teams have one month to develop their applications, wrapping up on May 14.

The organizers aim to "encourage and give developers an opportunity to learn more about Python and Kivy," through the contest. As Kivy is a cross-platform toolkit, they hope to see applications running not only on desktop operating systems, but also on mobile. The theme they plan won't be too limiting, so all platforms can join in the fun.

Visual styling will be among the judging criteria, so they're hoping to see some good looking entries. "Without giving anything away, the ideas could range from a simple scientific calculator, to an alarm clock manager, a diary app, or a maths tutor," the organizers said.

"The PSF has been a big part of helping us grow by providing us sponsorship," they said of the $2000 USD granted to support the contest. Jessica McKellar, they said, was "a big part of helping us get this competition off the ground."

"The project has been getting quite popular lately, especially with the increasing interest in mobile applications," they said of Kivy. Part of the attraction comes from being able to work with pure Python across all of the platforms, allowing developers to leverage the huge amount of code the Python community has made available.

When it comes to Kivy's development, they're preparing a lot of new features for the next major release, especially support for SDL2 backends. Adding SDL support should make for a much more speedy experience on mobile platforms, and give them more flexibility overall. They're also putting some focus on some projects that surround Kivy, such as Plyer and Buildozer.

If you're new to Python or Kivy, the organizers have created a level playing field that will allow both experienced and new programmers to partake. "Our judgement criteria will include not just areas of technical merit, but also a focus on great app ideas, user engagement, and use of Kivy features," they said.

"So come on dive in and make your first mobile app using Python facilitated by the Kivy framework!"

PyLadies: announcing paid summer internships with CPython

The Python Software Foundation is proud to announce that it is sponsoring CPython internships for women this summer through the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.

Please visit our project page for the full program details and how to apply!

• What: Earn a $5500 USD stipend while contributing to the CPython interpreter and standard library.
• When: This is a full-time summer internship lasting from May 19 through August 18.
• Where: Anywhere! This is remote internship, with most communication happening on mailing lists, bug trackers, and IRC.
• Who: This internship is open to anyone who identifies as a woman or is genderqueer, genderfluid, or genderfree. Note that unlike Google Summer of Code, you do not need to be a student.

Applications are due by March 19th.

Python in Google Summer of Code 2014

Python project contributors and student enthusiasts, mark your calendars: Google Summer of Code applications open soon!

Google Summer of Code is an annual, global program pairing student developers with mentors in open source projects for paid summer internships.

You can learn more about this year's Google Summer of Code here.

Python projects

Python serves as an umbrella organization for around a dozen open source Python projects each year. This year, the following projects are participating:

• CPython: core Python and the standard library
• GNU Mailman: the ubiquitous mailing list package
• Mercurial: a distributed source control management tool 
• BinPy: a platform for building circuit-based applications or logical games
• Vispy: high-performance interactive visualizations
• TARDIS-SN: supernova radiative transfer in Python
• SunPy: Python for solar physics
• Scrapy: a fast, high-level screen scraping and web crawling framework
• Theano: an optimizing compiler for numpy.ndarray and scipy.sparse matrix
• Kivy: a library for making cross-platform, multi-touch apps
• MNE-Python: a software package for processing MEG and EEG data
• scikit-image: a collection of algorithms for image processing
• scikit-learn: a Python module for machine learning
• PyDy: a package for studying multibody dynamics with Python
• SciPy and NumPy: open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering
• AstroPy: a community Python library for astronomy

Students

Google Summer of Code is a paid summer internship program for college/university students who will be 18 years of age or older on April 21, 2014. Participating in Google Summer of Code is a great way to develop real-world software engineering skills while giving back to an open source Python project you love.

Read more about eligibility in the FAQ.

If you are interested in participating in Google Summer of Code under the Python umbrella, it's time to start exploring potential projects and practicing the tools of open source development:

1. Read the Python Google Summer of Code guidelines.
2. Review this year's projects and their idea pages.
3. Start practicing the tools of open source development, including:
   
   • IRC
   • a revision control system like git or svn
   • the diff and patch utilities
   • bug trackers

If you've never used some of these tools before, don't worry! You have plenty of time to practice. A good resource for getting familiar with these tools is the OpenHatch training missions.

Important deadlines

• March 10: Student application period opens.
• March 21: Student application deadline.
• April 21: Accepted student proposals announced.

Note that the best way to boost your chances of being accepted for Google Summer of Code is to start contributing to a project before you apply. If you have questions about how to get started or just want some friendly encouragement, visit the OpenHatch project and say hello.