PyCon Pune 2017

by Kushal Das

2017 is a special year for various reasons. PyCon Pune 2017 is one of the biggest points in that list. This gave us an opportunity to meet with the friends and work along with the community on the language/projects we love.

Anwesha first pointed out the idea that we can have a regional PyCon, and later in the Delhi airport (while returning from PyCon India) I shared the idea with Sayan and Ratnadeep. The goal was to focus on upstream contribution and communities at the same time. We made the first call for organizers and volunteers as soon as I managed to get a venue fixed. Though just before the conference we had to move the main conference venue (for various reasons) to another beautiful location, AMANORA THE FERN HOTELS AND CLUB, Pune. We had two different part of the conference, first two days were the main conference, a single track of talks. This helped everyone to attend the whole of conference talks. People could also visit the sponsor booths or enjoy the view of the venue in the hallway track. The second part of the conference was dev sprints, which was the main attraction for us. It was held in the Red Hat Pune office in the last 2 days of the conference. Having the sprints in an office helped us to get a stable Internet, and power. In total, we had around 550+ attendees and around 120 dev sprint attendees. The tickets for dev sprints were sold out in the first few days :) and there was a big demand for any ticket transfer till the last moment. We also had child care facility around 5 minutes walking distance from the main venue. Our tshirt had a comment from Brett Cannon, this was also a perfect way to communicate the goal of the conference.

We had 89 talk proposals, out of that 10 talks were selected and 6 keynotes. I should especially thank all the speakers as they traveled of their own, and thus helping with our limited budget for the conference. Btw, I have written another blog post about how do we take care of our conference speakers.

Everything related to the conference was maintained in the github. Our logo came from Ryan Lerch, website was made by a group of volunteers. The local hackerspace, reserved-bit was not only a sponsor for us, but also volunteered to manage the finance of the conference and volunteering in person. They also have a blog post explaining the budget information in their blog. Janastu helped us to manage the ticket (registration) sales. Hasgeek helped by providing the video recording equipment. All the talks (except one where we lost the audio due to a technical issue) are available on youtube.

The Python Software Foundation helped us for this conference from the day 1, PyLadies Pune were managing the PSF booth during the conference. Microsoft Python team, Elastic, Pipal Academy, Red Hat, reserved-bit, PSF were the sponsors in the first edition of the conference.

Devsprints details

As I mentioned above, the dev sprints were the main fun point for PyCon Pune. At the end of two days of sprints, we manage to have the following things done (mostly by total newcomers):

Cpython

OpenCabs

Web.py

ElasticSearch

Django

es-django-example

Pagure

Learning of all things

  • Getting started with PyGame
  • Getting started with Cactus (static website generating)
  • Using git and github
  • Using github pages

MicroPython

We also had a full room with people working on MicroPython and hardware. John Hawley was helping out people with MicroPython, and he also got many ESP8266 based bunny boards, which he distributed among the participants. You can read more about one such project in Anwesha’s blog. And the rest of the details from sprints:

  • Making things blink
  • Watching Star Wars
  • Flashing Boards, then unflashing boards
  • Bunny herding
  • Thumb bitting at thee
  • Xen of V & A and the river W
  • MicroPython and the search for the Temperature Sensors 2 - the sensors are lost!
  • Asking random Chinese LED manufacturer’s if they can make the impossible (turns out they are bums and can’t)
  • Plotting adc values from esp8266 using matplotlib
  • Causing Bunny infestation

Full photoset

All the photos from the conference are available in my flickr album.

What about PyCon Pune 2018?

You will have to wait for few more days for the exciting announcements :) Sayan already made a call for design volunteers.