PyCon Belarus

One function the PSF is happy to do is to send a PSF Director to PyCons in various parts of the world to give a talk and to provide information about and encourage membership in the PSF. Last week, PSF Director, David Mertz, attended PyCon Belarus in Minsk where he spoke about a new Python language feature (Python's (future) type annotation system(s)) and met many amazing Python users. 

Along with David, the other invited keynote speaker was Austin Bingham, originally from Texas and currently co-owner and founder of Sixty North in Stavanger, Norway. Austin spoke on Python refactoring with Rope and Traad.

According to David Mertz, having a PSF Director attend and participate at these conferences "allows us to support the PSF mission, to make new contacts outside the US, and to promote the new membership model."

The January 31st conference, the first ever held in Belarus, was a one-day affair that took place at EventSpace located in central Minsk. Approximately 150 people attended. There were 14 talks, comprising two tracks; talks were given in either Russian or English. Many speakers and attendees came from Russia and Ukraine, both of which have had active recent PyCons. 

In the PyCon tradition, lively lightening talks were a popular feature. Austin's talk about what the hell super() does behind the scenes was particularly memorable (hint: see Michele Simionato's article Python 2.3 Method Resolution Order).

One of the corporate sponsors of PyCon Belarus was the Belorussian software company, Wargaming, developer of the hugely popular online multiplayer game World of Tanks. Wargaming employs around 2000 people in Minsk, including 900 software developers. Wargaming also has offices in several other cities worldwide. About 90% of Wargaming's codebase is in Python. David Mertz visited at their invitation and reprised his conference talk. He also discussed performance concerns and optimization. Specifically, major tools allowing significant speed-ups include PyPy and PyPy-STM, Cython, Numba, as well as plain old C extension modules. David's video is available on You Tube.

Pictures of PyCon Belarus are available at PyCon Belarus pics. Videos of talks are at PyCon Belarus youtube.

For a list of PyCons around the world go to the PSF website.

Geek Girls Carrots coming to PyCon 2015!

Earlier this week, I posted about a workshop the PSF sponsored given by Geek Girls Carrots. Since then, I've been in touch with organizer, Zuzanna Podwińska, who provided the following additional information. 

Geek Girls Carrots is a community of women who are interested in IT and new technologies. Our goal is to encourage women to take up IT-related careers, and to promote women who already work in the field.

To achieve this, we organize regular meet-ups as well as various coding workshops. At each meet-up, we have a speaker - usually a woman who works with new technologies - and a networking session, which is when members of the community get to know each other and inspire each other. People who come to our meetings are from various walks of life - some of them professionals, some considering changing their career paths, some are just hobbyists. What connects them all is love for new technologies.

Our community was started by Kamila Sidor and Kamila Stępniowska in Warsaw, Poland in 2011 and it has been rapidly growing ever since. At this point, we organize meet-ups in 22 cities all over the world - mostly in Poland, but also in places such as Berlin, London, Seattle, or New York City. The organizing team is now 71 people and growing.

Besides the meet-ups, we organize coding workshops, such as the Django Carrots workshops which you supported. So far in Warsaw we have had five editions of Django Carrots and 212 people - attendees and mentors - have participated since the first edition.

Every week, two coding workshops, Code Carrots Python and Code Carrots JavaScript, take place in Warsaw.There is also a 6-week-long coding workshop in Seattle.

Attendees of our programming workshops are very often people who want to switch career paths to a more technical, IT-oriented one. Although sometimes they are just curious to see what programming is all about. Most of our workshops are for beginners. We meet at offices and co-working spaces made available to us by our partners.

What really keeps us going is the stories of women who started their programming adventure with us and have since become professional developers. My personal favourite is the story of Gosia, who, as a psychology graduate, participated in the 3rd edition of Django Carrots and quickly realized programming is the thing she wants to do. She decided to change her career path completely and today not only is she a professional developer, but she also teaches JavaScript at our weekly Code Carrots course. In fact, the other female Code Carrots JS mentor also started programming with us.

You can find more information about Geek Girls Carrots at Geek Girls Carrots.

And the really exciting news is that Geek Girls are bringing a Django Carrots workshop to PyCon 2015 in Montreal! If you haven't signed up yet, there's still time: Django Carrots Workshop. Looking forward to meeting Zuzanna and her group in Montreal.