At the beginning one goes to the conferences to listen to the talks and make new contacts. You meet a lot of new faces every time. Over time a few of them will become great friends and then all conferences will become about friends.

We wait for the conferences so that we can meet our friends. I went back to PyCon US this year after 5 years, means I met many friends after 5 years. It was so happy feeling to see them again.

Last week I went to my first ever Euro Python in Prague, finally the visa was good in the right days of the year. This means I managed to meet more friends, a few of them just after a month (as they were present in PyCon US) and some after many many years. Really enjoyed the social event place selections by the organizers.

Personally the social events allowed me to go full scale nerd out on technical and social issues with friends. I was really missing these discussions. Heard more stories and discussed about fun ideas. One is below :)

$ python
Python 3.12.4 (main, Jun  7 2024, 00:00:00) [GCC 14.1.1 20240607 (Red Hat 14.1.1-5)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> hello
🤌🤌🤌
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'hello' is not defined. Did you mean: 'help'?
>>> [].set("different exception")
🤌🤌🤌
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'set'
>>> 

A couple of weeks back, I gave a talk at PyCon US 2019, "Building reproducible Python applications for secured environments".

The main idea behind the talk is about the different kind of threats in an application which has dependencies (with regular updates) coming from various upstream projects, and also the final deployable artifact (Debian package in this case) needs to audit-able, and reproducible.

Before my talk on Saturday, I went through the whole idea and different steps we are following, with many of the PyPA (Python Packaging Authority) and other security leads in various organizations.

You can view the talk on Youtube. Feel free to give any feedback over email or Twitter.

In the beginning of October, I attended a new PyCon in India, PyConf Hyderabad (no worries, they are working on the name for the next year). I was super excited about this conference, the main reason is being able to meet more Python developers from India. We are a large country, and we certainly need more local conferences :)

We reached the conference hotel a day before the event starts along with Py. The first day of the conference was workshop day, we reached the venue on time to say hi to everyone. Meet the team at the conference and many old friends. It was good to see that folks traveled from all across the country to volunteer for the conference. Of course, we had a certain number of dgplug folks there :)

In the conference day, Anwesha and /my setup in the PSF booth, and talked to the attendees. During the lighting talk session, Sayan and Anwesha introduced PyCon Pune, and they also opened up the registration during the lighting talk :). I attended Chandan Kumar’s talk about his journey into upstream projects. Have to admit that I feel proud to see all the work he has done.

Btw, I forgot to mention that lunch at PyConf Hyderabad was the best conference food ever. They had some amazing biryani :).

The last talk of the day was my keynote titled Free Software movement & current days. Anwesha and I wrote an article on the history of Free Software a few months back, and that the talk was based on that. This was also the first time I spoke about Freedom of the Press Foundation (attended my first conference as the FPF staff member).

The team behind the conference did some amazing groundwork to make this conference happening. It was a good opportunity to meet the community, and make new friends.

The CFP for PyCon Pune 2018 will close at the end of 15th September AOE. If you are thinking about submitting a talk, this is a good time to do that. The conference will happen from 8-11th February in Pune, India. The first 2 days are the main conference, a single track event where will have around 650 people. The last two days will be devsprints.

We have already announced all the 6 keynote speakers of the conference.

• Brett Cannon
• Carol Willing
• Nicholas Tollervey
• Paul Hildebrandt
• Paul Everitt
• Andrew Godwin

Go ahead and submit your talk today.

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 ***** 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):

*****ython

• CuriousLearner (Sanyam Khurana) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/147
• aktech (Amit Kumar) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/146
• chandankumar https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/148
• CuriousLearner (Sanyam Khurana) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/151
• aktech (Amit Kumar) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/152
• CuriousLearner (Sanyam Khurana) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/156
• CuriousLearner (Sanyam Khurana) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/158
• Sayan Chowdhury https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/175/
• CuriousLearner (Sanyam Khurana) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/172
• rtnpro (Ratnadeep Debnath) https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/173
• Sayan Chowdhury https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/312
• Subhendu Ghosh https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/171
• Subhendu Ghosh https://github.com/python/*****ython/pull/150

OpenCabs

• Rahul Bajaj Fixed doc, https://github.com/rtnpro/opencabs/pull/1
• Mahendra Yadav Fixed typo, https://github.com/rtnpro/opencabs/pull/2
• Rahul Bajaj, Fix the index booking form, https://github.com/rtnpro/opencabs/pull/7

Web.py

• https://github.com/webpy/webpy/commit/f85221ddc7d4a7a31effb0289a760c6e55c59ee9
• https://github.com/webpy/webpy/commit/fe500832e9517d7a621e1f3703d20884ab8253a8
• https://github.com/webpy/webpy/commit/2d0b1f1808fb81b808242ee1ea6c409934f97fef
• https://github.com/webpy/webpy/commit/21dccd0ed8690d2e179183f3e5b98a20e0f8f764
• https://github.com/webpy/webpy/commit/937904356ebe9e9cba2ab07bdc39194ca319d730

ElasticSearch

• https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-dsl-py/commit/7277c190fb7315fc83b746f228e27b4e6f58ebf0
• https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-dsl-py/commit/f09ff5e747f6320d59fde7b097427e1536962440
• https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-dsl-py/commit/7d06d3ce649df699daa8fe573037a0b731901a22
• https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-dsl-py/commit/6dabbb9e6c3b35f01a996c239e0628cf281b5d46
• https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-py/pull/539

Django

• https://github.com/django/django/pull/8081

es-django-example

• https://github.com/HonzaKral/es-django-example/pull/14
• https://github.com/HonzaKral/es-django-example/pull/13

Pagure

• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1945
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1944
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1943
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1942
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1941
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1940
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1939
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1937
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1934
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1947
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1948
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1946
• https://pagure.io/pagure/pull-request/1936

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.

In the weekend before PyCon US, we had a Django Girls PyCon workshop in Portland on 12th-13th May. On 12th there were a few lightning talks, and installation before the actual workshop started on 13th.

I gave a lightning talk about PyCon US, mostly focusing the volunteer nature of the conference, and why attending the sprints is a good idea. Anwesha and /me stayed back for few more talks and later moved out to have dinner with a friend. Later, during the conference, and sprints I met many from the workshop. I want to thank Terian, and other organizers for doing the amazing work behind the workshop.