The PyCon US Blog

Stories from the PyCon US Hotels

2026-04-07T10:30:00.002-04:00

Friendships, collaborations, and breakthroughs

The fun, the learning, and the inspiration don't stop when you walk out of the convention center. Some of the most memorable moments from PyCon US happen in the lobby at 10 pm, laughing with someone you only knew as a username until an hour ago; over breakfast, where a casual conversation turns into a collaboration that lasts years; and on the walks to and from the conference. PyCon US hotels have their own lore.

We asked people about their experiences and were overwhelmed, it turns out that everyone has a story!

"One story stands out to me beyond getting to know each other and sharing ideas. When I was getting ready to give my first PyCon talk in Montreal, Selena Deckelmann offered to help review my slides and listen to me practice. We spent a few hours on the floor of her hotel room prepping while her very young daughter crawled around on the floor and chewed on my PyCon badge since she was teething. It's still one of my favorite PyCon and PyLadies memories.” - Carol Willing, Willing Consulting

“The hotel lobby last year turned into a makeshift meetup after the PyLadies Auction. People were having a great time at the auction and kept the energy going in the lobby afterward. Everyone was there, even those who hadn't attended the auction. Luckily, the hotel also sold my favorite chocolate milk in the lobby, so I got to end my evening drinking milk and chatting with Python friends.” - Cheuk Ting Ho (the PyLady who loves the auction and karaoke)

"In Pittsburgh a couple of years ago I was having breakfast at the hotel, when a guy I didn't know spotted my Python T-shirt and introduced himself. It was his first PyCon and my 21st, and we ended up having breakfast together. I gave him a few tips on enjoying a PyCon, but it turned out he was also a guitarist, so we spent most of breakfast talking about music and playing guitar.” - Naomi Ceder, former board chair and loooong time PyCon goer

"I ran into Trey Hunner during my first PyCon US in the hotel lobby as a PSF employee. He was running a Cabo game. He immediately welcomed me and showed me how to play. (He’s a great teacher, so I won three rounds in a row!) I also met a bunch of lovely people who have been attending PyCon US for years and years, and I learned that there is almost always a Cabo game in the hotel lobby." - Deb Nicholson (PSF Executive Director & resident Cabo shark)

“One of my most memorable hotel lobby moments was a chance encounter with Thomas Wouters. We fell into a natural conversation about his work and his deep, genuine pride in the Python Software Foundation community. He spoke warmly about the people who make the community what it is and what it means to him to be part of it. What I had no idea at the time was that just three days later, he would be called up on stage and announced as a Distinguished Service Award recipient — one of the highest honors the Python Software Foundation gives.” - Abigail Dogbe, PSF Board Member

“Juggling in the hotel lobby turned into an unexpected highlight of the conference. We had started teaching each other — my fault entirely for bringing the juggling balls — when a teenager and his mom wandered through on their way to see Pearl Jam. The kid's eyes lit up the moment he saw us, so I waved them over and started teaching him. Turns out they'd booked that very hotel hoping to cross paths with the band. He was excited about everything, and she was right there with him, every bit as thrilled.” - Ned Batchelder, Python Core Team and Netflix, Software Engineer

And this year, instead of sitting in LA-to-Long Beach traffic, consider staying in the official conference hotel block because there's too much to miss if you're too far away.

Real Talk: Why booking a room via PyCon US matters

If you're planning to attend PyCon US, please consider booking your stay within the official conference hotel block.

When attendees reserve rooms through the block, it helps the conference meet its contractual commitments with the venue, which directly impacts the overall cost of hosting the event.

Strong participation in the hotel block helps PyCon US:

Keep registration prices as low as possible while continuing to invest in programs that support our community, like travel grants, accessibility services, and community events.

When rooms go unfilled in the block, the conference incurs major financial penalties that ultimately make the event more expensive to run for everyone.

By booking in the hotel block, you are giving back and helping keep PyCon US sustainable and affordable for the entire Python community.

PSST! Exclusive swag when you book a room. We can't say more.

Attendees who book within the official hotel block this year will receive a special mystery swag item. We can't tell you what it is. That's why it's called mystery swag. But we can tell you the only way to get it is to book in the official PyCon US hotel block.

Where to stay: official PyCon US 2026 hotel block

All hotels are in Long Beach, within easy reach of the Long Beach Convention Center.

The Westin Long Beach Spacious rooms and great amenities, and the block still has availability. Book here

Hyatt Regency Long Beach is the conference headquarters hotel. Closest to the convention center–just about connected. Book here

Marriott Long Beach Downtown A solid choice with easy access to the convention center and the waterfront. Book here

Courtyard by Marriott Long Beach Downtown A comfortable, more affordable option still within the block. Book here

Python and the Future of AI: Agents, Inference, and Edge AI

2026-04-06T10:33:00.005-04:00

Finding AI insights and education at PyCon US 2026

While AI content is sprinkled throughout the event, how could it not be, PyCon US features a dedicated The Future of AI with Python track, new this year, and programmed by Elaine Wong, PyCon US Chair, Jon Banafato, PyCon US Co-Chair, and Philip Gagnon, Program Committee Chair. According to JetBrains' State of Developer Ecosystem 2025 report, 85% of developers now regularly use AI tools for coding and development (which tell us that you are probably doing that), and 62% rely on at least one AI coding assistant, agent, or code editor. Looking ahead, nearly half of all developers (49%) plan to try AI coding agents in the coming year, and the eight sessions in this track map onto those priorities, covering everything from running LLMs on your laptop to building real-time voice agents. Take a look at the big themes and the sessions and tutorials you won't want to miss in our new track and throughout the event.

Let’s start with newbies, if you or someone on your team is just getting started with ML, Corey Wade's Wednesday tutorial Your First Machine Learning Models: How to Build Them in Scikit-learn is the perfect entry point, a hands-on introduction to the building blocks that underpin so much of what's discussed in the talks.

LLMs Are Moving to the Edge

One of the most significant shifts in AI right now is the move toward running models locally on laptops, browsers, and devices, rather than in centralized cloud infrastructure. Want to know more? Check out: Running Large Language Models on Laptops: Practical Quantization Techniques in Python from Aayush Kumar JVS, a hands-on look at how quantization makes large models practical on consumer hardware. Fabio Pliger takes a look at the role of the browser with Distributing AI with Python in the Browser: Edge Inference and Flexibility Without Infrastructure, exploring how Python-powered inference can run client-side with no server required. If you've been watching the open-weights model explosion and wondering how to actually deploy these things, these two talks are for you.

Want to go deeper before the conference even starts? On Wednesday, May 13th, Isabel Michel's tutorial Implementing RAG in Python: Build a Retrieval-Augmented Generation System gives you hands-on experience building a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline from scratch, the practical foundation underneath a lot of modern LLM applications.

AI Agents and Async Python

Agentic AI, systems that take multi-step actions autonomously, is one of the defining developments of 2025 and continues to take the world by storm in 2026. But building agents that actually work in production requires getting async right. Aditya Mehra's Don't Block the Loop: Python Async Patterns for AI Agents digs into the concurrency pitfalls that trip up so many teams when they move from demo to deployment. This talk bridges a gap that many tutorials leave open: the gap between "I have a working agent" and "my agent works reliably at scale."

If you want a running start, Pamela Fox's Wednesday tutorial Build Your First MCP Server in Python is the perfect on-ramp, MCP (Model Context Protocol) is quickly becoming the standard way to give AI agents access to tools and data, and building one yourself is the fastest way to understand how agentic systems actually work under the hood.

AI and Open Source Sustainability

AI-Assisted Contributions and Maintainer Load by Paolo Melchiorre tackles a genuinely thorny question: as AI tools make it easier to generate pull requests, what happens to the maintainers on the receiving end? Drawing on real examples from projects like GNOME, OCaml, Python, and Django, Melchiorre examines how AI-generated contributions are shifting workload onto already time-constrained maintainers and what the open source community is doing about it.

High-Performance Inference in Python

Python performance engineering is no longer optional for AI workloads. Yineng Zhang's High-Performance LLM Inference in Pure Python with PyTorch Custom Ops walks through the techniques for squeezing real speed out of inference pipelines without leaving the Python ecosystem (This one isn’t in the track, but it is so on point, I had to add it). Paired with Santosh Appachu Devanira Poovaiah's What Python Developers Need to Know About Hardware: A Practical Guide to GPU Memory, Kernel Scheduling, and Execution Models, Friday's track offers a practical hardware-to-application view of the performance stack that's increasingly essential for anyone building production AI systems.

Also, Catherine Nelson and Robert Masson's Thursday tutorial Going from Notebooks to Production Code is a great complement; bridging the gap between exploratory AI work and the kind of reliable, maintainable code that actually makes it into production systems.

Explainability and Responsible AI

As AI systems make more consequential decisions, the demand for explainability is only growing from regulators, from users, and from the developers building these systems. Jyoti Yadav's Building AI That Explains Itself: Why Your Card Got Declined uses a familiar real-world example to demonstrate how Python developers can build transparency into AI-driven decisions. It's a topic at the heart of current conversations about AI trust, and one that every practitioner should be thinking about.

Two tutorials round this theme out nicely: Neha's Wednesday session Causal Inference with Python teaches you how to move beyond correlation and reason about cause and effect in your data, a foundational skill for anyone building AI systems that need to explain why they made a decision. And on Thursday, Juliana Ferreira Alves' When KPIs Go Weird: Anomaly Detection with Python gives you practical tools for catching when your AI-powered systems go off the rails before your users do.

Voice AI and Multimodal Interfaces

Real-time voice is one of the fastest-moving areas in applied AI, and Camila Hinojosa Añez and Elizabeth Fuentes close out the AI track Friday evening with How to Build Your First Real-Time Voice Agent in Python (Without Losing Your Mind). This practical session covers the building blocks of voice agents in Python, a skill set that's quickly becoming table stakes for developers building consumer-facing AI products.

AI and Education

Sonny Mupfuni's AI-Powered Python Education: Towards Adaptive and Inclusive Learning explores how Python can power learning that adapts to the student, and Gift Ojeabulu's Making African Languages Visible: A Python-Based Guide to Low-Resource Language ID takes on one of NLP's most persistent blind spots, the languages that dominant datasets routinely leave out. Don't skip these. These sessions represent Python's role not just in building AI products, but in democratizing access to AI's benefits.

Friday's AI track is a rare chance to hear from practitioners who are building real things in production, not just demoing prototypes. Whether you're a Python developer who's been watching the AI wave from the sidelines or a team already shipping AI features who wants to sharpen your craft, clear your schedule and pull up a chair. And a big THANK YOU to Anaconda and NVIDIA for sponsoring this track!

We'll see you in Long Beach.

PyCon US 2026 takes place May 13–19 in Long Beach, California. The Future of AI with Python talk track runs Friday, May 15th.

¡Haciendo Historia! Celebrating PyCon US’s First-Ever Spanish-Language Keynote

2026-04-03T17:20:00.001-04:00

PyCon US has always been about more than just a programming language; it’s about the incredible, global community that builds, supports, and innovates with it. This year at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach, we are thrilled to celebrate a remarkable milestone for our community: our very first Spanish-language keynote address, delivered by the brilliant Pablo Galindo Salgado!

Meet Your Keynote Speaker: Pablo Galindo Salgado

If you’ve used Python recently, you’ve benefited from Pablo’s work. Pablo works on the Python team at Hudson River Trading and is a CPython core developer. He is currently serving his 6th term on the Python Steering Council and served as the release manager for Python 3.10 and 3.11.
But his background isn't just in software engineering—Pablo is a Theoretical Physicist specializing in general relativity and black hole physics! (He also has a cat, though he assures us that his cat does not write any code).
With his deep technical expertise and unique scientific perspective, Pablo is uniquely positioned to deliver an unforgettable keynote. But what makes this moment even more special is the language in which it will be delivered.

Why a Spanish Keynote Matters to PyCon US

Currently, about 14% of the US population speaks Spanish. PyCon US has proudly hosted the PyCon Charlas, a dedicated track of talks presented entirely in Spanish, since 2018. The Charlas have been a phenomenal success, highlighting the deep well of talent within the Spanish-speaking Pythonista community across Latin America, Europe, the United States, Africa (looking at you, Equatorial Guinea), and beyond.
The Charlas has evolved from a small day with a handful of talks to an official track with 2 full days of talks! But we believe we could do more.
Elevating a Spanish-language presentation to the Keynote Stage is a significant step for PyCon US for several reasons:

Reflecting our Global Community: Python is a truly global language, and its developer base is wonderfully diverse. By placing a Spanish-language talk on the main stage, PyCon US is reflecting the reality of our worldwide community. We want to remind folks that top-tier technical leadership and innovation happen in every language.

Amplifying the Charlas Track: Moving from the Charlas track to the Keynote stage bridges the gap between our English and Spanish programming. It exposes the broader PyCon US audience to the vibrancy of our Spanish-speaking community, and we hope it encourages more cross-cultural collaboration and networking.

Encourage the Spanish-speaking community: A few initiatives have been developed around the Python ecosystem supporting the Spanish-speaking community, like the official translation of the Python documentation. This initiative has been adding more and more people, so if you are interested, make sure to check out the contribution guide! We also encourage you to check out the Python en Español community hub, which has gathered many Spanish-speaking communities around the world. You can also come visit the Python en Español booth in the PyCon US Expo Hall!

Motivating other language-focused communities: If the Spanish-speaking community managed to get here, we have no doubt that in the future we could have even more languages in our beloved conference. Let us know which language you’d like to see follow these steps!

Join Us for This Historic Moment

Whether you are a native Spanish speaker, you've been practicing your español on some apps, or you just want to experience a fantastic technical talk through the magic of live translation and community spirit, you will not want to miss this.
So charge up your phone, pack a set of headphones so you can use the live translation service and get ready to give a massive, warm welcome to Pablo Galindo Salgado. ¡Nos vemos en Long Beach! (See you in Long Beach!)
*** To learn more about Pablo and our other incredible keynote speakers, head over to the PyCon US 2026 Keynote Speakers page.
Título: ¡Haciendo historia! Celebrando la primera keynote en español de PyCon US
PyCon US siempre ha sido mucho más que un lenguaje de programación; se trata de la increíble comunidad global que lo construye, lo apoya y lo impulsa. Este año, en PyCon US 2026 en Long Beach, estamos emocionados de celebrar un hito extraordinario para nuestra comunidad: ¡nuestra primera keynote en español, presentada por el brillante Pablo Galindo Salgado!

Conoce a tu keynote speaker: Pablo Galindo Salgado

Si has usado Python recientemente, probablemente te has beneficiado del trabajo de Pablo. Actualmente forma parte del equipo de Python en Hudson River Trading y es desarrollador core de CPython. Además, está cumpliendo su sexto mandato en el Python Steering Council y fue release manager de Python 3.10 y 3.11.
Pero su trayectoria no se limita a la ingeniería de software: ¡Pablo también es físico teórico especializado en relatividad general y física de agujeros negros! (Y sí, también tiene un gato, aunque asegura que no programa).
Con su sólida experiencia técnica y su perspectiva científica única, Pablo está más que preparado para ofrecer una keynote inolvidable. Pero lo que hace este momento aún más especial es el idioma en el que será presentada.

Por qué una keynote en español es importante para PyCon US

Actualmente, aproximadamente el 14% de la población de Estados Unidos habla español. Desde 2018, PyCon US ha sido anfitrión de PyCon Charlas, un track dedicado completamente a presentaciones en español. Este espacio ha sido un éxito rotundo, mostrando el enorme talento de la comunidad Python hispanohablante en América Latina, Europa, Estados Unidos, África (sí, Guinea Ecuatorial 👀) y más allá.
Las Charlas han evolucionado desde un pequeño conjunto de presentaciones en un solo día hasta convertirse en un track oficial de ¡dos días completos! Pero creemos que podemos ir aún más lejos.
Llevar una presentación en español al escenario principal es un paso importante por varias razones:
Reflejar nuestra comunidad global
Python es un lenguaje verdaderamente global, con una comunidad diversa y vibrante. Al incluir una keynote en español, PyCon US refleja esta realidad y reconoce que la innovación y el liderazgo técnico existen en todos los idiomas.
Amplificar el track de Charlas
Este paso conecta el track de Charlas con el escenario principal, acercando a toda la audiencia de PyCon US a la riqueza de la comunidad hispanohablante y fomentando más colaboración e intercambio cultural.
Impulsar a la comunidad hispanohablante
Existen iniciativas dentro del ecosistema Python que apoyan a la comunidad en español, como la traducción oficial de la documentación de Python. Este esfuerzo sigue creciendo, así que si te interesa contribuir, ¡no dudes en revisar la guía de contribución!
También te invitamos a conocer el hub de Python en Español, que reúne comunidades de todo el mundo, y a visitar su booth en el Expo Hall de PyCon US.
Motivar a otras comunidades lingüísticas
Si la comunidad hispanohablante logró este paso, estamos seguros de que en el futuro veremos más idiomas en nuestra conferencia. ¡Cuéntanos cuál te gustaría ver próximamente!

Acompáñanos en este momento histórico

Ya sea que hables español nativo, estés practicando con alguna app o simplemente quieras disfrutar de una excelente charla técnica con traducción en vivo y el espíritu de la comunidad, no querrás perderte este momento.
Carga tu teléfono, lleva tus audífonos para usar el servicio de traducción en vivo y prepárate para darle una gran bienvenida a Pablo Galindo Salgado.
¡Nos vemos en Long Beach!
Para conocer más sobre Pablo y otros increíbles keynote speakers, visita la página de Keynote Speakers de PyCon US 2026.

Introducing the 8 Companies on Startup Row at PyCon US 2026

2026-03-31T09:00:00.001-04:00

Each year at PyCon US, Startup Row highlights a select group of early-stage companies building ambitious products with Python at their core. The 2026 cohort reflects a rapidly evolving landscape, where advances in AI, data infrastructure, and developer tooling are reshaping how software is built, deployed, and secured.

This year’s companies aim to solve an evolving set of problems facing independent developers and large-scale organizations alike: securing AI-driven applications, managing multimodal data, orchestrating autonomous agents, automating complex workflows, and extracting insight from increasingly unstructured information. Across these domains, Python continues to serve as a unifying layer: encouraging experimentation, enabling systems built to scale, and connecting open-source innovation with real-world impact.

Startup Row brings these emerging teams into direct conversation with the Python community at PyCon US. Throughout the conference, attendees can meet founders, explore new tools, and see firsthand how these companies are applying Python to solve meaningful problems. For the startups in attendance, it’s an opportunity to share their work, connect with users and collaborators, and contribute back to the ecosystem that helped shape them. Register now to experience Startup Row and much more at PyCon US 2026.

Supporting Startups at PyCon US

There are many ways to support Startup Row companies, during PyCon US and long after the conference wraps:

Stop by Startup Row: Spend a few minutes with each team, ask what they’re building, and see their products in action.
Try their tools: Whether it’s an open-source library or a hosted service, hands-on usage (alongside constructive feedback) is one of the most valuable forms of support. If a startup seems compelling, consider a pilot project and become a design partner.
Share feedback: Early-stage teams benefit enormously from thoughtful questions, real-world use cases, and honest perspectives from the community.
Contribute to their open source projects: Many Startup Row companies are deeply rooted in open source. Startup Row companies with open-source roots welcome bug reports, documentation improvements, and pull requests. Contributions and constructive feedback are always appreciated.
Help spread the word: If you find something interesting, tell a friend, post about it, or share it with your team. (And if you're posting to social media, consider using tags like #PyConUS and #StartupRow to share the love.)
Explore opportunities to work together: Many of these companies are hiring, looking for design partners, or open to collaborations; don’t hesitate to ask.
But, most importantly, be supportive. Building a startup is hard, and every team is learning in real time. Curiosity, patience, and encouragement make a meaningful difference.

Without further ado, let's...

Meet Startup Row at PyCon US 2026

We’re excited to introduce the companies selected for Startup Row at PyCon US 2026.

Arcjet

Embedding security directly into application code is fast becoming as indispensable as logging, especially as AI services open new attack surfaces. Arcjet offers a developer‑first platform that lets teams add bot detection, rate limiting and data‑privacy checks right where the request is processed.

The service ships open‑source JavaScript and Python SDKs that run a WebAssembly module locally before calling Arcjet’s low‑latency decision API, ensuring full application context informs every security verdict. Both SDKs are released under a permissive open‑source license, letting developers integrate the primitives without vendor lock‑in while scaling usage through Arcjet’s SaaS tiered pricing.

The JavaScript SDK alone has earned ≈1.7 k GitHub stars and the combined libraries have attracted over 1,000 developers protecting more than 500 production applications. Arcjet offers a free tier and usage‑based paid plans, mirroring Cloudflare’s model to serve startups and enterprises alike.

Arcjet is rolling out additional security tools and deepening integrations with popular frameworks such as FastAPI and Flask, aiming to broaden adoption across AI‑enabled services. In short, Arcjet aims to be the security‑as‑code layer every modern app ships with.

CapiscIO

As multi‑agent AI systems become the backbone of emerging digital workflows, developers lack a reliable way to verify agent identities and enforce governance. CapiscIO steps into that gap, offering an open‑core trust layer built for the nascent agent economy.

CapiscIO offers cryptographic Trust Badges, policy enforcement, and tamper‑evident chain‑of‑custody wrapped in a Python SDK. Released under Apache 2.0, it ships a CLI, LangChain integration, and an MCP SDK that let agents prove identity without overhauling existing infrastructure.

The capiscio‑core repository on GitHub hosts the open‑source core and SDKs under Apache 2.0, drawing early contributors building agentic pipelines.

Beon de Nood, Founder & CEO, brings two decades of enterprise development experience and a prior successful startup to the table. “AI governance should be practical, not bureaucratic. Organizations need visibility into what they have, confidence in what they deploy, and control over how agents behave in production,” he says.

CapiscIO is continuously adding new extensions, expanding its LangChain and MCP SDKs, and preparing a managed agent‑identity registry for enterprises. In short, CapiscIO aims to be the passport office of the agent economy, handing each autonomous component an unspoofable ID and clear permissions.

Chonkie

The explosion of retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) is unlocking AI’s ability to reason over ever‑larger knowledge bases. Yet the first step of splitting massive texts into meaningful pieces still lags behind.

Chonkie offers an open‑core suite centered on Memchunk, a Python library with Cython acceleration that delivers up to 160 GB/s throughput and ten chunking strategies under a permissive license. It also ships Catsu, a unified embeddings client for nine providers, and a lightweight ingestion layer; the commercial Chonkie Labs service combines them into a SaaS that monitors the web and synthesises insights.

Co‑founder and CEO Shreyash  Nigam, who grew up in India and met his business partner in eighth grade, reflects the team’s open‑source ethos, saying “It’s fun to put a project on GitHub and see a community of developers crowd around it.” That enthusiasm underpins Chonkie’s decision to release its core tooling openly while building a commercial deep‑research service.

Backed by Y  Combinator’s Summer  2025 batch, Chonkie plans to grow from four to six engineers and launch the next version of Chonkie Labs later this year, adding real‑time web crawling and multi‑modal summarization. In short, Chonkie aims to be the Google of corporate intelligence.

Pixeltable

Multimodal generative AI is turning simple datasets into sprawling collections of video, images, audio and text, forcing engineers to stitch together ad‑hoc pipelines just to keep data flowing. That complexity has created a new bottleneck for teams trying to move from prototype to production.

The open‑source Python library from Pixeltable offers a declarative table API that lets developers store, query and version multimodal assets side by side while embedding custom Python functions. Built with incremental update capabilities, combined lineage and schema tracking, and a development‑to‑production mirror, the platform also provides orchestration capabilities that keep pipelines reproducible without rewriting code.

The project has earned ≈1.6 k  GitHub stars and a growing contributor base, closed a $5.5  million seed round in December 2024, and is already used by early adopters such as Obvio and Variata to streamline computer‑vision workflows.

Co‑founder and CTO Marcel  Kornacker, who previously founded Apache Impala and co-founded Apache Parquet, says “Just as relational databases revolutionized web development, Pixeltable is transforming AI application development.”

The company's roadmap centers on launching Pixeltable Cloud, a serverless managed service that will extend the open core with collaborative editing, auto‑scaling storage and built‑in monitoring. In short, Pixeltable aims to be the relational database of multimodal AI data.

Skyvern

Manual browser work remains a hidden bottleneck for many teams, turning simple data‑entry tasks into fragile scripts that break on the slightest UI change. Skyvern’s open‑source agent is one of the tools reshaping how developers and non‑technical users automate the web.

The Skyvern library lets anyone build a no‑code browser agent that combines computer‑vision models with a large language model to see, plan, act, and validate each step of a web workflow. Its planner–actor–validator loop compiles successful runs into deterministic code, while the free open‑source core can be run locally or via Skyvern Cloud on a per‑automation pricing model.

The GitHub repository has attracted ≈20 k stars, drawing an active community of contributors who extend the framework and share evaluation datasets. The company monetizes through Skyvern Cloud, letting teams run agents without managing infrastructure.

Skyvern is preparing a release that tightens vision‑model integration, adds support for additional LLM providers, and launches a self‑serve dashboard aimed at non‑technical teams. In short, Skyvern aspires to be the Django of browser‑automation, pairing developer friendliness with production reliability.

SubImage

The sheer complexity of modern multi‑cloud environments turns security visibility into a labyrinth, and  SubImage offers a graph‑first view that cuts through the noise.

It builds an infrastructure graph using the open‑source Cartography library (Apache‑2.0, Python), then highlights exploit chains as attack paths and applies AI models to prioritize findings based on ownership and contextual risk.

Cartography, originally developed at Lyft and now a Cloud Native Computing Sandbox project, has ≈3.7 k GitHub stars, is used by over 70 organizations, and SubImage’s managed service already protects security teams at Veriff and Neo4j; the company closed a $4.2  million seed round in November 2025.

Co‑founder Alex  Chantavy, an offensive‑security engineer, says “The most important tool was our internal cloud knowledge graph because it showed us a map of the easiest attack paths … One of the most effective ways to defend an environment is to see it the same way an attacker would.”

The startup is focusing on scaling its managed service and deepening AI integration as it targets larger enterprise customers. In short, SubImage aims to be the map of the cloud for defenders.

Tetrix

Private‑market data pipelines still rely on manual downloads and spreadsheet gymnastics, leaving analysts chasing yesterday’s numbers. Tetrix’s AI investment intelligence platform is part of a wave that brings automation to this lagging workflow.

Built primarily in Python, Tetrix automates document collection from fund portals and other sources, extracts structured data from PDFs and other unstructured sources using tool-using language models, then presents exposures, cash flows, and benchmarks through an interactive dashboard that also accepts natural‑language queries.

The company is growing quickly, doubling revenue quarter over quarter and, at least so far, maintains an impressive record of zero customer churn. In the coming year or so, Tetrix plans to triple its headcount from fifteen to forty‑five employees.

TimeCopilot

Time‑series forecasting has long been a tangled mix of scripts, dashboards, and domain expertise, and the recent surge in autonomous agents is finally giving it a unified voice. Enter TimeCopilot, an open‑source framework that brings agentic reasoning to the heart of forecasting.

The platform, built in Python under a permissive open‑source license, lets users request forecasts in plain English. It automatically orchestrates more than thirty models from seven families, including Chronos and TimesFM, while weaving large language model reasoning into each prediction. Its declarative API was born from co‑founder  Azul Garza‑Ramírez’s economics background and her earlier work on TimeGPT for Nixtla (featured SR'23), evolving from a weekend experiment started nearly seven years ago.

The TimeCopilot/timecopilot repository has amassed roughly 420  stars on GitHub, with the release of OpenClaw marking a notable spike in community interest.

Upcoming plans include a managed SaaS offering with enterprise‑grade scaling and support, the rollout of a benchmarking suite to measure agentic forecast quality, and targeted use cases such as predicting cloud‑compute expenses for AI workloads.

Thank You's and Acknowledgements

Startup Row is a volunteer-driven program, co-led by Jason D. Rowley and Shea Tate-Di Donna (SR'15; Zana, acquired Startups.com), in collaboration with the PyCon US organizing team. Thanks to everyone who makes PyCon US possible.

We also extend a gracious thank-you to all startup founders who submitted applications to Startup Row at PyCon US this year. Thanks again for taking the time to share what you're building. We hope to help out in whatever way we can.

Good luck to everyone, and see you in Long Beach, CA!

Support PyLadies: Donate to the PyLadies Auction at PyCon US 2026!

2026-03-30T12:53:00.004-04:00

PyCon US 2026 is quickly approaching and we can’t wait to see all of you there! This year, we are reaching out to our community to help support one of our favorite events: the PyLadies Auction. Our wonderful community is bursting with creative, artsy, and generous folks and we invite you to donate items to this year’s Auction. If you’d like to support PyLadies by making a donation, please fill out the PyLadies Charity Auction donation form. To learn more about the event and what to donate, read on!

What to Donate

Need inspiration? Over the years, we’ve seen that people love to bid on items that are artsy, nerdy, and Python-specific. Art, decor, customized tech, and vintage PyCon or Python-related swag are all examples of things that will inspire a friendly bidding war. To get more inspiration search ‘PyLadies Auction’ on social media or check out the PyLadies Instagram.

Items that are personalized or have a story tend to attract bidders– DIYers, artists, crafters, and collectors, this is your time to shine! It's also worth thinking about what will show up well on stage. We have a magnifying camera, but smaller and less colorful items like jewelry and watches might be harder for bidders to see than a big piece of art or an adorable, bright colored snake stuffy! If you have smaller items– like vintage swag, stickers, or even pens (iykyk)– they can go into the raffle.

Please note that we cannot accept donations of guns, alcohol, cars, real estate, or houses. We may decline other gifts that are inappropriate or impractical at the PSF’s discretion (for example, sorry, no real pythons!). Although we would love to accept signed books, we will also not be accepting those this year.

If you’ve got an item to contribute that you’d like to share in a sneak preview, feel free to post a photo and tag us on the social media platform of your choice!

Donation details

To donate an item, please fill out the PyLadies Charity Auction donation form. This form asks for required information around the person or organization donating, item specifics, and logistics. You will need to indicate if you will ship the item in advance or deliver it in person. You will receive shipping information once you complete the form. The deadline to drop off donations in person is May 16th, 2026, at 4 pm PST (that’s just about 3 hours before the event!).

About the PyLadies Charity Auction

The fourteenth PyLadies Charity Auction will be held in-person during PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach, California. It’s an evening of fun and refreshments while supporting the PyLadies community!

The Entry cover charge of $50.00 includes dinner and a drink ticket, while the Supporter cover charge of $100.00 includes dinner, a drink ticket, and a $50.00 contribution to PyLadies. We have increased the cover charge this year to help offset rising food and venue costs. Everyone who attends will also have access to the cash bar. To save your place at the Auction, add the PyLadies Auction to your PyCon US registration via your dashboard. Last year we sold out quickly, so if you’d like to go, reserve your ticket soon!

Attend PyCon US for a day of Trailblazing Python Security!

2026-03-16T15:58:00.001-04:00

PyCon US is coming to Long Beach, California in 2026. This year for the first time ever there is a day-long talk track devoted to the latest in Python security. This new talk track is titled “Trailblazing Python Security”, and we have 11 Python security experts covering all angles of security from Actions to Zero-Trust including Software Bill-of-Materials, phishing, FedRAMP, Rust, and more.

Our goal with the Trailblazing Python Security track is to create a space where developers, security practitioners, and open source contributors can learn from one another and discuss the problems and solutions for securing Python software and infrastructure.

Whether you're developing web applications, infrastructure, security, working with data, or just getting started with Python: there's something for everyone to learn about how to securely build with Python.

We hope to see you at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach to learn from experts and shape the future of Python security landscape.

If your organization wants to support security in the Python ecosystem, we are accepting sponsors for the inaugural security talk track at PyCon US. Send an email to sponsors@python.org for more information.

Schedule at a Distance

The Trailblazing Python Security talk track will occur on Saturday, May 16th during the PyCon US main conference in Room 103ABC. The talk track runs the full length of the main talk schedule for the day, starting after the morning keynote at 10:30AM and running until 5:30PM. Below is the schedule at a distance including topics and speakers:

Time	Talk	Speaker(s)
10:30AM	FastAPI Security Patterns: OAuth 2.0, JWTs, and API Keys Done Right	Ian Mwangi
11:15AM	Anatomy of a Phishing Campaign	Mike Fiedler
12:00PM	Zero Trust in 200ms: Implementing Identity-Per-Transaction with Python and Serverless	Tristan McKinnon
1:45PM	Rust for CPython: Making Python Safer and More Robust for Everyone	Emma Smith
2:30PM	Asleep at the Wheel: Getting your SBOMs to pay attention to Python Builds	Sanchit Sahay, Abhishek Reddypalle
3:15PM	Post-Incident Runtime SBOM Generation from Python Memory	Hala Ali, Andrew Case
4:15PM	GitHub Actions Security in Python Packages	Andrew Nesbitt
5:00PM	Breaking Bad (Packages): Why Traditional Vulnerability Tracking Fails Supply Chain Attacks	Shelby Cunningham, Madison Ficorilli

The complete PyCon US 2026 schedule is available online or on the PyCon US mobile app. You can use the mobile app build your schedule by selecting which talks you are interested in attending. Or better yet, come to Room 103ABC and hang out with us all day!

Launching the PyCon US 2026 Schedule!

2026-03-13T16:45:00.000-04:00

We’re excited to announce the full schedule for PyCon US 2026!

For another year, PyCon US received an overwhelming number of incredible proposal submissions, with this year’s final count totaling an impressive 1,015 proposals. We are so excited to have so many people in our community share their work and ideas with us. Thank you to everyone who submitted their proposals!

With these many proposals received, we could easily have enough speakers to fill the program for multiple Python conferences! We were only able to accept 13% of the many strong proposals, and our volunteer Program Committee has worked hard to create an excellent conference program that covers a wide range of subjects for attendees to enjoy. We’re looking forward to meeting all the presenters and learning from them at PyCon US 2026.

Meet Our Keynote Speakers

We are thrilled to announce our Keynote speakers! Please join us in welcoming Lin Qiao, Pablo Galindo Salgado, amanda casari, and Rachell Calhoun & Tim Schilling, as they help us kick off our main conference days, May 15 - May 17, 2026.

Head to the Keynotes page to learn more about the amazing individuals who make up this year’s Keynote lineup!

Full Schedule Released

Check our updated schedule page to learn more. The schedule has been updated with the dates and timing of our Tutorials, Talk Tracks, Charlas Track, and Sponsor Presentations.

Don’t miss our new dedicated talk tracks: the Future of AI with Python Track on Friday, May 15, and Trailblazing Python Security Track on Saturday, May 16. Visit the schedule page to explore the exciting lineups for each track!

Posters will be featured and displayed during all open hours of the Expo Hall on May 15 - May 16, 2026, with presentations by the authors taking place alongside the Job Fair & Community Showcase on Sunday, May 17, 2026. All together, there will be a wide array of topics that we hope experienced and newer Python users will find engaging.

Many thanks again to all of those who submitted proposals this year! The schedule would not be the same without all your hard work.

Note that if you’ve attended PyCon US before, you might notice that our scheduling looks slightly different this year. We encourage you to check the schedule ahead of the conference.

Thank You Committees and Reviewers!

Thank you to all of our Program Committee members and proposal reviewers who volunteered their time and hard work! Going through over one thousand proposals is no easy task. Without their efforts in helping to launch the PyCon US Call for Proposals, the PyCon US program would not have been possible.

Their commitment to managing the process of preparing for CFPs to launch and managing the review process began over 6 months ago. We truly could not have accomplished the final result of launching the schedule today without each of them–we appreciate you!

Tutorial Committee: Sarah Kuchinsky, Merilys Huhn & Stephen Kiazyk
Program Committee: Philippe Gagnon
Charlas Committee: Denny Perez & Cristián Maureira-Fredes
Poster Committee: Kristen McIntyre
The Future of AI with Python Track Co-Chairs: Silona Bonewald & Zac Hatfield-Dodds
Trailblazing Python Security Track Co-Chairs: Juanita Gomez & Seth Larson

In addition, we want to send a huge thank you to the numerous volunteers who reviewed each of the submissions and worked long hours to make sure PyCon US has a great line-up.

Tutorial, Summit & Event Registration

Registration is now open for Tutorials, select Summits & Events, and the PyLadies Auction.

Tutorials - Wednesday, May 13, and Thursday, May 14, 2026 - $150.00 per session. There are 2 time slots per day
Education Summit - Thursday, May 14, 2026 - no entry fee
Maintainers Summit - Saturday, May 16, 2026 - no entry fee
PyLadies Auction - Saturday evening, May 16, 2026 - $50.00 Entry or $100.00 Supporter rates are offered
PyLadies Luncheon - May 18, 2026 - no entry fee

Please note that there is no registration for Sponsor Presentations. Sponsor Presentations are open until all spots are filled, so make sure you check out each event’s schedule to know when to show up and grab your spot!

Be sure to register for the conference if you have not already done so. Keep in mind that there are limited spaces available for each of the events listed above, with Tutorials and PyLadies Auction being sold out way ahead of the conference each year. So if you’re planning to attend and participate in any of these, be sure to register early!

NOTE: Please be sure to hit “Check out and Pay” when registering for any extra events, including Tutorials and the PyLadies Auction. If you do not complete your invoice and an event sells out, it will be removed from your cart and you will no longer be able to reserve a spot for that session. Please contact pycon-reg@python.org with any questions.

PyCon US Hotel Block

Don’t forget to book your hotel reservations with the PyCon US hotel block to receive our discounted conference rates while supplies last!

If you’re planning to attend PyCon US, please consider booking your stay in the official conference hotel block. When attendees reserve rooms through the block, it helps the conference meet its contractual commitments with the venue and avoid costly penalties, which directly impacts the overall cost of running PyCon US.

Strong participation in the hotel block helps PyCon US keep registration prices as low as possible and allows us to continue funding programs that support our community, like PyCon US travel grants. By booking in the hotel block, you’re doing more than securing a convenient place to stay—you’re helping keep PyCon US sustainable and affordable for the entire Python community!

Once you complete your registration for PyCon US 2026, you will be able to book a hotel reservation on your dashboard through our official housing bureau, Orchid Events. This is the only way to get the conference rates, so book now before they sell out! The hotel blocks will start closing on April 20th and close fully on April 24th, 2026. More information can be found on the Venue and Hotels page.

Conference T-shirts

PyCon US 2026 conference, PyLadies, and Charlas t-shirts are now available! You can order t-shirts when you are registering for the conference or add them to an already existing registration using the link on your dashboard. The deadline to order t-shirts is April 14, 2026.

A special shoutout and thank you to Georgi K for the hard work and creativity that went into this year’s t-shirt designs!

Building the Future with Python? Apply for Free Booth Space on Startup Row at PyCon US 2026

2026-01-16T14:43:00.000-05:00

Consult just about any guide about how to build a tech startup and one of the very first pieces of advice you’ll be given is: Talk to Your Customers. If your target market just so happens to be Python-fluent developers, data scientists, researchers, students, and open-source software enthusiasts, there’s probably no better place than PyCon US to share your startup’s products and services with the Python community.

If you’re a founder of an early-stage startup that’s building something cool with Python and want to apply for free (yes, free) booth space, conference passes, and (optionally) a table at the PyCon US Job Fair for your team at PyCon US 2026 in lovely Long Beach, California this upcoming May, we have some great news for you: Applications for booth space on Startup Row are open, but not for long…

Applications close Friday, January 30, 2026. You’ll hear back with an acceptance decision from us by mid-February, so you’ll have plenty of time to book travel and get your booth materials together in time for the conference.

TL;DR: How/where to Apply. For all the action-oriented types who want to skip the rest of this post and just get to the point, here’s the Startup Row page again (where you can find eligibility criteria, etc.) and a direct link to the application form (for which you’ll need to be logged in or create an account to access). Good luck! We look forward to reviewing your application, and hope to see you at PyCon US 2026.

What Startup Row Companies Receive

Since 2011, organizers of PyCon US set aside a row of booths for early-stage startups, straightforwardly named: Startup Row. The goal is to give early-stage companies access to the best of what PyCon US has to offer.

At no cost to them, Startup Row companies receive:Two included conference passes, with additional passes available for your team at a discount.

Booth space in the Expo Hall on Startup Row for the Opening Reception on the evening of Thursday May 14th and for both days of the main conference, Friday May 15th and Saturday May 16th.
Optionally: A table at the PyCon US Job Fair on Sunday May 17th. (If you’re company is hiring Python talent, there is likely nowhere better than PyCon US for technical recruiting.)
Placement on the PyCon US 2026 website and a profile on the PyCon US blog (where you’re reading this post)
Eternal glory

The only catch? If you’re granted a spot on Startup Row, as part of the onboarding process, PyCon US organizers ask for a fully refundable $400 deposit to discourage no-shows. Teams also cover their own transportation, lodging, and booth materials (banners, swag, table coverings, etc.). Startup Row organizers will partner with your team to make sure everything runs smoothly. After the conference, PyCon US refunds deposits to startups that successfully attended.

If your company is building something cool with Python, it’s hard to beat PyCon US for sharing your work and meeting the Python software community. Startup Row is where some companies launch publicly, where others find their earliest customers and contributors, and where attendees can discover exciting, meaningful job opportunities.

What kinds of companies get a spot on Startup Row?

Python is a flexible language and has applications up and down the stack.

Over the years, Startup Row has featured software and hardware companies, consumer and enterprise offerings, open-source and proprietary codebases, and teams from a surprisingly broad range of industries—from familiar categories like developer tools and ML frameworks to foundation model developers and the occasional wonderfully weird idea (think: an e-ink portable typewriter with cloud sync, or an online wedding-planning platform).

Want recent examples? Take a look at the PyCon US blog announcements for the 2025, 2024, 2023, and 2022 batches.

When scoring applications, the selection committee is encouraged to weigh:

Market upside: could this be a big business?
Problem/solution fit: does the product truly address the stated need?
Team strength: does the founding team have the credibility and capability to execute?
“X factor”: would appearing on Startup Row materially accelerate outcomes for the company and/or the Python community?

If you can make a credible case for any one of those points, your startup stands a chance of getting featured on Startup Row at PyCon US 2026.

Who do I contact with questions about Startup Row at PyCon US 2026?

For specific Startup Row-related questions between now and the application deadline, reach out to pycon-startups@python.org.

PyCon US 2026 - Registration, Hotels, Travel Grants & More!

2025-12-11T14:47:00.001-05:00

The news you’ve been waiting for is finally here: registration for PyCon US 2026 is officially open!

PyCon US will take place May 13 - May 19, 2026, in Long Beach, California at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center. The core of the conference, May 15 - May 17, 2026, packs in three days' worth of our community’s best talks, amazing keynote speakers, and our famed lightning talks to close out each day—but it’s much more than that!

It’s gathering together with the members of our community to learn from, share with, and connect. It’s joining a conversation in the hallway with the creators of our open source projects. It’s taking yourself from beginner to intermediate; intermediate to advanced; or advanced to cutting edge. For some, it’s getting started with Python for the first time. We have loads of exciting plans in the works for this year, and we can’t wait to spend this special time with you!

How to Register

Once you have created an account on the PyCon US 2026 conference website, you can register via the registration button on your dashboard. Head over to our Registration Information page to get all the details on how to register.

Early Bird Registration Rates

PyCon US is providing discounted rates for Corporate, Student, and Individual tickets for the first 30 days that registration is open. Don’t wait, register now to receive your discount!

Early Bird Corporate - $849
Early Bird Individual - $419
Early Bird Student - $100

Regular rates will go into effect on January 12, 2026:

Regular Registration Rates

Corporate - $899 USD
Individual - $469 USD
Student - $139 USD

Hotels

PyCon US has contracted special rates with nearby hotels. When you complete your registration for PyCon US 2026, you will be able to book a hotel reservation on your dashboard through our official housing bureau, Orchid Events. Booking through Orchid helps support PyCon US and it is the only way to get the conference rates, so book now while supplies last!

We highly recommend staying in Long Beach rather than Los Angeles. Staying local will help you avoid LA’s notorious traffic and long commutes so you can arrive at talks, tutorials, and events on time (and with less stress!). Staying in Long Beach also gives you more opportunities to connect with the community, recharge between sessions, and fully enjoy the PyCon US experience.

More information can be found on the Hotels page.

Note: Beware of Housing Pirates! PyCon US or Orchid Events will not be calling delegates to sell rooms. If you are contacted by an agency other than Orchid Events offering to make your hotel reservations, we urge you not to use their services. We cannot protect you against fraud if you book a reservation with an outside party.

Call for Proposals - Deadline December 19th!

There’s still time to submit your proposal to present a Talk, Charla, Poster, or Tutorial at PyCon US! More information on our website and on our CfP platform.

PyCon US is introducing two dedicated Talk tracks to the schedule this year, “the Future of AI with Python” and “Trailblazing Python Security”. For more information and how to submit your proposal visit the Proposal Guidelines page.

Health & Safety Guidelines and Code of Conduct

PyCon US is committed to protecting the health and safety of our community. To ensure that we are gathering safely, we have implemented updated guidelines and protocols to be followed by all attendees during the event. We ask that you please review our Health & Safety guidelines prior to registration.

To support a safe environment and enjoyable experience for all, PyCon US attendees are also required as always to comply with our Code of Conduct, which you can review on the PyCon US Code of Conduct page.

T-shirts & PyLadies Auction

Conference T-shirts and tickets to the PyLadies Auction have not yet been released, but will be available to add to your PyCon US 2026 registration in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out on the PyCon US 2026 website and subscribe to PyCon US News to be one of the first to know and grab yours while supplies last!

Tutorials

Tutorials will be presented on Wednesday, May 13, 2026, and Thursday, May 14, 2026. We are accepting proposals for tutorials through December 19, 2025. Find more information on how to submit your proposal via our website and our CfP platform. Once our program committee has scheduled the selected tutorials, you will be able to add them to your conference registration.

Watch for tutorial registration launch in March 2026. Opt-in for PyCon US News and follow us on X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and the PSF LinkedIn for the announcement.

Sponsorship and Sponsor Presentations

Sponsorship for PyCon US 2026 is open now, and you can see the details of our sponsorship options and apply directly on our Sponsorship Application page. We’re grateful to all of our sponsors who make PyCon US possible!

For those interested in a paid speaking opportunity, Sponsor Presentations will take place on Thursday, May 14, 2026, and Friday, May 15, 2026. To reserve a slot for an hour-long Sponsor Presentation on the topic of your choice, please apply for Partner Level Sponsorship or higher and select the check mark next to “Sponsor Presentation.” Slots are limited and typically sell out, so please submit your request soon. Contact sponsors@python.org with any questions.

Travel Grants - Applications now Open!

Check out the Travel Grant page to learn more about the support we provide for travel, hotel, and registration to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to attend PyCon US. We actively encourage people to apply for travel grants and welcome applications from any attendees who otherwise would not be able to attend. Our goal is to support diversity and provide opportunity for attendees and attract Python developers at all experience levels from around the world. For questions about the application process, visit the Travel Grant FAQ page.

Deadline to apply is February 25, 2026.

Cancellation Fees

Registration cancellations must be submitted in writing to pycon-reg@python.org and received by May 1, 2026, in order to receive a refund minus the $50 cancellation fee ($25 for students; waived for cancellation due to health reasons). No refunds will be granted for cancellations received after May 1, 2026, unless you must cancel for any health-related reasons (see more details in the Health & Safety Guidelines). In lieu of cancellation, you have the option to transfer your registration to another person. For details about transferring your registration, visit the registration page.

Startup Row - Applications now open!

Startup Row is where early-stage companies show off what they’re doing with Python at PyCon US. Eligible startup stage companies are welcome to apply for a complimentary booth that will be open for attendees to visit from May 15 - 17, 2026. If you are a startup and would like the opportunity to share your projects with the community, submit your application!

Read the details on our Startup Row page and be sure to submit your applications by January 16, 2026.

Community Booths - Applications now open!

Each year, we set aside booth space in the Expo Hall for nonprofit organizations and community open source projects that serve the Python community and the broader open source ecosystem. If that describes your organization or group, we’d love for you to apply for one of our complimentary Community Booths. Visit the Community Booth page for more details and submit your application by February 5, 2026.

Join us in “Trailblazing Python Security” at PyCon US 2026

2025-11-18T11:17:00.000-05:00

PyCon US 2026 is coming to Long Beach, California! PyCon US is the premiere conference for the Python programming language in North America. Python experts and enthusiasts from around the globe will gather in Long Beach to discuss and learn about the latest developments to the Python programming language and massive ecosystem of Python projects.

New in 2026: Security and AI talk tracks!

Brand new this year are two themed talk tracks: “Trailblazing Python Security” and “Python and the Future of AI”. We want to hear talks from you! The PyCon US Call for Proposals (CFP) for PyCon US 2026 is now open through December 19th, 2025. Don’t wait to submit your talks, the earlier you submit the better.

If your company or organization would like to show support for a more secure Python ecosystem by sponsoring the “Trailblazing Python Security” talk track check out the PyCon US 2026 Sponsor Prospectus or reach out via email to sponsors@python.org. We’ve made three sponsor slots available for the track: one lead sponsor and two co-sponsors, so act fast!

We’re also looking for mentors! If you’re an experienced speaker and want to help someone with their proposal, the PyCon US Proposal Mentorship Program is for you! We typically get twice the number of mentees seeking support than we do for volunteer mentors. Sign up to mentor via this form by November 21, 2025.

What’s next for Python security?

If you're interested in Python and security: why should you attend PyCon US 2026?

Many Pythonistas use the Open Source software available on the Python Package Index (PyPI). PyCon US is the flagship conference hosted by the Python Software Foundation, the stewards of the Python Package Index. Many brand-new security features are announced and demoed live at PyCon US, such as “PyPI Digital Attestations”, “PyPI Organizations”, and “Trusted Publishers”.

You’ll be among the first Pythonistas to hear about these new features and chat with the developers and maintainers of PyPI.

Open Space about handling vulnerabilities in Python projects

PyCon US always has many opportunities to learn about the latest in Python security. Last year at PyCon US 2025 hosted a “Python Security Mini-Summit” Open Space with speakers discussing the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), CVE and Open Source, and supply-chain within the Scientific Python community. Expect even more security content this year!

The conference talk schedule includes many talks about using memory-safe systems programming languages like Rust with Python, authentication with popular Web frameworks, how to handle security vulnerabilities as an Open Source project, and how the “Phantom Dependency” problem affects the Python package ecosystem.

We hope you’ll consider joining us in Long Beach, CA for PyCon US 2026. See you there! 🔥🏕️

PyCon US 2026 - Call for Proposals Now Open!

2025-10-31T14:02:00.000-04:00

We’re so excited to announce that PyCon US 2026 is heading to California for our first year in our sunny new host city of Long Beach, CA!

We’re also excited to announce the launch of our conference website, along with Call for Proposals and our sponsorship program!

Here we come, Long Beach!

PyCon US is heading to Long Beach, CA, located in the heart of sunny Southern California, right along the Pacific Ocean. We will continue to return in person, with Health and Safety Guidelines in place.

PyCon US 2026 will be held at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, in downtown Long Beach, CA on the following dates:

May 13-14, 2026 - Tutorials
May 14-15, 2026 - Sponsor Presentations
May 15-17, 2026 - Main Conference Days—Keynotes, Talks, Charlas, Expo Hall, and more
May 18-19, 2026 - Sprints

PyCon US Website is Live

You can now head over to the PyCon US 2026 website for all the conference details and more information about our sponsorship program.

This year’s PyCon US design blends the vibrant landscape and energy of Long Beach through a synthwave aesthetic, reflecting the creativity of our community and a bright, forward-looking future for Python.

We’re excited to collaborate with designers Meanapas.C and Hamza Haj Taieb, whose illustrations and designs brought the PyCon US 2026 website to life. The design is brought together with the coordination of Georgi K and implemented by YupGup.

PyCon US Call for Proposals is Now Open

PyCon US 2026’s Call for Proposals is officially open for Talks, Tutorials, Posters, and Charlas! The deadline to submit for all tracks is December 19, 2025.

We need beginner, intermediate, and advanced proposals on all sorts of topics— and beginner, intermediate, and advanced speakers to give said presentations. You don’t need to be a 20-year veteran who has spoken at dozens of conferences. On all fronts, we need all types of people. Our community is comprised of a diverse set of people with unique skill sets, and we want our conference program to be a true reflection of that diversity.

PyCon US is introducing two dedicated Talk tracks to the schedule this year, “The Future of AI with Python” and “Trailblazing Python Security”. For more information and how to submit your proposal, visit this page.

For the new and first-time speakers, be sure to take advantage of the speaker mentorship program where you can be matched with experienced speakers who can help you with crafting your proposal. Check out the info on our Proposal Mentorship Program page.

For more information on where and how to submit your proposal, visit the Proposal Guidelines page on the PyCon US 2026 website.

Sponsorship Has Tremendous Impact

Sponsors are what make PyCon US and the Python Software Foundation possible. PyCon US is the main source of revenue for the PSF, the non-profit behind the Python language and the Python Packaging Index (PyPI), and the hub for the Python community.

PyCon US is the largest and longest-running Python gathering globally, with a diverse group of highly engaged attendees, many of whom you won’t find at other conferences. We’re excited to be able to provide our sponsors with opportunities to connect with and support the Python community. You’ll be face-to-face with talented developers, qualified recruits, and potential customers, access a large and diverse audience, as well as elevate your visibility and corporate identity within the Python community.

Check out our prospectus and our full menu of benefits to learn more about the 2026 PSF sponsorship program.

What you can expect when you sponsor PyCon US and the PSF:

Reach - Access to 2500+ attendees interested in your products and services and generate qualified leads.
Brand strength - Be part of the biggest and most prestigious Python conference in the world and support the nonprofit organization behind the Python language.
Connections - Networking with attendees in person to create connections and provide detailed information about your products and services.
Recruiting - Access to qualified job candidates. If you’re hiring, there’s no better place to find Python developers than PyCon US.
12 months of benefits - Reach the Python community during PyCon US and beyond, with options for recognition on Python.org, PyPI.org, and more.

Because of the generosity of our sponsors, the Python Software Foundation is able to continually improve our support of Python and its community. Read more about the PSF here and in our most recent Annual Impact Report. You can help us ensure the Python ecosystem thrives for years to come.

Apply to sponsor PyCon US and the PSF today! Head over to our prospectus to learn more about the 2026 PSF sponsorship program or go directly to the Sponsorship Application page to sign up to sponsor.

If you have any questions about sponsoring PyCon US and the PSF, please contact us at sponsors@python.org.

Stay in the Loop

As we get closer to the event, the conference website is where you’ll find details for our call for proposals, registration launch, venue information, and everything PyCon US related!

Be sure to subscribe here to the PyCon US Blog, follow @PyCon on X, @PyCon.US on Bluesky, @pycon@fosstodon.org and @ThePSF@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, the PSF on LinkedIn, and subscribe to PyCon US 2026 News so you won’t miss a thing. Our official hashtag is #PyConUS.

PyCon US 2025 Recap and Recordings

2025-08-22T12:38:00.000-04:00

As we close the books on PyCon US 2025, we can’t express enough gratitude to everyone who joined us in Pittsburgh, PA, and made our 9 days together a special and unforgettable experience.

We had an amazing and diverse group of community members join us for PyCon US 2025, attending from 58 different countries! By the numbers, we welcomed a total attendance of 2,225 Pythonistas to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. We couldn’t be more grateful for all who supported the Python ecosystem and helped make PyCon US 2025 a huge success.

Check out a full, comprehensive recap of this year’s PyCon US conference here:

Are you already missing PyCon US? Check out this highlight reel for key moments, insights, and all the PyCon US 2025 energy:

Find more photos from PyCon US 2025 here.

For anyone who couldn’t join us or would like to rewatch any of this year’s fabulous content, all PyCon US 2025 recordings are available on the PyCon US YouTube channel! Be sure to subscribe to our channel for notifications of any new content.

We send a huge thank you to all the presenters and speakers for their time, energy, and efforts in providing the wonderful content presented at PyCon US 2025, as well as to our incredible AV team, Altitude C, for their hard work and attention to capturing recordings and providing AV this year.

The attendees, volunteers, speakers, staff, and sponsors truly make PyCon US what it is! The work of the Python Software Foundation is only possible with you all. A huge heartfelt thank you to the whole community.

Code of Conduct Transparency Report

Code of Conduct Summary: At PyCon US 2025, three non-emergency incidents were addressed through discussion. One additional report was made of unintentional misgendering. This was addressed by the Code of Conduct team.

Here we come, Long Beach!

We can’t wait to welcome you to our new host city of Long Beach, California, for PyCon US 2026! Be sure to mark your calendars - we’ll see you there May 13-May 19, 2026!

If you’d like to be notified when the CFP opens and when tickets go on sale, you can watch this blog or subscribe to PyCon US News. Until then, if you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to pycon-reg@python.org.

Welcoming 8 Companies to Startup Row at PyCon US 2025

2025-05-17T09:42:00.002-04:00

PyCon US gives the community a chance to come together and learn about what’s new and interesting about the Python language and the seemingly infinite variety of problems that can be solved with a few (or a few thousand) lines of Python code. For entrepreneurial Pythonistas, Startup Row at PyCon US presents a unique opportunity for startup companies to connect directly with the developer community they’re building for.

Kicked off in 2011, Startup Row at PyCon US gives early-stage startups access to the best of what PyCon US has to offer, including conference passes and booth space, at no cost to their teams. Since its inception, including this year’s batch, well over 150 companies have been featured on Startup Row, and there’s a good chance you are familiar with some of their products and projects. Pandas, Modin, Codon, Ludwig, Horovod, SLSA, and dozens of other open-source tools were built or commercialized by companies featured on Startup Row at PyCon US.

Think of Startup Row at PyCon US as a peek into the future of the Python software ecosystem. And with that, we’re pleased to introduce the 2025 batch!

The Startup Row 2025 Lineup

AgentOps

Building an AI agent that works is only half the battle; seeing why it fails, how much it costs, and whether it’s about to go rogue is the other half. AgentOps gives developers that missing x-ray vision. Drop a two-line SDK into your code and every run is captured as a “session” complete with step-by-step waterfalls, prompt/response pairs, cost and token metrics, and security flags—instantly viewable in a web dashboard.

The idea was born at a San Francisco hackathon, where co-founders Alex Reibman and Adam Silverman discovered that their agent-debugging tools were more popular than the agents themselves. They turned those internal tools into AgentOps, raised a $2.6 million pre-seed led by 645 Ventures and Afore Capital in August 2024, and now give thousands of AI engineers a live dashboard that replays every agent step, surfaces exact cost and latency metrics, and enforces benchmark-driven safety checks—all from a two-line SDK.

Open-sourced under an MIT license, the project has already racked up 4.4k GitHub stars and integrates out-of-the-box with OpenAI Agents SDK, CrewAI, LangChain, AutoGen and dozens of other frameworks. With observability handled, AgentOps wants to be to autonomous agents what Datadog is to micro-services: the layer that makes ambitious agent stacks safe enough for production—and cheap enough to keep running.

AllHands AI

Agentic coding went from a theoretical possibility to something seemingly overnight, and All Hands AI’s open-source platform OpenHands is one of the reasons why. Written in Python (with a JavaScript front-end), OpenHands lets an AI developer do everything a human can: edit repositories, run shell commands, browse the web, call APIs—even lift snippets straight from Stack Overflow—and then roll it all back into a commit you can review and merge.

Since its first README-only commit just 14 months ago, the project has snowballed into 54k-plus GitHub stars and 6k forks, backed by a community of roughly 310 contributors and counting. The momentum helped the team close a $5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures last September, giving the ten-person startup runway to layer commercial tooling on top of its permissively-licensed core.

“About six months ago it finally clicked—I now write about 95% of my own code with agents,” says co-founder and chief scientist Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon who shipped the project’s first lines before Robert Brennan—now CEO—joined the project and built a globally-distributed team to scale it up. Neubig credits the early decision to ship a “non-functional prototype” and build in public for catalyzing the contributor base; today, community members maintain everything from Windows support to protocol bridges while swapping LLM benchmarks daily in the project’s Slack.

OpenHands has evolved from a weekend proof-of-concept into a community-driven framework that now aims for production-grade reliability as an open alternative to proprietary code agents. Weekly releases focus on reproducible debugging, cost control, and enterprise safeguards, and contributors are already using the system to generate and review real pull requests across a growing set of Python projects.

DiffStudio

Product photos tell a story, but DiffStudio wants to let shoppers walk around that story. The North-Jersey startup is building a camera-agnostic “inverse graphics” pipeline that ingests a handful of ordinary 2-D shots or video and returns a fully-textured, web-ready 3-D model that drops into any product page. The goal is simple: turn scrolling into spinning, pinching, and zooming—and watch engagement and conversions rise.

Founder Naga Karumuri just recently formed the company in December, after months of hacking on the latest developments in Gaussian splatting and differentiable rendering. “You upload a batch of images, and our model hands you a compressed asset—think megabytes, not gigabytes—that Shopify can serve instantly,” Karumuri explained. A companion mobile app will let merchants scan products on the fly, while a web dashboard handles cloud processing and one-click embeds.

DiffStudio’s beachhead market is small- and mid-sized Shopify sellers, and blue-chip retailers are already circling. “In casual chats we’ve had interest from brands like Adidas and Michael Kors,” Karumuri noted, hinting at an eventual move up-market once the self-service MVP launches. Compression and quality are the differentiators: where existing tools like Polycam focus on hobbyist scans or LiDAR-assisted captures, DiffStudio is chasing photo-real fidelity with file sizes that won’t tank page speed. The project’s GitHub repositories showcase early demos and the startup’s open-source commitment.

The team is still lean—Karumuri plus a collaborator—but the vision is outsized: make 3-D product “digital twins” as easy to generate as a product photo set. Or, as their LinkedIn banner puts it, “Splat your products into 3D glory.”

Fabi.ai

Business users shouldn’t have to ping the data team for every ad-hoc question—and data scientists shouldn’t spend half their day writing the same queries on repeat. Fabi.ai positions itself as the AI “side-kick” that lets both camps meet in the middle: a web notebook where natural-language prompts, SQL, Python, and no-code building blocks live side-by-side, with generative agents filling in (and explaining) 90 % of the boilerplate.

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in the San-Francisco Bay Area, the six-person team works face-to-face in San Mateo to iterate quickly on the product. CEO Marc Dupuis ran embedded analytics at revenue-ops unicorn Clari before teaming up again with former colleague Lei Tang (now CTO) to “let vibe-coders do 95 % of their own analysis” while still giving experts an easy way to supervise the last mile.

Eniac Ventures and Outlander VC co-led a $3 million seed round in July 2023 to bring Fabi.ai’s collaborative notebook to market. Early customers already range from fast growing startups to established e-commerce brands.

With BI dashboards stuck on the what and legacy notebooks siloed on individual laptops, Fabi.ai is betting that a cloud-native, agent-augmented workspace is the missing link—and it’s inviting the Python community to kick the tires (and write fewer queries) at PyCon US.

Gooey.ai

Most no-code AI builders stop at slick demos; Gooey.ai is obsessed with what happens after the hype, when a multilingual chatbot has to work for a Kenyan farmer with a 2 G signal or a frontline nurse switching between English and Kannada. The open-source, low-code platform stitches together the “best of private and public AI” into reusable workflows—text, speech, vision and RAG pipelines you can fork, remix and ship to WhatsApp, SMS, Slack or the web from a single dashboard. One billing account, one-click deploy.

Founders Sean Blagsvedt (ex-Microsoft Research, founder of Indian job-matching startup Babajob), Archana Prasad (artist-turned-social-tech entrepreneur), and CTO Dev Aggarwal split their time between Seattle and Bangalore and run the company under the umbrella of Dara Network. Their thesis: impactful AI needs to be both affordable and local—so Gooey bakes in speech recognition for low-resource languages, translation APIs like India’s Bhashini, and zero-data-retention options for NGOs handling sensitive chats.

Real-world traction is already visible. An agronomy WhatsApp bot built on Gooey reached “tens of thousands of farmers in Kenya, India, Ethiopia and Rwanda,” delivering accurate, objective answers with page-level citations. The platform’s copilot builder now supports the latest GPT-4o, Llama 3, Claude, Gemini and Mistral models; integrates OCR, vision and text-to-speech; and ships bulk evaluation harnesses so teams can test new prompts before they hit production.

To seed more grassroots projects, Gooey recently launched a Workflow Accelerator with funding from The Rockefeller Foundation, covering model and SMS costs for six NGOs and open-sourcing every workflow that emerges. If you’re looking to take an AI pilot from “cool demo” to “24/7 field tool,” Gooey.ai wants to be the glue—and the infra—you won’t outgrow.

GripTape AI

Enterprise AI teams love the idea of autonomous agents, but hate the roulette wheel of prompt-only code. Griptape steps in with a Python framework that keeps creativity where it belongs—inside LLM calls—while wrapping every outside step in predictable, testable software patterns. Agents, sequential pipelines, and parallel workflows are first-class “Structures”; memory, rulesets, and observability are plug-in Drivers; and an “Off-Prompt” mechanism pushes sensitive or bulky data out of the prompt for lower cost and higher security.

The project launched in early 2023 and has already gathered ≈2.3 k GitHub stars and an active Discord community. Adoption accelerated after co-founders Kyle Roche and Vasily Vasinov—both former AWS leaders—closed a $12.5 million Seed Round in September 2023 led by Seattle’s FUSE and Acequia Capital. The fresh capital funds Griptape Cloud, a fully managed runtime that hosts ETL pipelines, hybrid vector knowledge bases, and structure executions while piping metrics to whatever monitoring stack a Fortune 500 already uses.

Under the Apache-2.0 license, developers can start locally, swap between OpenAI, Bedrock or Anthropic drivers, and graduate to the cloud only when they need auto-scaling or policy enforcement. In short, Griptape aims to be the Django of agentic AI: batteries-included, prod-ready, and with enough guardrails that even the compliance team can sleep at night.

Griptape also recently launched Griptape Nodes, an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface where designers, artists and other creative professionals can create advanced creative pipelines using graphs, nodes, and flowcharts to exploit state-of-the-art image generation and image processing models, together with more “traditional” large language models.

MLJAR

Most AutoML platforms lock you into a browser tab and someone else’s GPU cluster. MLJAR takes the opposite approach: everything runs locally, yet you still get the “train, explain, and deploy” cycle in a single click.

The Polish-based project began in 2016, when founder Piotr Płoński—fresh from a PhD spent building models for physicists, bioinformaticians, and telecom giants—decided he was tired of rewriting the same pipelines over and over. Impatience, not laziness, pushed him to automate the entire workflow.

Today the three-person team (Piotr, his co-founder wife, and a close friend) maintains a fully open-source stack. The flagship MLJAR-AutoML package handles feature engineering, hyper-parameter search, and rich Markdown reports; Mercury turns any Jupyter notebook into a shareable web app or dashboard with a sprinkle of widgets; and the brand-new MLJAR Studio Desktop app bundles its own Python environment, point-and-click “code recipes,” an integrated GPT-4 assistant, and a one-button Share that converts a notebook into a live web application.

Open source is more than a distribution strategy—it’s a trust signal. One recognisable enterprise adopted the package under an MIT license and then contracted the team for advanced features such as fairness-aware training. Revenue is a side effect; the primary goal is software that makes data science faster, friendlier, and fully under the user’s control.

If you’ve ever wished Streamlit met AutoML—and ran natively on your laptop—swing by the MLJAR booth on Startup Row at PyCon US and take Studio for a spin.

Ragas

Seemingly everyone is building RAG pipelines, but almost no one is measuring them. Ragas sets out to be “pytest for Retrieval-Augmented Generation,” bundling ready-made metrics—context recall, faithfulness, answer relevancy—and auto-generated test sets so teams can turn vibe checks into repeatable CI tests. Drop the library into LangChain, LlamaIndex, or plain-Python code and Ragas spits out a single “Ragas Score” (plus per-metric drill-downs) that tracks whether your latest prompt tweak fixed accuracy or broke it.

The project landed a shout-out during OpenAI’s Dev Day and has since snowballed to 9.1 k GitHub stars and 900+ forks, with more than 80 external contributors. In production it now processes ~5 million evaluations a month for engineers at AWS, Microsoft, Databricks, and Moody’s—a number growing 70 % month-over-month.

Co-founders Jithin James (early engineer at BentoML) and Shahul ES (Kaggle Grandmaster, core contributor to Open-Assistant) met at college, hacked on open-source together for years, and entered Y Combinator’s W24 batch to turn their weekend project into a commercial platform. Their plan: keep the core evaluator MIT-licensed while DG Labs, the commercial arm, layers team dashboards, experiment tracking, and dataset management on top—so every product squad can ship RAG updates with CI-style confidence.

Thank You’s and Acknowledgements

There are far too many stakeholders in the ongoing success of Startup Row at PyCon US to name individually, but this program would not be possible without the following folks:

The Python Software Foundation, for its continued support of this little corner of PyCon US.
The PSF Sponsorship team, for managing the logistics of getting everyone registered and set up for success
Startup Row co-organizers, Jason D. Rowley (p.s. hey, that's me!) and and collaborator, Shea Tate-Di Donna, whose first experience with the Python community was presenting her company, Zana, on Startup Row at PyCon US 2015.
Startup Row alumni companies that come back as paid sponsors at PyCon US. Shoutouts to Anvil (SR’17), Chainguard (SR’22), and Dagster (SR’21), whose support helps make Startup Row at PyCon US possible.
To all startup founders who filled out the (mercifully brief) application. To those that did not get a spot this year, we appreciate your time and attention. To those that did: a hearty congratulations.
To the selection committee, for accomplishing the difficult task of evaluating and scoring applications.

2026 will mark 15 years of Startup Row at PyCon US. We can't wait to see what's next in the Python software ecosystem. 🐍

Asking the Key Questions: Q&A with the PyCon US 2025 keynote speakers

2025-05-05T17:19:00.000-04:00

Get to know the all-star lineup of PyCon US 2025 keynote speakers. They’ve graciously answered our questions, and shared some conference advice plus tidbits of their backstories–from rubber ducks to paper towel printing to Pac-Man. Read along and get excited to see them live as we count down to the event!

How did you get started in tech/Python? Did you have a friend or a mentor that helped you?

CORY DOCTOROW: My father was a computer scientist so we grew up with computers in the house. Our first "computer" was a Cardiac cardboard computer (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) that required a human to move little tokens around in slots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation

Then in the late seventies, when I was 6-7, we got a teletype terminal and an acoustic coupler that we could use to connect to a PDP-11 at the University of Toronto. However, my computing was limited by how much printer-paper we had for the teletype. Luckily, my mother was a kindergarten teacher and she was able to bring home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathrooms. I'd print up one side of them, then reverse the roll and print down the other side, and then, finally, I'd re-roll-up the paper so my mom could take the paper into school for the kids to dry their hands on.

LYNN ROOT: I started in 2011, learning how to code through an online intro to CS course. It was awful – who thinks C is a good first language? I failed both midterms (failed as in, "here's a D, be thankful for the grading curve"), but somehow finished the course with an A- because I learned Python for my final project. After that experience, I had to learn more, but didn't want to go through a "proper" degree program. It's actually how PyLadies SF got started: I wanted friends to learn to program with, so I figured – why not invite other like-minded people to join me!

I did (and still do) have a mentor – I definitely wouldn't be where I am today without the guidance and patience of Hynek Schlawack, who also happens to be my best friend ( hi bestiee ). He's been there since the very beginning, and I hope someday I can repay him. I do try to pay it forward with mentoring women who are early in their careers. Everyone deserves a Hynek!

TOM MEAGHER: As a journalist, I've had no formal training in programming. Most of what I have learned — including Python and pandas and Django and other tools for data analysis and investigative reporting — has come through my connection to the organization Investigative Reporters and Editors. IRE is a wonderful community of really generous journalists from around the world who teach one another new techniques and support each other in our projects.

GEOFF HING: I studied computer science and engineering as an undergrad. Python was really emerging as a language at that point, but a few years later, it was fully the “get stuff done” language among a lot of people around me. I really benefited from people I worked with being generous with their time in explaining code bases I worked with.

DR. KARI L. JORDAN: I was introduced to tech/Python when I began working for Data Carpentry back in 2016. Before then, you didn't know what I was doing to analyze my data!

What do you think the most important work you’ve ever done is? Or if you think it might still be in the future, can you tell us something about your plans?

DR. KARI L. JORDAN: The most important work I've ever done is making it more accessible for people who look like me to get involved with coding.

TOM MEAGHER: I'm really lucky to work for a news organization where I feel everything we publish helps explain a criminal justice system that is shrouded in secrecy and often really inefficient. That makes me feel like we're contributing something useful to the national conversation. If I had to choose one recent project to highlight, I was particularly proud of our work exposing how prison guards in New York State regularly get away with abusing the people in their custody. These stories only became possible after New York reformed some of its police secrecy laws after the death of George Floyd and took a lot of time and work to get it right.

CORY DOCTOROW: I have no idea - I think this is something that can only be done in retrospect. For example, I worked on an obscure but very important fight over something called the "Broadcast Flag" that would have banned GNU Radio and all other free software defined radios outright, and would have required all PC hardware to be certified by an entertainment industry committee as "piracy proof." That may yet turn out to be very important, or it may be that the work I'm doing now on antitrust - which seems likely to result in the breakup of Google and Meta - will be more important.

LYNN ROOT: I think my most important work I've done revolves around PyLadies. Founding the San Francisco chapter and working to grow the global community has been incredibly rewarding. Seeing how PyLadies has evolved into an international network that empowers women to thrive in tech has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career.

I take great pride in the rise of women at PyCon: in 2012 (my first PyCon) less than 10% of speakers were women. Within five years, that number rose to one-third. Looking ahead, I'm excited to keep making an impact in the Python community. With the PyLadies Global Council, we're focusing on how to make the organization sustainable. It's a decentralized, grassroots group powered by volunteers – and we need to figure out how to keep the momentum going.

GEOFF HING: I think the most important work that I’ve done is just bringing some structure, open source approaches and practice to newsroom code where many people are self-taught, don’t have a lot of technical support and are working under tough resource and time constraints.

Years before I worked as a journalist, I provided some commits to a records management system for volunteer groups that send reading material to people in prisons and jails. The creators of that software are still maintaining it, and it’s still being used by prison book programs after more than a decade. I can’t take very much credit for this project, but its longevity speaks to the ways software developers doing regular-degular volunteer work can begin to understand systems in ways that eventually let them apply their specific technical skills. The longevity also speaks to the persistent problematic conditions across U.S. prisons and jails, as well as barriers to incarcerated people getting access to reading materials, which my colleagues at The Marshall Project have reported on.

In the future, I’m interested in synthesizing some of the approaches from open data movements but working backwards from the information needs of people for whom access to information can really be a life and death issue, rather than just focusing on opening up data.

Have you been to PyCon US before? What are you looking forward to?

CORY DOCTOROW: I have not - I'm looking forward to talking with geeks about the deep policy implications of their work and the important contributions they can make to a new, good internet.

LYNN ROOT: PyCon US is like the family reunion that I actually look forward to. Python folks are my people – it's the community I feel most myself in. I love seeing old friends, catching up with my fellow PyLadies, and talking nerdy, and meeting new people.

DR. KARI L. JORDAN: This will be my first time attending PyCon US! I'm excited to learn about the ways the community is using Python for good. I'm also excited for people to find all of the rubber duckies I plan to hide around the convention center :) Bring them to The Carpentries booth and say hi!

GEOFF HING: I haven’t been to PyCon before. But, beyond the utility that Python offers for my journalism, I just like programming as a practice, and I’ve found Python to be a useful, accessible language to write programs, and I’m just excited to be around other people who are excited about that, and have put in a lot of the work to continue to make the language so broadly useful.

TOM MEAGHER: I attended PyCon US in Montreal in 2014. I was much newer to Python then, and I was impressed by the breadth of experiences of the attendees at the time. I'm really looking forward to learning about new libraries that might be helpful in my journalism and leveling up my programming knowledge.

Do you have any advice for first-time conference goers?

LYNN ROOT: Seek out the Pac-mans! If you see a group of people chatting that have an opening in the shape of a Pac-man, take that as an invitation to join in and introduce yourself. The best part of PyCon US is the most ephemeral: the "hallway" track where you meet new people, hear interesting conversations, and ask questions of your favorite speakers, maintainers, and core developers. All the talks are recorded – don't worry about missing one. But you can't create new connections once you're back home.

DR. KARI L. JORDAN: Pick two events per day that you MUST attend. You'll burn out quickly trying to do all the things, so don't try. Take breaks when you need to - in person meetings can be exhausting.

GEOFF HING: I can only speak from attending journalism conferences that have a lot of programming (and Python) content, like NICAR and SRCCON, but I think taking good notes, especially ones that highlight potential use cases in one’s own work for a particular approach, is really critical. Also, just trying to make time to try out a few things post-conference while it’s still fresh.

TOM MEAGHER: When I'm entering a conference for a new community, I try to meet as many people as I can and learn about how they do their jobs, the problems they try to solve and the tools they use. I find a lot of inspiration from other fields who wrestle with similar issues that I face as an investigative reporter but often have new and vastly different ways to deal with them.

CORY DOCTOROW: Not having attended this conference before, I'm unable to give PyCon-specific advice. However, I'd generally say that you should attend sessions that are outside your comfort zone, strike up conversations by asking about things learned at sessions rather than asking about someone's job, and try the workshops.

Can you tell us about an open source or open culture project that you think not enough people know about?

DR. KARI L. JORDAN: Surprisingly, I'd say The Carpentries, and I'm of course not at all biased. We are the leading inclusive community teaching data and coding skills, yet many have never heard of us. I encourage you to visit www.carpentries.org to learn more.

LYNN ROOT: There are so many big, intense projects out there – and they have their place! But I like to show appreciation to the small and the cheeky. Especially those with a cute logo: check out icecream, and never use `print()` to debug again!

TOM MEAGHER: The open source landscape in journalism has changed quite a bit over the last decade, as many of the most prominent open source projects were sunsetted. One library I've found helpful on recent projects is dedupe, which uses machine learning to help with fuzzy matching of records and weeding out duplicates, a very common problem I face when dealing with messy government data.

GEOFF HING: Frequently, at the start of my data reporting, I’ll look for prior art by just searching for agency names, or data release names, or even column names in some data set I get back from a records request, in GitHub. I don’t want to blow up the spot, but a Gist that I came across with some Python code for decoding the JSON format used by a certain type of widely-used dashboard, was really helpful to me. I imagine that every community has someone hacking around making it easier to work with data in a way that agencies should be producing it, but aren’t. I also really appreciate academics who have written freely-available documentation around confusing and ever-changing data sets, like Jacob Kaplan’s Decoding FBI Crime Data, feels very much in the spirit of open source projects.

I feel like people already know about this project, but I recently used MkDocs and it was so easy to use. I think documentation is really important, and having something that lets someone focus on writing and not on tooling is so great. Finally, VisiData is my go-to tool for taking a first look at data. Quickly exploring data is so much of what I do, and it feels like a spreadsheet application that prioritizes that use. If reading data, rather than making some kind of report for an administrative process is how you mostly engage with spreadsheets, I guarantee you won’t miss Excel.

CORY DOCTOROW: There is a broad, urgent project to update services that use outdated CC licenses (e.g. Flickr) to the latest CC 4.0 licenses. The reason this is so important is that the older CC licenses have a bug in them that allow for "copyleft trolling," a multimillion-dollar, global extortion racket pursued by firms like Pixsy and grifters like Marco Verch.

Here's how that works: older CC licenses have a clause that says they "terminate immediately upon breach." That means that if you screw up the attribution string when you use a CC license (for example, if you forget to explicitly state which license version the work you're reproducing was released under), then you are in breach of the license and are no longer an authorized user.

In practice, *most* CC users make these minor errors. Copyleft trolls post photos and stock art using older licenses, wait for people to make small attribution errors, then threaten them with lawsuits and demand hundreds or even thousands of dollars for using CC-licensed works. They threaten their victims with $150,000 statutory damage penalties if they don't settle.

Some copyleft trolls even commission photo-illustrations based on the top news-site headlines of the day from Upwork or Fiverr, paying photographers a tiny sum to create bait in a trap for the unwary.

The CC 4.0 licenses were released 12 years ago, in 2013, and they fix this bug. They have a "cure provision" that gives people who screw up the attribution 30 days after being notified of the error to fix things before the license terminates.

Getting sites like Flickr - which hosts tens of millions of CC-licensed works and only allows licensing under the 2.0 licenses - to update to modern licenses, and to push existing account holders to upgrade the licenses on works already on the service, is of critical importance.

Flickr, unfortunately, is burdened by decades of tech debt, as a result of massive neglect by Yahoo and then Verizon, its previous owners. Its current owners, Smugmug, are working hard on this, but it's a big project.

Once it's done, all Wikimedia Commons images that have been ganked from Flickr should be regularly checked to see if the underlying Flickr image has had its license updated, and, if so, the license on WM:C should be updated, too.

Thank you to all of our keynote speakers for participating! We are more eager than ever to hear what you have to share with us on the main stage next week. If you haven't got your ticket yet, it's not too late--visit https://us.pycon.org/2025/attend/information/ to get registered today. See you soon!

Community Organizer Summit and PSF & Meetups Discussion

2025-04-17T10:13:00.003-04:00

Calling all community organizers! We want to sit down together and share what’s going well, what new tricks we’ve learned, and what’s been challenging in the area of organizing Python and Python adjacent communities. So if you’re attending PyCon US this year and you run a local Python meet-up, help organize a regional conference, or facilitate peer learning through workshops or hack nights, we hope you will join us at the Community Organizer Summit and the PSF & Meetups Discussion.

Community Organizer Summit: 10:30 am - 1 pm on Saturday, May 17th
PSF & Meetups Discussion: 1pm - 2pm on Sunday, May 18th

Saturday’s Community Organizer Summit kicks off with a keynote and then three short “Show & Tell” slots, for which the CFP is open now. After the more formal sessions, we’ll break into unconference discussions, so be sure to bring your ideas. If you’re not able to make it to Pittsburgh but you want to join the ongoing conversation about conference organizing, please consider joining the bi-monthly Conference Chats on Discord. Thanks so much to Mason Egger, Heather White and Kevin Horn for organizing the Summit!

Sunday’s PSF & Meetups Discussion is organized by the PSF board and is intended to kick off a more collaborative and purposeful era of Python community organizer knowledge sharing! Community organizer meetups have been happening casually at PyCon US and (more famously) at EuroPython for a few years now. We’re looking to make this year’s PyCon US session into a jumping off point for a global conversation that we hope to see happen regularly in lots of places around the world, as well as online. If you’ve got ideas or want to be involved in this conversation, please email community-organizing@pyfound.org

This is not just for experienced organizers! Looking to start a community and want to learn from a group of awesome people? Come join us!

What to expect at PyCon US sprints

2025-04-15T09:51:00.000-04:00

The conference starts days before the first official talk. There’s topic-specific summits, sponsor presentations, and deep-dive tutorials that are definitely worth checking out. Similarly, the conference does not end with the last talk. For the next four days, groups of enthusiasts rally around their projects and sprint on making them better in person. Some say it’s the best part of the conference, actually. Let’s take a closer look then!

Who organizes the sprints?

Sprints at PyCon US are organized by the attendees. The conference provides the space with tables, power strips, Internet connectivity, and, for the first two days, catered lunches. The attendees band together to work on their open-source and community projects of choice.

You can expect bigger projects like CPython, Django, Flask, or BeeWare, to have their own dedicated rooms to hack on their stuff. Smaller projects either group together topically or just join a random friendly room with empty seats.

Of course, the general rules around health and safety apply to the sprints as well. Same goes for the code of conduct. PyCon US staff is still around during sprints, so you can talk to them or to the Sprints chairs, Tania Allard and Cheuk Ting Ho, if you need any help.

Who comes to sprints? Do I need to come for 4 days?

You’ll find project maintainers, seasoned contributors, community organizers, and first-time contributors alike. Everybody’s welcome!

Most don’t stay for all four days, so understandably, everybody wants to maximize what they get out of the experience. So come prepared. Especially if you’re only coming for a single day. Our recommendation would be to stay for at least two, this gives it enough time to set everything up and actually create a pull request with a bugfix or feature.

But if you can only spare one day, that’s fine, too. Let’s cover some ways in which you can make your experience the best.

Which project should I join for sprints?

This is a question worth answering before coming. Sprints work best for contributors who are already users of a given project. If you know a project like, say, CPython or Django well enough, you probably stumbled upon a bug in that software in the past. Maybe you looked into how some internals of that software work. Maybe you thought about making a change to it in the past. Or maybe you at least saw enough tracebacks that you feel somewhat familiar with the software you’re using.

The most impactful way to participate in sprints is to choose a project you’re familiar with, at least as a user. The project maintainers who come to sprints are helpful people and want you to succeed with your contribution. Meet them halfway and choose a project you already use. There’s not enough time during the sprints for maintainers to install software for the first time and explain how it works on somebody else’s laptop.

Of course, there’s going to be exceptions to every rule. If you first learned about some library or framework at the conference and you’re very excited to get involved, by all means join the sprint for that project!

First PR to CPython

For CPython in particular, the maintainers at the sprint recommend that sprint attendees have at least 2 years of experience as users of the Python programming language. A sprint isn’t the best place to learn the basics of programming. But it’s totally okay to be new at contributing to Python. In fact, this year we’ll be trying something new: a dedicated space for first-time contributors to CPython to make sure the experts around you are best-equipped to help you get your first pull request merged. Look for the dedicated “First PR to CPython” signage on the sprint room list.

Are there any easy issues to work on?

This depends on the project. Some issue trackers contain issues marked as “easy” or “help wanted”. You can look at those first. Sometimes such issues are a bit of a trap. When an “easy” issue is still open 3+ years later, it often means there’s something not particularly easy about it.

Asking the maintainers present at the sprint for an issue to fix is another way to get something to work on. That will often mean that you’ll get involved with whatever that maintainer already planned to work on. This might be super interesting or pretty boring to you, depending on what that particular topic area is.

So the best way to find an issue to work on is to scratch your own itch. Fix that bug you also stumbled upon. Add this thing you once wished a library had. Open the list of issues in a library you used last week. Maybe you’ll be able to reproduce a problem, add a test, and fix it.

In fact, a related cool way to get involved is to have a laptop with an environment that the maintainer usually doesn’t work with. If you see issues on the tracker that need reproducing on Windows or macOS or FreeBSD and this just happens to be the platform that you’re on right now, that’s perfect!

Speak up!

Sprints are different from tutorials and talks. Everybody, including the experts in the room, hunker down and work on something. If you get stuck with an issue, others around you will probably not notice. A good rule of thumb is to fight with an issue for 45 minutes, and if you’re not making progress, let others know where you’re stuck. They might be able to help unblock you.

Some maintainers will suggest pair programming, or will be open to the idea if you suggest it. So that’s a thing you can try as well if you’re both interested in solving a particular problem.

Sometimes two newcomers band together to work on a single issue. This can also be a good strategy and it’s more fun to attack a problem with another person interested in solving it.

Preparing your work environment

While the conference is ready for even a large cohort of sprinters to all access wifi at the same time during sprints, it’s best to avoid the network congestion on the first day when a lot of people first “git clone” their projects.

If you know the project you want to contribute to, clone their repository before coming. Try to build it and run tests. Even if they’re failing for you, you are already way ahead.

If you don’t have a project chosen yet, you can still prepare a few things in advance. Install and configure your text editor of choice, and if you already have one, run a round of updates before coming. If you’re using any system-wide package manager like Apt or Homebrew, updating your installed packages before coming is a good idea.

Keep in mind that you will be working with other people. If you have a privacy screen on your laptop, it might be helpful to get rid of it for the time of the sprint. Or bring a different device. If you keep your terminal font size tiny to fit a ton of information on screen, you might want to figure out how to increase that font temporarily at least for the sprints so people you collaborate with can see what’s going on. This also applies to text editors and their color schemes. Think about your display brightness.

Similarly, if your keyboard layout is esoteric, it will make it harder for others to type on your laptop if you need help. Maybe you can find a quick way to toggle between layouts to allow others to write stuff.

Stay safe

The following section might sound a bit scary, but we’re sharing it as common-sense advice for any large gathering of industry professionals where technology is widely actively used. Don’t let it deter you from coming!

First things first. Backup your system before coming to the event. You might drop it, you might spill liquid on it, you might leave it at a restaurant or issue just the wrong command on the terminal in the heat of the moment and lose your data. They are all unlikely events, but they all happen at conferences. Backup your system.

This is a large event. People are generally nice and helpful. But if you leave your laptop or phone unattended, somebody might take it, deliberately or not. If you do decide to leave your hardware at the table, put some unique stickers on it, so people don’t mistake it for their own. This is especially effective when it comes to smaller accessories like laptop chargers. If you’re in need for stickers, you’ll find lots of them in the expo hall during the conference!

Finally, don’t get hacked. You will be active on a conference-wide network. Keep your system up-to-date, don’t bring laptops with legacy operating systems that are no longer receiving security updates. Unless you know and trust the person you’re interacting with, be vigilant about system-wide software they want you to install and settings they want you to change. Don’t allow strangers to connect devices to your laptop or phone, whether they’re thumb drives, keyboards, slide clickers, USB-C chargers, or anything else.

Have fun!

If everything above sounds like a lot, it’s only because it’s a list of tips gained through 15 years of experience attending sprints at programming conferences. It’s there to allow you to prepare, but don’t overthink it! Join us, you might really love it.

Sprints are fun, surprisingly productive, and sometimes spark big things! We also can’t overstate the importance of putting a face to a name. “Don’t be a stranger” is good advice. Connecting a GitHub account name with a good experience you had at a conference is a great way to build trust and fast-track online collaboration in the future!

And that’s that. The mysterious sprints demystified! Come and see for yourself whether they’re really the best part of PyCon US.

Guest post by Łukasz Langa

PyCon US 2025: Call for Volunteers & Hatchery Lineup!

2025-04-11T12:25:00.001-04:00

Call for Volunteers!

Looking to make a meaningful contribution to the Python community? Look no further than PyCon US 2025! Whether you're a seasoned Python pro or a newcomer to the community and looking to get involved, there's a volunteer opportunity that's perfect for you.

Sign-up for volunteer roles is done directly through the PyCon US website. This way, you can view and manage shifts you sign up for through your personal dashboard! You can read up on the different roles to volunteer for and how to sign up on the PyCon US website.

PyCon US is largely organized and run by volunteers. Every year, we ask to fill over 300 onsite volunteer hours to ensure everything runs smoothly at the event. And the best part? You don't need to commit a lot of time to make a difference– some shifts are as short as 45 minutes long! You can sign up for as many or as few shifts as you’d like. Even a couple of hours of your time can go a long way in helping us create an amazing experience for attendees.

Keep in mind that you need to be registered for the conference to sign up for a volunteer role.

One important way to get involved is to sign up as a Session Chair or Session Runner. This is an excellent opportunity to meet and interact with speakers while helping to ensure that sessions run smoothly. And who knows, you might just learn something new along the way! You can sign up for these roles directly on the Talks schedule.

Volunteer your time at PyCon US 2025 and you’ll be part of a fantastic community that's passionate about Python programming and help us make this year's conference a huge success. Sign up today for the shifts that call to you and join the fun!

Hatchery Program

First introduced in 2018, Hatchery program offers the pathways for PyCon US attendees to introduce new tracks, activities, summits, demos, etc., at the conference—activities that all share and fulfill the Python Software Foundation’s mission within the PyCon US schedule.

Since its introduction, this program has “hatched” several new tracks that are now staples of our conference, including PyCon US Charlas, Mentored Sprints, and the Maintainer’s Summit. This year, we’ve received eight very compelling proposals. After careful consideration, we have selected three returning programs and one new program, each of them unique and focused on different aspects of the Python community.

New Hatchery Program

Hometown Heroes - Saturday, May 17, 2025

The Hometown Heroes track at PyCon US 2025 highlights individuals and organizations doing interesting and innovative work with Python right here in our host city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Organized by leaders from the local Python community, the Hometown Heroes track features a curated selection of presentations, panel discussions, and lightning talks from Pittsburgh-based software engineers, data scientists, researchers, educators, and more.

Hometown Heroes strengthens the relationship between PyCon US and its host city and forges connections within the local community that will last long after the curtain closes on the conference.

Organized by: Patrick Harrison, Colin Dean, Nathan Brouwer, Doug Nicola, Madison Ebersole

Returning Hatchery Programs

FlaskCon - Friday, May 16, 2025

Join us in a mini conference dedicated to Flask, its community and ecosystem, as well as related web technologies. Meet maintainers and community members, learn about how to get involved, and join us during the sprint days to contribute. Submit your talk proposal today!

Organized by: David Lord, Adam Englander, David Carmichael, Phil Jones, Pamela Fox

Community Organizers Summit - Saturday, May 17, 2025

Do you organize a Conference, Meetup, User Group, Hackathon, or other community event in your area? Are you trying to start a group but don't know where to start? Whether you have 30 years experience or are looking to create a new event, this summit is for you.

Join us for a summit of Presentations, Breakout Sessions, Open Spaces and more about organizing community events.

Organized by: Mason Egger, Heather White (eevelweezel)

Humble Data Workshop - Sunday, May 18, 2024

Are you eager to embark on a tech career but unsure where to start? Are you curious about data science? Taking the first steps in this area is hard, but you don’t have to do it alone. Join our workshop for complete beginners and get started in Python data science - even if you’ve never written a single line of code!

We invite those from underrepresented groups to join us for a fun, supportive workshop that will give you the confidence to get started in this exciting area. You can expect plenty of exercises, as well as inspiring talks from those who were once in your shoes. You’ll cover the basics of programming in Python, as well as useful libraries and tools such as Jupyter notebooks, pandas, and Matplotlib.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll work through a series of beginner-friendly materials at your own pace. You’ll work within small groups, each with an assigned mentor, who will be there to help you with any questions or whenever you get stuck. All you’ll need to bring is a laptop that can connect to the internet and a willingness to learn!

Humble Data aims to increase inclusivity and provide a safe community for Python and Data Science. We organise free workshops for people who are outside of the mainstream in the data science and tech industry. We encourage past participants to become mentors and even organise their own workshop one day. We are building a community where people can help and learn from each other. Remember to stay humble! See more on our website: https://humbledata.org/

Organized by: Cheuk Ting Ho, Jodie Burchell, Laís Carvalho

Register Now

Registration for PyCon US is now open, and all of the Hatchery programs are included as part of your PyCon US registration at no additional cost. Space is limited, so be sure to plan your Hatchery Program attendance in advance.

Congratulations to all the accepted program organizers! Thank you for bringing forward your fresh ideas to PyCon US. We look forward to seeing you in Pittsburgh.

Call for Volunteers: PyCon US Code of Conduct Team

2025-03-25T15:18:00.000-04:00

Help us make PyCon US welcoming, fun, and safe!

We are looking for volunteers to join the Code of Conduct Team for PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, PA. The Code of Conduct Team supports the PyCon US community by taking reports should anyone violate the PyCon US Code of Conduct and, when appropriate, participating in deciding how PyCon US should respond.

Code of Conduct Team shifts are 3-4 hours long. We are looking for volunteers for the tutorials (May 14 - 15), the main conference (May 16 - 18), and the first 2 days of sprints (May 19 - 20), and ask that you be prepared to do a minimum of two shifts.

As a member of the Code of Conduct Team, you will:

Take reports of incidents that occur at PyCon US (there’s a handy form for this)
Keep track of your email and/or Slack while on shift
Participate in discussions about how to respond to incidents (as needed)

As a member of the Code of Conduct Team, you will not:

Have to make any tough decisions on your own
Have to approach anyone you are uncomfortable approaching
Have to address incidents that involve your friends

In addition to the minimum two shifts, you will need to attend a 90-minute training session virtually before PyCon US or in-person on May 14th or 16th.

We are looking for people with a wide range of experiences in and outside of the Python community! We are especially interested in talking with you if you:

Have experience with code of conduct response, moderation, etc
Speak multiple languages (especially Spanish)
Are from outside the United States

If you are interested in joining us on the Code of Conduct Team, either fill out this form or email molly.deblanc@pyfound.org.

Refund Policy for International Attendees

2025-03-19T15:51:00.003-04:00

International travel to the United States has become more complex for many in our community. PyCon US welcomes all community members to Pittsburgh and we are committed to running a safe and friendly event for everyone who is joining us for PyCon US in Pittsburgh.

Each nation has its own relationship with the United States, so please contact your country’s State Department, Travel Ministry or Department of Foreign Affairs for travel information specific to traveling from your country to the US. Ultimately, each person must make their own decision based on their personal risk assessment and the travel conditions.

If it feels feasible and safe for you to attend PyCon US this year, then we’d love to see you! It is more important than ever to connect with our fellow community members. In light of current conditions, PyCon US would like to highlight the support we provide for international travelers.

Refund Policy Details

If your PyCon US trip is canceled due to not being able to obtain a visa or you are denied entry at the US border with a valid visa; or if you have COVID, influenza, measles, or other communicable diseases, PyCon US will grant you a refund of your ticket and waive the cancellation fee.

Additionally, if you have a valid visa to travel to the United States and are denied entry upon arrival to the United States, please see the details below and note that you will need to provide documentation that you arrived in the United States and were denied entry.

Airfare:

Please request a refund of your airfare from your airline carrier or booking agent.
PyCon US will reimburse you the portion of the PyCon US airfare the airline will not refund.

Hotel:

If you used the PyCon US registration system to book a hotel room, the PyCon US registration team will personally work with the hotel to make sure you do not have to pay a cancellation fee.

Please note the above policy only applies to attendees not traveling to or from OFAC sanctioned countries.

In the event that you have a refund request or questions, please contact our registration team.

PyCon US hopes that the expanded refund and travel support policy offers attendees the ability to plan more confidently and will continue to make PyCon US 2025 an option for as many Pythonistas from around the world as possible.

PyCon US 2025 - Travel Grants Transparency Blog Post

2025-03-18T08:15:00.001-04:00

Providing travel grants to community members for PyCon US and witnessing both their growth and contributions to the event is one of the most fulfilling aspects of our work at the PSF, and every year, we only wish we could award more!

PyCon US 2025 received 952 travel grant applications from 87 countries totaling almost $1.7M. We dislike using the phrase “record-breaking” every year, but it’s true! Again, the number and amount requested have broken our 2024 record. The total dollar amount requested was more than six times the available budget. For 2025, the total PyCon US revenue is budgeted at $2.3M and supports conference costs of $2.5M, including $266K in travel grant funds. The Travel Grant Team offered 272 travel grants and 33 ticket-only grants, amounting to $384K, or about 23%, of travel grant requests received.

The PSF is committed to financial transparency, and in line with that commitment, we are happy to share more about how our PyCon US 2025 travel grant process works.

Travel Grant Funding

PyCon US travel grants are funded from various sources including PyCon US ticket sales and sponsorships, the Python Core Devs, the Packaging Work Group, the PSF, and generous contributions from PyLadies. In addition, we already have a direct sponsorship for 2025 travel grants from OpenEDG Python Institute!

Inflation in event costs, continued economic risk from the tech sector, and global market swings mean that many corporations are funding less travel for both speakers and attendees. PyCon US has received increased travel grant requests over the past two years. We are working with a limited budget and can only accommodate a portion of those who applied.

Travel Grant Award Philosophy

PyCon US Travel Grants are designed to further our non-profit mission of promoting, protecting, and advancing the Python programming language while supporting the growth of a diverse and global community of Python developers. Our goal is to create an event that mirrors this diversity, unites individuals who will gain valuable experiences and bring those benefits back to their communities, and delivers an engaging and impactful experience from the first tutorial to the final sprint.

To achieve these goals, we allocate part of our budget to fund our incredible lineup of speakers, and this year, to reduce costs, we limited travel grants to up to 2 speakers per talk. We prioritized factors such as global representation, welcoming first-time PyCon US attendees, supporting folks looking for new job opportunities, and inviting students, educators, and community organizers from around the world. Despite our best efforts, the bittersweet reality remains that we couldn't award grants to everyone who applied.

Although we are a US-based conference and non-profit organization, PyCon US strives to bring folks from around the world. In fact, about 75% of travel grant funds were offered to non-US Pythonistas covering 58 countries!

Percentage of Travel Grants Awarded by Continent

The PyCon US Travel Grant Team takes a personalized approach to the awards process, and each application is reviewed multiple times (by humans!). The team continues to be impressed with the true community spirit of the Python community! All travel grant awards for PyCon US 2024 were used by awardees.

Award Outcome

As of the acceptance deadline of March 11th, 2025, 226 full travel and 28 ticket-only grants were accepted by grantees. 9 full travel and 2 ticket-only grants were declined, and a handful of grants expired.

We do not have additional funds to award because the Travel Grant Team intentionally over-awards grants; for reference, our budget was $266K, and we offered $384K. Based on several years of historical travel grant offers, acceptance, and use trends, the team has found that many folks aren’t able to use the travel grant due to changes in personal circumstances, illness, changes in work or education commitments, as well as issues securing a US visa.

You can find more information on the PyCon US Travel Grants FAQ. If you have feedback or questions about our process, please contact us at pycon-aid@python.org.

Sincerely,

The PyCon US 2025 Travel Grant Team

p.s. As a final note, we’d love to continue expanding our travel grant program in the future. If you’d like to help do that, a great way is to encourage your employer or other companies you are connected with to sponsor the PSF or to let them know you notice and appreciate it if they are already a sponsor.

Support PyLadies: Donate to the PyLadies Auction at PyCon US 2025!

2025-03-06T11:53:00.004-05:00

PyCon US 2025 is quickly approaching and we can’t wait to see all of you there! We're reaching out to our community to help support one of our favorite events: the PyLadies Auction. Our wonderful community is bursting with creative, artsy, and generous folks and we invite you to donate items to this year’s Auction. If you’d like to support PyLadies by making a donation, please fill out the PyLadies Charity Auction donation form. To learn more about the event and what to donate, read on!

What to Donate

Items that are personalized or have a story tend to attract bidders– DIYers, artists, crafters, and collectors, this is your time to shine! It's also worth thinking about what will show up well on stage. We have a magnifying camera, but smaller and less colorful items like jewelry and watches might be harder for bidders to see than a big piece of art or an adorable, bright-colored snake stuffy!

Please note that we cannot accept donations of guns, alcohol, cars, real estate, or houses. We may decline other gifts that are inappropriate or impractical at the PSF’s discretion (for example, sorry, no real pythons!). Although we would love to accept signed books, we will also not be accepting those this year.

If you’ve got an item to contribute that you’d like to share in a sneak preview, feel free to post a photo and tag us on the social media platform of your choice!

Donation details

To donate an item, please fill out the PyLadies Charity Auction donation form. This form asks for required information about the person or organization donating, item specifics, and logistics. You will need to indicate if you will ship the item in advance or deliver it in person. You will receive shipping information once you complete the form. The deadline for donations is May 15th, 2025 (that’s the Thursday before the event!).

About the PyLadies Charity Auction

The thirteenth PyLadies Charity Auction will be held in person during PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s an evening of fun and refreshments while supporting the PyLadies community!

The Entry cover charge of $45.00 includes dinner and a drink ticket, while the Supporter cover charge of $90.00 includes dinner, a drink ticket, and a $45.00 contribution to PyLadies. We have increased the cover charge due to rising food and venue costs. Everyone who attends will also have access to the cash bar. To save your place at the Auction, add the PyLadies Auction to your PyCon US registration via your dashboard. Last year we sold out, so if you’d like to go, reserve your ticket soon!

Launching the PyCon US 2025 Schedule!

2025-02-28T14:02:00.001-05:00

We’re excited to announce the full schedule for PyCon US 2025!

For another year in a row, PyCon US received over 900 proposal submissions with this year’s final count totalling 938 proposals! We are so excited to have so many people in our community share their work and ideas with us. Thank you to everyone who submitted their proposals!

With these many proposals received, we could easily have enough speakers to fill the program for multiple Python conferences! Our volunteer Program Committee has worked hard to select only 15% of the many strong proposals to create an excellent conference program that covers a wide range of subjects for attendees to enjoy. We’re looking forward to meeting all the presenters and learning from them at PyCon US 2025.

Meet Our Keynote Speakers

We are thrilled to announce our Keynote speakers. Please welcome Lynn Root, the Marshall Project; Geoff Hing and Tom Meagher, Cory Doctorow, and Dr. Kari L. Jordan who will be sharing their insights and perspectives on our main conference days, May 16 - May 18, 2025.

Head to the Keynotes page to learn more about the amazing names that make up this year’s Keynote lineup!

Full Schedule Released

Check our updated schedule page to learn more. The schedule has been updated with the dates and timing of our Tutorials, Talk Tracks, Charlas Track, and Sponsor Presentations.

Posters will be featured and displayed during all open hours of the Expo Hall on May 16 - May 17, 2025, with presentations by the authors taking place alongside the Job Fair on Sunday, May 18, 2025. All together, there will be a wide array of topics that we hope experienced and newer Python users will find engaging.

Many thanks again to all of those who submitted proposals this year! The schedule would not be the same without all your hard work.

Note that if you’ve attended PyCon US before, you might notice that our scheduling looks slightly different this year. We encourage you to check the schedule ahead of the conference.

Thank You Committees and Reviewers!

Thank you to all of our Program Committee members and proposal reviewers who volunteered their time and hard work! Going through close to one thousand proposals is no easy task. Without their efforts in helping to launch the PyCon US Call for Proposals, the PyCon US program would not have been possible.

Tutorial Committee: Sarah Kuchinsky, Merilys Huhn, Mridul Seth, Mfon Eti-mfon
Program Committee: Philippe Gagnon
Charlas Committee: Denny Perez, Cristián Maureira-Fredes
Poster Committee: Kristen McIntyre

In addition, we want to send a huge thank you to the numerous volunteers who reviewed each of the submissions and worked long hours to make sure PyCon US has a great line-up.

Tutorial, Summit & Event Registration

Registration is now open for Tutorials, select Summits & Events, and the PyLadies Auction.

Tutorials - Wednesday, May 14, and Thursday, May 15, 2025 - $150.00 per session. There are 2 time slots per day
Education Summit - Thursday, May 15, 2025 - no entry fee
PyLadies Auction - Saturday evening, May 17, 2025 - $45.00 Entry or $90.00 Supporter rates are offered
Mentored Sprints for Diverse Beginners - Saturday, May 17, 2025 - no entry fee
PyLadies Luncheon - May 18, 2025 - no entry fee

Please note that this year, there is no registration for Sponsor Presentations, the Maintainers Summit, or Hatchery Programs. These programs are open until all spots are filled so make sure you check out each event’s schedule to know when to show up and grab your spot!

Be sure to register for the conference here if you have not already done so. Keep in mind that there are limited spaces available for each of the events listed above, with Tutorials and PyLadies Auction being sold out way ahead of the conference each year. So if you’re planning to attend and participate in any of these, be sure to register early.

NOTE: Please be sure to hit “Check out and Pay” when registering for Tutorials. If you do not complete your invoice and a Tutorial sells out, it will be removed from your cart and you will no longer be able to reserve a spot for that session. Please contact pycon-reg@python.org with any questions.

Conference T-shirts

PyCon US 2025 conference t-shirts and Charlas t-shirts are now available! You can order t-shirts when you are registering for the conference or add them to an already existing registration using the link on your dashboard. The deadline to order t-shirts is April 14, 2025.

A special shoutout and thank you to Georgi K for the hard work and creativity that went into this year’s t-shirt designs!

The Hatchery Program at PyCon US 2025

2025-01-29T14:30:00.002-05:00

We are pleased to announce the return of the Hatchery program in PyCon US 2025.

What is the Hatchery program?

This program offers the pathways for PyCon US attendees to introduce new tracks, activities, summits, demos, etc., at PyCon US—activities that all share and fulfill the Python Software Foundation’s mission within the PyCon US schedule.

The program began as a trial led by Ee Durbin and Naomi Ceder in 2018, resulting in the creation of several new tracks that are now staples of PyCon US, for example: PyCon US Charlas, Mentored Sprints, and Maintainer’s Summit.

With the Hatchery program, we want to provide the opportunity for you, the Python community members, to take active participation and lead new activities and events at PyCon US. We want to provide a transparent process for this, and we also want to ensure that every attendee, whether they are new to the community, or have been at the conference for the 10th time, have the equal opportunity to propose ideas for PyCon US.

What belongs in a Hatchery program

PyCon US offers a wide range of events for the attendees to engage with the community during the conference. In addition to the talks, Charlas, keynotes, tutorials, posters, and lightning talks, at PyCon US we further support the Python community by hosting summits (e.g. The Python Language Summit, Education Summit), Sprints, and Open Spaces: one-hour meet ups in dedicated rooms throughout the conference. PyCon US also hosts other events like the PyLadies Luncheon, Members Lunch, and PyLadies Auction. We also offer community booths and Startup Row alongside the Sponsor Booths in the expo hall.

Despite all of the above, as conference organizers we still receive great, creative suggestions and ideas from the community for more things that they’d like to see at PyCon US. This is where the Hatchery program comes in.

If you have an idea for new and different kinds of events, activities, summits, or tracks at PyCon US, or things that do not fit in any of the existing talks, charlas, tutorials, and posters tracks, please propose that as a Hatchery.

A few examples of topics that have been accepted for the program (not a complete list, creativity is expressly encouraged):

Maintainers' Summit
The Art of Python
Foreign language talk track (see the PyCon US Charlas, the first track created in the hatchery, and now a part of PyCon US).
Scientific data summit
Mentored Sprints

See the full guidelines and criteria for proposals.

Available spaces and time for the Hatchery Program

We have allocated one room at the conference venue for Hatchery, and this room is available during the main conference days: May 16th-18th. The room will be configured in rounds with a capacity for 70 people and a projector.

Each Hatchery session will have a time allotment of a half day (between 2-4 hours) so that two Hatchery Programs can take place each day. Your program does not have to fill the whole time allotment, however, If you do not believe that your program can take place within the time please tell us why when submitting your application.

You might also want to consider running all or part of your activity as an Open Space (no approval or advance application required) instead of a Hatchery event.

One-off events are still encouraged!

We still want to focus on the experimental aspect of the hatchery program. There is no obligation to continue running your program going forward if you no longer have the bandwidth for it.

Rolling admission

Proposal submissions for the Hatchery Program are open until April 17, 2025, or until all the spaces have been filled.

We will be reviewing your ideas and proposals as they come in, and we will do our best to support and accommodate your request. We aim to give you a decision within 2 weeks, depending on the nature of your proposal. (i.e. if your proposal requires a more complicated room set up, we may need extra time to figure out the feasibility for that).

Graduation Criteria

Due to limited spaces at PyCon US, accepted programs are not guaranteed a spot to return in the following years. We will evaluate the program based on the post-event report and attendee feedback.

Previously accepted Hatchery organizers are requested to re-submit their program to the CFP so that we have up to date information about this year's organizing team and in case there is any changes to your program.

How to submit your Hatchery proposal?

Please visit the PyCon US 2025 Hatchery page. Submissions are open through the PyCon US 2025 Hatchery CFP on Pretalx here. Please note that Pretalx accounts used for the main conference PyCon US 2025 CFP will not be carried over; all submitters will be required to create a new account for the PyCon US 2025 Hatchery CFP.

Thank you. If you have any questions about the Hatchery, please get in touch with us, pycon-hatchery@python.org. The PyCon US Hatchery Committee members are: Elaine Wong, Jon Banafato, Mariatta Wijaya, and Naomi Ceder.

Applications for Free Booth Space on Startup Row at PyCon US 2025 Are Now Open

2025-01-27T12:54:00.001-05:00

Calling all startup founders and aspiring entrepreneurs: did you know that PyCon US has been giving away free booth space to early-stage tech companies since 2011? Did you know that, since then, over 150 companies have gotten the opportunity to show off the cool stuff they’re building with Python? Would you have guessed that some of the most popular open source Python packages — Pandas, Plotly, and more — were developed by or spun out from companies that presented on Startup Row at PyCon US.

Good news: Startup Row applications are now open! But if you’re the action-oriented type who wants to skip all this reading and get straight to the point, here’s the direct link to the application. Applications close on March 14th, so don’t delay.

That’s right. As you might have guessed from the name, Startup Row is its own corner of the PyCon US expo hall offering free booth space to early-stage tech companies. The objective of this program is to give startups the best of what PyCon US has to offer:

Booth space on Startup Row in the Expo Hall on the evening of May 15th for the Opening Reception and on the main exhibit days May 16th and 17th, 2025.
Two conference passes (you’re welcome to stay for the post-conference sprints too); discounted passes for additional team members are available
Optional access to the PyCon US Job Fair on Sunday, May 18, 2025
Exclusive placement on the PyCon US website
Coverage on the PyCon US blog when we announce this year’s Startup Row batch
Eternal glory

The only catch? To discourage no-shows, PyCon US organizers require a fully refundable $400 deposit to secure your spot, and teams must cover their own transportation, lodging, and booth decorations (banners, swag, table coverings, etc). Startup Row organizers will work closely with your team to ensure logistics run smoothly. After the conference, PyCon US organizers issue refunds of those deposits to all companies that attended.

If your company is building something cool with Python, there’s likely no better place to share and connect with the Python software community than at PyCon US. Startup Row is where some companies first launch themselves to the public, where others have found their first customers and contributors, and where curious PyCon US attendees have found exciting, impactful job opportunities.

To help you figure out if your company is a good fit for Startup Row, we’ve put together a quick set of FAQs.

Does my startup qualify?

The goal of Startup Row is to give seed and early-stage companies access to the Python community. Here are the qualification criteria:

Somewhat obviously: Python is used somewhere in your tech or business stack, the more of it the better!
Your startup is roughly 2.5 years or less at the time of applying. (If you had a major pivot or took awhile to get a product in the market, measure from there.)
You have 25 or fewer folks on the team, including founders, employees, and contractors.
You or your company will fund travel and accommodation to PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (There’s a helpful page on the PyCon US website with venue and hotel information.)
You haven’t already presented on Startup Row or sponsored a previous PyCon US. (If you applied before but weren’t accepted, or if you’re a Startup Row alumni founder working on something new, please do apply again!)

There is a little bit of wiggle room. If your startup is more of a fuzzy rather than an exact match for these criteria, still consider applying.

How do I apply?

Assuming you’ve already created a user account on the PyCon US website, applying for Startup Row is easy.

Make sure you’re logged in on the PyCon US website.
Go to the Startup Row application page and submit your application by March 14th. (Note: It might be helpful to draft your answers in a separate document; the application form does not auto-save.)
Wait to hear back! Our goal is to notify folks about their application decision toward the end of March.

Again, the application deadline is March 14, 2025 at 11:59 PM Eastern. Applications submitted after that deadline may not be considered.

Can I learn more about Startup Row?

Absolutely. Check out the Startup Row page for more details and testimonials from prior Startup Row participants. (There’s a link to the application there, too!)

What kinds of companies get a spot on Startup Row?

All sorts of companies have been featured on Startup Row over the years: software and hardware, consumer and enterprise, both open-source and entirely proprietary codebases, and representing a dizzying array of industries ranging from “usual suspects” like developer tooling and machine learning frameworks to foundation model developers and even more offbeat offerings like an e-ink portable typewriter with cloud sync or an online wedding-planning platform.

To get a better idea of what a few of our recent batches looked like, check out announcements on the PyCon US blog from 2024, 2023, and 2022.

Members of the Startup Row selection committee are encouraged to consider the following factors when doing their scoring:

The commercial opportunity of the venture. Can it be big?
The suitability of the company’s product or service to address the problem they’re aiming to solve
Credibility and capability of the founding team.
The “X factor”: How much could this venture benefit from being on Startup Row? Will being on Startup Row significantly “move the needle” for the company or the Python community?

Startup Row’s success hinges on the quality of its applicant pool, and over the past 5 years especially, Startup Row batches have been particularly strong.

Out of the 40 companies featured on SR since 2020, two of them are now valued at over $1 billion
This same population of companies, in the time after appearing on Startup Row, have raised at least $950M in venture capital funding (at time of writing)
Out of those 40 companies, 4 have been acquired by the likes of Databricks, Snowflake, Confluent, and Greylog.
Besides US-based companies, Startup Row participants have flown in from Mexico, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, among other places

Although many Startup Row companies are self-funded or barely out of an accelerator program like Y Combinator, many go on to raise capital from leading venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital, NEA, General Catalyst, True Ventures, and many, many others.

We’re excited to keep up this momentum in 2025.

Who do I contact with questions about Startup Row?

First off, if you have questions about PyCon US in general, you can send an email to the PyCon US organizing team at pycon-reg@python.org. We’re always happy to help.

For specific Startup Row-related questions, reach out to co-chair Jason D. Rowley via email at jdr [at] omg [dot] lol, or find some time in his calendar at calendly [dot] com [slash] jdr.

Wait, what's that deadline again?

Again, the application deadline is March 14, 2025 at 11:59PM Eastern.

Good luck! We look forward to reviewing your application!

PyCon US 2025 Registration Launch!

2024-12-06T12:43:00.000-05:00

The news you’ve been waiting for is finally here - registration for PyCon US 2025 is officially open!

PyCon US will take place May 14 - May 22, 2025, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. The core of the conference, May 16 - May 18, 2025, packs in three days worth of our community’s best talks, amazing keynote speakers, and our famed lightning talks to close out each day— but it is much more than that!

It’s gathering together with the members of our community, to learn from, share with, and connect. It’s joining a conversation in the hallway with the creators of open source projects. It’s taking yourself from beginner to intermediate; intermediate to advanced; or advanced to cutting edge. For some, it’s getting started with Python for the first time. We have loads of exciting plans in the works for this year, and we can’t wait to spend this special time with you!

How to Register

Once you have created an account on the PyCon US 2025 conference website, you can register via the registration button on your dashboard. Head over to our Registration Information page to get all the details on how to register.

Early Bird Registration Rates

PyCon US is providing discounted rates for Corporate, Student, and Individual tickets for the first 500 tickets sold during the first 30 days that registration is open. Don’t wait, register now to receive your discount!

Early Bird Corporate - $750
Early Bird Individual - $400
Early Bird Student - $100

Regular rates will go into effect once early bird tickets sell out or after January 6, 2025.

Regular Registration Rates

Corporate - $800 USD
Individual - $450 USD
Student - $125 USD

Health & Safety Guidelines and Code of Conduct

To support a safe environment and enjoyable experience for all, PyCon US attendees are also required as always to comply with our Code of Conduct, which you can review here.

T-shirts & PyLadies Auction

Conference T-shirts and tickets to the PyLades Auction are not yet available but will be released in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out on the PyCon US 2025 website to be one of the first to know and grab yours while supplies last!

Tutorials

Tutorials will be presented on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, and Thursday, May 15, 2025. We are accepting proposals for tutorials through December 19, 2024. Find more information on how to submit your proposal via our website and our CfP platform. Once our program committee has scheduled the selected tutorials, you will be able to add them to your conference registration.

Watch for tutorial registration launch in February 2025. Opt-in for PyCon US News and follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, and the PSF LinkedIn for the announcement.

Sponsorship and Sponsor Presentations

Sponsorship for PyCon US 2025 is open now, and you can see the details of our sponsorship options and apply directly on our Sponsorship Application page. We’re grateful to all of our sponsors, who make PyCon US possible.

For those interested in a paid speaking opportunity, Sponsor Presentations will take place Thursday, May 15, 2025. To reserve a slot for an hour-long Sponsor Presentation on the topic of your choice, please apply for Partner Level Sponsorship or higher and select the check mark next to “Sponsor Presentation.” Slots are limited and typically sell out, so please submit your request soon. Contact sponsors@python.org with any questions.

Hotels

PyCon US has contracted special rates with nearby hotels. When you complete your registration for PyCon US 2025, you will be able to book a hotel reservation on your dashboard through our official housing bureau, Orchid Events. Booking through Orchid helps support PyCon US and it is the only way to get the conference rates, so book now while supplies last!

More information can be found on the Hotels page.

Note: Beware of Housing Pirates! PyCon US or Orchid Events will not be calling delegates to sell rooms. If you are contacted by an agency other than Orchid Events offering to make your hotel reservations, we urge you to not use their services. We cannot protect you against them if you do book a reservation.

Travel Grants - Applications now Open!

Check out the Travel Grant page to learn more about the support we provide for travel, hotel, and registration to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to attend PyCon US. We actively encourage people to apply for travel grants and welcome applications from any attendees who otherwise would not be able to attend. Our goal is to support diversity and provide equity to attendees and attract Python developers at all experience levels from around the world. For questions about the application process, visit the Travel Grant FAQ page.

Cancellation Fees

Registration cancellations must be submitted in writing to pycon-reg@python.org and received by May 1, 2025, in order to receive a refund minus the $50 cancellation fee ($25 for students; waived for cancellation due to health reasons). No refunds will be granted for cancellations received after May 1, 2025, unless you must cancel for any health-related reasons (see more details in the Health & Safety Guidelines). In lieu of cancellation, you have the option to transfer your registration to another person. For details about transferring your registration, visit the registration page.

Call for Proposals - Deadline December 19th!

There’s still time to submit your proposal to present a Talk, Charla, Poster, or Tutorial at PyCon US! More information on our website and on our CfP platform.