Python Events Calendars - Please submit your 2015 events

Introduction

As some of you may know, the PSF has a team of volunteers who are maintaining a set of central Python event calendars. We currently have two calendars in place:

• Python Events Calendar - meant for conferences and larger gatherings focusing on Python or a related technology (in whole or in part)

• Python User Group Calendar - meant for user group events and other smaller local events

The calendars are displayed on http://pycon.org/ and also on the new https://python.org/ website at https://www.python.org/events/python-events/ and https://www.python.org/events/python-user-group/.

You can subscribe to the calendars using iCal and RSS feeds and also embed the calendar widgets on your sites. We have also added a Twitter feed @PythonEvents to get immediate updates whenever a new event is added. Please see our wiki page for details:

   https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar

The calendars are open to the world-wide Python community, so you can have local user group events, as well as regional and international conference events added to the calendars.

News

Looking back on 2014, the calendars have proven to be a great tool for the Python community to connect, with more than 60 conferences and more than a hundred of user group events listed.

We would therefore like to encourage everyone to submit their 2015 events, so that the Python community can get a better overview over what's happening in Python land.

Adding Events

Please see the instructions at https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar#Available_Calendars for details on how to submit an event. We've made it really easy for you: just need to send an email to our team address using the email template we provide for this. Thanks.

PS: Please help spread the word about the calendars - we'll all benefit from knowing more about Python events happening around the world. Feel free to forward this posting to your local user groups and conference teams. Thanks.

Python Events Calendars - Please submit your 2014 events

Introduction

As some of you may know, the PSF has put together a team of volunteers who are maintaining a central Python events calendar. We currently have two calendars in place:

• Python Events Calendar - meant for conferences and larger gatherings focusing on Python or a related technology (in whole or in part)

• Python User Group Calendar - meant for user group events and other smaller local events

The calendars are displayed on http://pycon.org/ and in a smaller version in the sidebar of the http://python.org/ website.

You can subscribe to the calendars using iCal and RSS feeds and also embed the calendar widgets on your sites. Please see our wiki page for details:

   https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar

The calendars are open to the world-wide Python community, so you can have local user group events, as well as regional and international conference events added to the calendars.

News

Created in Oct 2012, the project has proven to be a success as you can see in the past events listed in the calendars.

We would like to encourage everyone to submit their 2014 events, so that the Python community can get a better overview over what's happening in Python land.

Adding Events

If you want to have entries added to those calendars, please write to [email protected] and include the following information:

• Name of the event
• Type of the event (conference, bar camp, user group, etc)
• Focus on Python and approximate size
• URL
• Location and country
• Date and time (if relevant)

For recurring events, please also include a description of the recurrence in a way that's compatible and supported by Google calendars.

PS: Please help spread the word about the calendars - we'll all benefit from knowing more about Python events happening around the world. Feel free to forward this posting to your local user groups and conference teams. Thanks.

2011 Frank Willison Memorial Award

The 2011 Frank Willison Memorial Award for Services to the Python Community has been awarded to Georg Brandl.

Georg has been a core contributor to CPython since 2005, contributing bug fixes for compiler internals and modules such as pdb. His most widely known contributions are to Python's documentation, through writing as well as by creating and maintaining the Sphinx tool chain for converting reStructuredText input files to more easily consumed formats such as HTML and PDF.

The video announcing Georg's award at OSCON 2011 is available on YouTube.

Making Documentation Easier

Earlier versions of Python used LaTeX and a Perl-based tool-chain to convert documentation into HTML and PDF. The reliance on Perl, and the relative difficulty of contributing to LaTeX-formatted source files, came up from time to time, but Georg was the one to finally take on the problem of building the necessary tools to manage the content in another format, and then converting all of the existing files.

Georg studied the docutils project and decided that it met most of the requirements, but needed a few custom markup features and a tool to convert individual input files to a unified output document. He wrote a tool called "doctools" for Python's documentation, which was eventually re-christened to Sphinx "because of the build tool for python.org, which was called Pyramid -- and unhappily without regard to the two existing projects called Sphinx."

Over time, the user base for Sphinx grew beyond CPython's documentation team, and Georg continues to work with other contributors to make it more generally useful for other projects. For example, some of the Python-centric features have been reorganized with the recent addition of the "domains" system, allowing Sphinx to be used for projects written in C, Java, and other languages just as easily as Python.

When I asked him about Sphinx, Georg said,

Today I'm very happy and very proud of what the community has done for documentation, also thanks to Sphinx: while Python itself always had excellent docs, now extensive and usable docs are basically a trademark of the whole Python community (just look at ReadTheDocs or packages.python.org).

About Georg

Georg is a PhD student of Physics. He works at the Munich research reactor slash neutron source on magnetism, researching novel materials for the computing of tomorrow. He uses Python to control experiments consisting of dozens of individual devices, and for teaching other scientists how to do so efficiently. When he is not working on Python-related projects, Georg likes to cycle and to cook.

About the Award

Since 2002, O'Reilly Media has presented the Frank Willison Award for Contributions to the Python Community to someone who has done outstanding work for the Python community. The award was established in memory of Frank Willison, a Python enthusiast and O'Reilly editor-in-chief, who died in July 2001. Previous recipients include Christian Tismer (2010), Martin von Löwis (2008), and Steve Holden (2007).

Frank Willison Memorial Award Recipient Selected

The 2010 Frank Willison Memorial Award for Services to the Python Community has been awarded to Christian Tismer.

Christian's contributions to the technology behind Python have focused on performance. For example, he is the founder of the Stackless Python project, a micro-threading system with the first implementation of generators and continuations. You can learn more about Stackless from the project's history page and this IBM developerWorks interview with Christian by David Mertz.

Christian also co-founded PyPy, an implementation of Python in Python, with Armin Rigo and Holger Krekel. Christian worked on PyPy full time for a period, using EU funding. Later, he worked on the JIT compiler Psyco with Raymond Hettinger to create Psyco V2. Most recently, he has been employed by CCP Games to work on combining Stackless and Psyco and updating them to support 64-bit systems.

In 1997, as one of his earliest contributions to the Python community, Christian launched the Starship Python website. That was a time when setting up your own server online required considerable effort, and hosting services were nascent and expensive. Starship filled an important gap as a free playground and hosting site for Python programmers. Members of the Python Software Activity (the forerunner of the PSF) were given preference when requesting accounts on the Starship, which had the effect of increasing membership in the PSA from 60 to 300

The Starship site was quite popular (by 2000 it had over 250 "crew members"), and moved several times, with several other volunteers helping with the system administration. Old versions of the site are available through the Internet Archive Way Back Machine. A revived version is running on one of Christian's servers now, but because hosting services are much easier to find today, he is looking for another concept to give it a renewed purpose.

When he's not working on Python, Christian enjoys watching movies, reading, and practicing playing piano. You can follow him on twitter @ctismer.

About the Award

Since 2002, O'Reilly Media has presented the Frank Willison Award for Contributions to the Python Community to someone who has done outstanding work for the Python community. The award was established in memory of Frank Willison, a Python enthusiast and O'Reilly editor-in-chief, who died in July 2001. Previous recipients include Martin von Löwis (2008) and Steve Holden (2007).

More details about the award, including a complete list of past recipients, are available on the Python web site at http://www.python.org/community/awards/frank-willison/

Updated: The award is for 2010, not 2009.

Third-Quarter Community Service Awards

Regular readers will know that the Foundation periodically honors those who have made significant contributions to its mission. Often these people aren't even members of the Foundation, but this doesn't exclude them. At its recent meeting the PSF Board voted Community Awards to two people, one of whom isn't currently a member.

Noufal Ibrahim Noufal was nominated for heading up the organizing team for the recent (and very successful) first PyCon India conference held on September 26 and 27 in Bangalore, attracting 450 delegates. Although Noufal was "first among equals" this award also recognizes the work of everyone who helped to make the inaugural conference so successful.

Barry Warsaw Many people are unaware of the huge volume of mail that is processed by software written in Python every hour of every day. This is because they don't know about the Mailman project, which was Barry's brainchild. Barry, a founder member of the Foundation, also acted as release manager for several recent Python releases.

The Foundation is grateful to Noufal and Barry for their efforts, each of which helps to promote Python's popularity and increase the Python community as a whole.

Second-Quarter Community Service Awards

The Foundation tries to recognize those whose assistance has been significant in its growth and development as well as its day-to-day operations. This quarter's Community Service Award winners are two particularly noteworthy examples.

Stephan Deibel Stephan was last year's outgoing chairman after four years in harness. This year Stephan has stepped down as a director, after helping to ensure that the Foundation's bylaws were reorganized. Stephan developed pythonology.com to promote Python, and his work as founder of Wingware and a developer of the Wing IDE has also had a significant impact.

Sean Reifschneider Sean has master-minded the PyCOn networking every time it's worked, and without the support of this always helpful and reliably competent tummy.com director our conferences simply would not have been the same.

Our thanks and congratulations go to both these recipients.