RMOTR at PyCon US 2019 ♥️
PyCon US is one of the, if not the, most important Python events of the year. A great number of Python community members/Python enthusiasts meet and share an entire week of talks, tutorials and coding sprints. 🙌
The conference location changes every two years, and this time it took place in Cleveland for the second time in a row. The RMOTR team had the chance to assist, not only as attendees/guests but also as exhibitors, and we want to share it with you. 🎉
Day 1: Registration and tutorials
We were pleasantly surprised by the way Cleveland greeted the Python community into this event. Signs, coloured buildings and even official social media reactions gave us a warm welcome to this great city.
PyCon was hosted in the Huntington Convention Center, which is crazy huge and convenient for such a big event. Organizers estimated around 3,500 attendees in this edition of the conference.
The first two days of PyCon were about tutorials. Most of them (probably all) were paid. Tickets cost around $150/seat and each room held up to 50 people. We helped Chalmer Lowe as mentors in his great Scikit-Learn tutorial about “Wrapping your head around Machine Learning”. Check it out if you are looking for a good intro to Machine Learning.
Day 2: Education Summit
Tutorials continued the second day, with a good variety of tools and applications.
We participated in the Education Summit meeting where many educational projects and investigations were presented. This was one of our favourite parts of PyCon, because it combined our two greatest passions: Python + Education.
The Convention Center continued to fill with hundreds of people, waiting for the big Opening Reception and keynotes that took place next day, on Friday (Day 3).
Day 3: RMOTR’s booth at the Startup Row
Friday was a very intense and exhausting day for us. Around 7:30am we started setting up our booth in the Start Row area of the Exhibit Hall. We were honored to be located next to major companies, such MongoDB, RedHat, Amzon AWS and others.
Soon after, hundreds of people started roaming around the hallway. We met lots of nice people that showed interest in our programs and the whole education/mentoring market in general.
We also organized a small raffle to give away free Python books. Part of our goal in PyCon was to communicate and ease access to Python and related tools. With the aim of fostering such tools, we selected the most relevant and well-known books on the matter and gave them away as raffle prizes.
Here are the winners 👇
Day 4: Jupyter tutorial and Expo Hall
We’ve learnt from our Data Science classes that Jupyter Notebooks is a key technology for any data analyst. However, many students struggle while learning how to use them.
To tackle this issue, we took the chance and organized a Jupyter tutorial in the format of an open space during PyCon. Open spaces are open rooms that people can reserve to organize any sort of talk, tutorial, meeting or event related to any Python topic. We thought it was a good place to teach people what Jupyter is, how they can use Notebooks for their daily jobs and also mention the https://notebooks.ai/ project that RMOTR has been contributing to during the last few months.
The rest of the day we mainly walked around the Exhibit Hall and talked to colleges and partners. We visited the Django Girls and PyLadies booths, met with Kenneth Reitz and some other influential people of the community.
Day 5: RMOTR’s booth in the Job Fair
On Sunday RMOTR had a booth in the Job Fair. We opened search for teacher and mentors, as well as Pythonists lovers of education and willing to join our team.
It was great to see how many people love what we do, and love education in general. Meeting such people validates our main goal of simplifying the access to Python technologies to any person around the world, and motivates us to keep pushing in the same direction and with the same passion.
Sunday also had the big closing talk, where organizers did a quick recap of the whole PyCon event and also presented the location for the two upcoming PyCon conferences in 2020 and 2021. New locations is… Pittsburgh!! 👏
Conclusion
Personally speaking, this was my first PyCon US. I was astonished by the conference magnitude, the number of people that attended, the accommodation at the Convention Center and the prettiness of Cleveland as a city. I hope that 2019 will be my first PyCon, but not my last one! 😜
