PSF Proffers Payment to Port to Python 3

As news of Python 3 porting becomes a more frequent occurrence and Python 3.3 development takes strides towards becoming the version everyone wants, the PSF has their own way of helping: money. With a grant program in place, the PSF is awarding funds to projects that plan an effort to port their work to Python 3.

As we've previously written about, R. David Murray's work to port the email package was funded by a PSF grant. Jean-Paul Calderone took advantage of a grant to port PyOpenSSL. Most recently, Chris McDonough used grant funding to port WebOb to Python 3. The foundation has been able to help these projects make the move to Python 3 and hopes to help even more in the coming year.

As PSF Director Jesse Noller states on http://www.getpython3.com, "The Python Software Foundation is here for not just CPython, or python-core, or python the language. It is here for Python -- the community, its efforts, its developers, designers and people." These grants are being made available for the betterment of the Python community, and funding can be used in any number of ways to get the job done. For some self-employed developers, funding may mean that porting a project could become more than a side-project. For projects with multiple developers, funding could mean a series of team sprints to complete the work. This could even be used in conjunction with funding from the PSF Sprint committee.

If you're involved in a project which could benefit from funding to complete a Python 3 port, Jesse Noller has recently written on the topic and offers his services to assist with grant applications. From templates to reviews, he is willing to step up and help represent projects before the PSF board for approval.

For more information on the PSF's grants program, see http://www.python.org/psf/grants/.

First annual PyCon China a hit in Shanghai

The first annual PyCon China recently wrapped up an excellent event in Shanghai, with the December 3 and 4 conference serving over 450 attendees and just under 500 viewers of their live webcast. The new conference drew so much interest that over 100 people were put on a waiting list to get in.

The conference schedule included 25 topics with 13 of them being 45+ minute presentations. After a keynote speech by Sting Chen titled "Python Enriches the World", the conference went on to cover Tornado, the Xunlei download manager, OpenStack, and others. They also included a lightning talk series with twelve 10-15 minute sessions. As with many other PyCons around the world, video of each talk is available online.

After the conference, attendees reported about the event here and here. Tech news sites InfoQ and ITEye also posted coverage of the conference.

The PSF applauds the PyCon China organizers and their sponsors for making a great conference, and we hope to hear about PyCon China in 2012!

Boston Python Workshop PSF Grant

(This is a guest post by Jessica McKellar, a Boston Python User Group organizer and co-organizer of the Boston Python Workshop for women and their friends.)

I am thrilled to report that the Python Software Foundation's Outreach and Education Committee awarded a $3300 grant to the Boston Python Workshop to support and grow the workshop over the next 8 months. We are excited to continue our successes at bringing more women into the Boston Python community and to take the show on the road!

The Boston Python Workshop

The Boston Python Workshop is a free, volunteer-driven introduction to the Python programming language for women and their friends who have no or limited programming experience. We run the workshop every 2 months for between 30 and 50 women, and it has run 4 times so far. We strive to:

• Show new programmers and the Boston Python community examples of smart, confident, capable programmers of all backgrounds.
• Bring new, awesome, diverse people into the local Python community through diversity and outreach events.
• Inspire others to run their own introductory workshops and outreach events, and to get more user groups thinking about diversity and outreach.

An important part of our philosophy is a commitment to running the workshop as part of the local user group.

This Python Software Foundation grant will help us run the next three workshops in Boston and bootstrap workshops in 3 new cities. As a result of this grant:

• Over 200 women will learn Python fundamentals and join their local programming communities as empowered, confident beginners who are excited to continue learning.
• 3 new Python user groups will learn how to run high-quality diversity outreach events.
• Volunteers at the workshops will get experience with public speaking and teaching technical content -- a great stepping stone to leading future PyCon talks and tutorials!
• The Python community as a whole will continue to benefit from our shared, online, Creative Commons-licensed workshop material as we expand and refine it.

Results

The workshop has resulted in dramatic, lasting diversity improvements for the Boston Python User Group. Many workshop alums are now fixtures at our hack nights and lecture-style events, and the group has gone from 0-3% women at its events to consistently over 15%. Additionally, group membership has doubled since the workshops started, to over 1350 people, making it the second-largest Python user group in the US.

If you do the math you'll see that we aren't just bringing women into the user group through the workshop. The secret is that running beginner-friendly outreach events for women focuses the group on being more welcoming to everyone. Our monthly hack nights grew out of the workshop and are one example of bringing beginner-friendly ideas from the workshop to the group as a whole. The Boston Python user group is now a more diverse and vibrant community full of beginners, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and people switching to a career in software/IT, and we're very happy that the workshop has played a significant role in this.

Beyond Boston

We want to help other user groups see the same kinds of successes that we've had here in Boston, and a large part of this PSF grant is dedicated to bootstrapping workshops in other cities. If you want to bring the workshop to your city, read the full grant proposal and get in touch!

All of our material is online and shared through a permissive Creative Commons license. Check out an example curriculum and photos from the workshops. Our goal of stress-free experiences for attendees makes our material a good base for other intro events; for example, we believe our cross-platform installation instructions for Python are the best we've seen.

We look forward to a larger, more diverse Python community, and we want to thank the Python Software Foundation for supporting our efforts. The Outreach and Education Committee, PSF Grants program, and PSF Sprints program are all interested in new grant requests to push the Python world forward. Make something awesome happen in your city!

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).

PSF Granted PyTexas 2011 US$750

The Python Software Foundation gave the recent PyTexas conference US$750 in funds.

About the Conference

PyTexas 2011 was the fourth annual free Python programming conference in Texas. It took place Saturday, September 10 - Sunday, September 2011 at the Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. They have a blog that has some photos from the conference on it. All of the talks at PyTexas were recorded and are starting to appear on NextDayVideo and Miro. If you would like to help plan next year's conference, you can join the PyTexas mailing list.

They estimate about 170 people attended PyTexas 2011, up from 94 at PyTexas 2010, and 22 at PyTexas 2009.

PyCon 2012 Proposals Due 12 Oct.

PyCon 2012, the tenth annual Python conference, is accepting proposals for talks, tutorials, and posters through 12 Oct 2011. Please submit proposals at the PyCon speaker page, and then encourage someone else to prepare one, too.

Call for Proposals

Last year set records for attendance and talk submissions, and the conference organizers are looking forward to an even bigger and better conference this year. Anyone, whether hobbyist or professional programmer, can propose a talk, tutorial, or poster. The call for proposals includes recommendations for creating a good submission.

About PyCon 2012

PyCon 2012 will be held in Santa Clara, California, from March 7 - 15. The conference itself runs March 9 - 11 with two days of tutorials preceding the conference, and four days of sprints following.

Arc Riley Receives PSF Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the third quarter of 2011 to Arc Riley for dedicated long-term support through organizing the PSF's Google Summer of Code activities, and by managing DNS for PSF servers.

Please join us in recognizing Arc's hard work and dedication.

Nick Coghlan Receives PSF Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the third quarter of 2011 to Nick Coghlan for outstanding core development work and technical leadership, particularly through the Python Mentors project.

Please join us in showing Nick that his contributions to the community are appreciated.

Tarek Ziadé Receives PSF Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the second quarter of 2011 to Tarek Ziadé for his hard work leading the effort to revamp Python's packaging tools.

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Tarek's contributions to the community.

Laura Creighton Receives PSF Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the second quarter of 2011 to Laura Creighton in recognition of her continuous efforts in making community events happen, and especially for her work with the PyPy team.

Please join us in thanking Laura for her contributions to the community.

Benjamin Peterson Receives PSF Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the first quarter of 2011 to Benjamin Peterson for his work as Release Manager and the numerous contributions to the Python Core.
The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Benjamin's contributions to the community.

Van Lindberg Receives PSF Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the first quarter of 2011 to Van Lindberg for his leadership work on PyCon 2010 and 2011, as well as the pro bono legal work done for the PSF over the years.
The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Van's contributions to the community.

PSF Provides Grant to Port WebOb

The Python Software Foundation has provided Chris McDonough with US$3000 to port the WebOb project to Python 3. The port is scheduled to run between Oct. 1-31, with the results to be received on or before Nov. 30.

Chris has actually begun work a little early and completed porting a significant amount of the code already. There is still testing and documentation work to do, however. You can follow his progress through the project's Github repository.

About WebOb

WebOb provides wrappers around the WSGI request environment, and an object to help create WSGI responses. The objects map much of the specified behavior of HTTP, including header parsing and accessors for other standard parts of the environment. The current version runs on Python 2.6 and up.

Current Schedule

Over the next few weeks, Chris will be updating the documentation and testing WebOb against the "in the wild" things that depend on it. He encourages those who use WebOb to check out his source from Github and try it with Python 3 and submit bugs if they find any. You can also use the #pyramid channel on IRC to report success stories or ask questions of Chris (AKA: mcdonc).

About Chris McDonough

Chris is a developer from Fredericksburg, VA, USA who has been using Python since 1999, mostly to create web applications. Chris is the mastermind behind the Pyramid web framework, the Supervisor process manager, and the Repoze set of middleware and applications. Chris' ohloh profile provides a good overview of his open source contributions.

PSF Grants PyCon PL 2011

The Python Software Foundation approved a US$750 grant for the PyCon PL conference in Poland. This is the fourth edition of the Polish version of PyCon. It aims to integrate developers, designers and managers interested in using Python. Such meeting makes a great opportunity to meet new people and exchange experiences and ideas.

The PyCon PL 2011 was held in Przedwiośnie Hotel situated in Mąchocice Kapitulne near Kielce city from September 22th to September 25th.

PSF Grants PyCon Ireland US$1500

PSF Grants PyCon Ireland US$1500

The Python Software Foundation recently approved a grant of US$1,500 to PyCon Ireland.

Date and Location

PyCon Ireland 2011 will be taking place in the beautiful city of Dublin from October 8th through the 9th.

About PyCon Ireland

This is the second Python conference held in Dublin, Ireland. The event brings together the Python community for a weekend of talks, tutorials, workshops and sprints.

PyCon Ireland is organised by the Python Ireland Committee, a bunch of enthusiastic Pythonistas based in Dublin, a community effort for the community.

Whether you're a lad or a lass, now is a good time to book your trip to verdant Ireland.

PSF Grants PyArgentina US$1500

The Python Software Foundation approved a US$1,500 grant for the PyArgentina Conference. PyArgentina is the premier Python conference in the city of Junin, Argentina which is in the Buenos Aires Province. The conference is hosted and run by PyAr, the Python Users Group of Argentina. You can go to the conference website now to register, view the current schedule, and learn who is coming and from where.

If you have ever wanted to go to South America, now you have a reason! Go register today!

PyCon DE 2011 Funding

The PSF Board of Directors has awarded a $1500 USD grant to sponsor PyCon DE 2011.

Date and Location

PyCon DE 2011 will be held from October 4th to 9th in Leipzig, Germany. The conference will be held at the Leipziger Kubus.

PyCon DE

PyCon DE 2011 is the first PyCon in the German-speaking countries. It consist of one day of 12 high-quality tutorials, three days of more than 60 talks, and two days of sprints. The topics reflect the wide usage of Python, including web development, science and engineering, testing, Python in business, databases, financial engineering, code quality and much more. The organizers are expecting between 250 and 300 attendees from the excited German-speaking Python community.

More Information

For more details, refer to the PyCon DE 2011 website.

July 2011 Members' Election Results

The Python Software Foundation selected ten new nominated members during the election held in July 2011.

New Nominated Members

Nominated members are individuals or entities who have demonstrated a commitment to the Python language and community. They are nominated and elected by existing members of the foundation.

Giovanni Bajo

Giovanni Bajo has contributed to the community as an organizer for the EuroPython and PyCon Italy conferences, and as a founding member of Python Italia. He also contributes to the PyQt and PyInstaller projects

Massimo DiPierro

Massimo DiPierro is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing and Digital Media of DePaul University and the Director of the Master of Science program in Computational Finance. He is also the manager and founder of MetaCryption LLC and Experts4solutions LLC. Massimo's open source contributions include web2py and fermiqcd.net.

Mike Driscoll

Mike Driscoll is a member of the PSF Communications team, where he is one of the most frequent posters on this blog. He also writes for the Python Insider and PyCon blogs. Mike is active in the Python community in Iowa and founded Pyowa, the local Python user group. He also helps on the PyCon organizer and program committees.

Alex Gaynor

Alex Gaynor has contributed to the PyCon program committee for the past two years. He also has delivered presentations at PyCon, DjangoCon, DjangoCon EU, and PyOhio.

Alex has commit rights for PyPy, Django, CPython, and Unladen Swallow. He has also contributed to dozens of other projects through github.

Asheesh Laroia

Asheesh Laroia is involved in OpenHatch a project to mentor new members of the open source community. He has helped to organize outreach events such as "A project-driven introduction to Python for women and their friends".

Jessica McKellar

Jessica McKellar is a maintainer for the Twisted and OpenHatch projects. She also works on outreach and education projects such as "A project-driven introduction to Python for women and their friends". Jessica also helps to organize Python user groups.

Tetsuya Morimoto

Tetsuya Morimoto is active in the Japanese Python community and is on the staff for PyCon JP. He has translated a significant portion of "Python Module of the Week" into Japanese, and works on the PSF Communication team to organize the translation process and working on the Japanese version of the Python Insider blog. Tetsuya uses Python extensively in his work, and contributes to the pyrtm, Pikzie, and ikazuchi projects.

Paulo Nuin

Paulo Nuin is a member of the PSF Communications team. He writes for the PSF blog and leads the Portuguese translation team for Python Insider. As part of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, Paulo has encouraged the use of Python and BioPython for daily lab and informatics work and organizes a "Python for Bioinformatics" workshop.

Audrey M. Roy

Audrey Roy has been instrumental in the creation and initial success of the PyLadies outreach group in Los Angeles and will be one of the keynote speakers at PyConAU 2011. She is a core developer for DjangoPackages and the associated Packaginator open source project.

Gavin M. Roy

Gavin Roy is the CTO of myYearbook.com, where he encourages the use of Python and contributes internally developed code to the open source community. He supports two local Python user groups, PhillyPUG in Philadelphia, and PUG-IP in Princeton, NJ. He was a speaker at PyCon 2011 in Atlanta and participated in the Program Committee. Gavin is also the primary maintainer of the pika module for interacting with RabbitMQ.

PSF Membership

The FAQ contains more information about membership in the Python Software Foundation.

Tell Us About Your User Group

The Python Software Foundation is conducting an international survey of Python User Group organizers to help us better serve the large and ever-expanding Python User Group community.

The survey contains questions on user group organization, events, demographics, and growth. There are some questions with numerical answers, and while your best guess is fine, you may find it helpful to gather some statistics on your user group membership before starting the survey (example statistics include the number of active members and the size and topics for recent user group events).

We expect this survey to take around 30 minutes to complete. We appreciate your time and honesty in answering these questions.

This survey was written by Jessica McKellar, organizer for the Boston Python Meetup, and Jesse Noller, PSF board member and PyCon chair.

User group organizers, please click here to begin the survey.

Free Tickets for PyNZ

The Python Software Foundation is once again sponsoring an international conference. This time is the Kiwi's PyCon 2011 to be held on August 27th and 28th at Te Whaea in Wellington, New Zealand.

As a sponsor, the PSF received several passes to the conference, and is offering them to foundation members or other members of the Python community. Preference will be given to students or other individuals with financial aid needs--especially those just getting into Python!

If you wish to take advantage of the tickets or know of someone local, a student, or someone else who would love to go but can not cover the admission, contact Jesse Noller (jnoller@python.org) or the PSF board (psf@python.org).

PyLadies gets a PSF Grant

The PSF has given a grant of US$1220 to the PyLadies for use at their women’s Python events. In addition, the Python Sprints project has announced a separate grant of US$300 to PyLadies to go toward organizing a Python sprint in Los Angeles.

PyLadies

PyLadies is a group of women who use and love the Python programming language. They organize workshops, meetups, and hackathons with a goal of increasing the number of women active in the Python community. They started in Los Angeles, California, but plan to expand with local chapters in other areas.

June 18: PyLadies/SoCal Python Interest Group Hackathon

The SoCal Python Interest Group and LA PyLadies are two of LA’s biggest Python user groups. They are teaming up for a day of sprinting Saturday June 18, 2011. Tickets are available through the eventbrite site.

Schedule:

• 2-7pm: Hack on your own projects
• 7-8pm: Dinner, drinks, and lightning talks
• 8pm-midnight: Python Ladies’ Night 4 at The Hollywood Canteen. Gentlemen of the Python community and friends not attending the hackathon are invited too. The more, the merrier!

This is no ordinary sprint: thanks to the pythonsprints.com grant, at least 10 mentors will be on hand to provide one-on-one help and tutoring throughout the event. Mentors will bring beginners up to speed and teach attendees a variety of Python-related skills, such as git, PyPI packaging, Sphinx docs, installing Python, and other open-source subjects. Think of this as free Python tutoring!

Free T-shirts for Open Source Work

Participants in the hackathon who release their projects as open source (or contribute to an existing open source project) will receive limited-edition PyLadies/PyLadies Supporter t-shirts, funded by the PSF.

Invite the Smart Women in Your Life

The hackathon is open to participants of all skill levels. Invite a smart lady or two of any age to attend the event with you. Even if they are absolute beginners, the mentors will help them start learning Python through online tutorials such as Learn Python The Hard Way, while you hack on other projects.

Contact

Contact audreyr at pyladies dot com with questions about PyLadies or the hackathon on June 18.

The Python Core Mentorship Program

Jesse Noller recently announced the formation of the Python Core Mentorship program. The idea behind the program is to help programmers, including students and developers from other projects, connect with experienced contributors who serve as mentors to ease them into Python Core development.

Contributors Wanted

The mentors will help people regardless of experience level by bringing them up to speed, answering questions, and giving guidance as needed in a non-confrontational and welcoming way. The contributors will receive guidance through the entire contribution process, including discussions on the related mailing lists, the bug tracker, Mercurial, code reviews, and much more.

Early Success

The program already has been successful, and the participants have actively committed a number of patches. There have also been several constructive discussions on the mailing list, helping guide people in the right direction for a variety of issues.

Code of Conduct

The program has a code of conduct explained on the website that aims to assuage concerns many new contributors have when interacting with experienced developers and mailing lists on contribution in general. Jesse and the other mentors hope that this program can act as a model for other projects long-term, not just benefiting Python-Core. They also want the program to help increase the overall diversity of the contributors to Python.

Signing Up

The program is run via the mailing list and has a clear, concise website devoted to it. If you would like to join to ask questions and begin on the path of core contribution, or even if you are an experienced developer (even experienced in Python-Core) looking to ask questions you're worried about asking on other lists, this is an excellent opportunity to jump in, ask and get your feet wet!

Summer pyGames Registration Open

The 2011 Summer pyGames event is now accepting registrations for student teams and volunteer coordinators. Registration will remain open until the competition begins on 11 June at 9:00 AM US Eastern time.

Summer pyGames

The Summer pyGames project is a six-week long competition during which high school students develop open-source educational software and games to be used and distributed to schools in South Carolina. Many of last year's competing teams presented at the FIRST Championship in St Louis. The program has also been showcased at the FIRST Robotics Palmetto Regional, POSSCON and INNOVENTURE Southeast.

Competition Details

The Summer pyGames will begin on June 11th at 9am with the announcement of this year's challenge. Students will have 6 weeks to create a new video game or modify previous games submitted to the competition. Scoring, theme, and rules will be announced at the season kickoff.

Teams may be made up of 1-7 students. The competition is geared for high school age students, high school graduates for 2011 are welcome to participate. Younger students may be admitted to the competition upon request. All teams must have an adult contact who can communicate directly with the Summer pyGames coordinators.

Resources will be available on the Summer pyGames website, and additional forums and chat channels will be made available to registered teams. Volunteers will be available to assist students with questions regarding their projects.

The projects will be graded by professional programmers, graphic artists, audio professionals, teachers, and students.

Sponsors

The Python Software Foundation has given the Summer pyGames organization a grant of US$1,000. After combining the grant with contributions from One Laptop Per Child, BAE Systems, Reaction Apps LLC, The Palmetto Project, BOSCH, and FIRST Robotics Team 342, the organizers plan to offer netbook computers as the grand prize for the competition this year.

Additional prizes and donations are still needed for the 2011 season. Donations can also be made via Paypal at the Summer pyGames website. Summer pyGames is a 100% volunteer run non-profit organization (501(c)3 under the Palmetto Project). All donations go directly toward prizes for the students.

PSF Needs Help Creating Logos

The Python Software Foundation board is looking for volunteers to create logos that can be made available to supporters and members of the PSF. Whether you are a professional graphics artist or you just enjoy creating artwork, the PSF would appreciate your contribution.

PSF Member Logos

The first set of logos is for members and sponsors of the Foundation. We need logos for the following support levels, listed in order from lowest to highest:

• Supporter of the Python Software Foundation
• Honorary Associate Member of the Python Software Foundation (HAMs)
• Sponsor Member of the Python Software Foundation
• Principal Sponsor of the Python Software Foundation