The PyCon US Blog

Last year was a busy one for PyCon tutorial and talk presenter Brandon Rhodes . His conference trips took him from Santa Clara to his home state of Ohio and up to Toronto, with talks at all of them. PyCon was particularly busy with two tutorials as well as two talks, going with single talks at PyOhio and PyCon Canada later in the year. He also made a busy 2011 for himself with three talks at PyOhio in 2011 after his PyCon tutorial, and gave great dictionary talk the year before at PyCon 2010 with the tutorial that started it all. Save for the tutorials, you can check out those presentations on pyvideo . He’s kicking 2013 off right with a redux of his well received “ Documenting Your Project in Sphinx ” tutorial, giving its fourth run on Thursday March 14 at 9 AM. Started at PyCon 2010 in Atlanta, the tutorial introduces the widely used Sphinx documentation framework, a staple of the Python community. Sphinx lets you focus on writing great documentation rather than inundating the write...

If you’re interested in learning to program, PyCon 2013 is the place to be. Each year the conference draws a wide range of individuals, including those who work on and teach the Python language. The tutorials are an especially great place to be as they’re an affordable way to gain the freshest knowledge from the best in the community. That’s where Jessica McKellar comes in. She’s a PSF board member, Twisted contributor, and organizer of the hugely successful Boston Python Workshop . The group hosts weekend training sessions in Boston, and they’ve been so popular that the methods are being applied around the country. The courses have gotten countless people up and running with Python, and that’s what her PyCon 2013 tutorial aims to do. At 9 AM on Wednesday March 13th, her “ A hands-on introduction to Python for beginning programmers ” gets attendees on their way to loving programming via the Python language. “Thanks to the ‘batteries included’ philosophy and rich package ecosystem, ...

Dave Beazley is no stranger to PyCon. He’s been attending them since the beginning, including a few last-minute road trips, the ones close to home in Chicago, and all the ones in between. Throughout the years he’s given several mind blowing talks, followed up some of those talks with equally mind blowing open spaces. He has presented before the entire audience on the plenary stage, and has brought his educational skills on the road for numerous tutorial sessions. For PyCon 2013 he’s running two great tutorials: Wednesday afternoon’s “ Learn Python Through Public Data Hacking ”, and Thursday afternoon’s “ Python 3 Metaprogramming .” The first aims to introduce Python to complete beginners, and the second aims to fill the advanced user’s tool belt with some of the shiny new features of Python 3. He’s also sponsoring this year’s conference, a first for Dabeaz, LLC . For the Beginner When it comes to the Learn Python tutorial, the emphasis really is on the first two words: Learn Python. “I...