PyCon 2013 launched on July 9, 2012 with 21 sponsors pledging support, leading the charge that drew over 150 organizations to pitch in to the biggest and best Python conference yet. We’re planning a similar go-live date for the 2014 site, and we’re building up our cadre of supporters for the April 9-17 conference taking place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Your organization’s support enables PyCon to do the awesome things. 2013 introduced a number of new events suggested by the community, so we’d like to keep doing those things and more. For example, the inaugural Young Coders tutorial was such a hit that there are already plans around the world for user groups to replicate it, and we’re looking forward to doing a PyCon 2014 rendition. Programs like Financial Aid, which saw its budget increased and then quickly doubled to reach $100,000 USD, are greatly enhanced by the giving of sponsors.

Along with benefiting the community, sponsorship of PyCon brings many benefits to its supporters. We hear it year after year that there is no better place to hire Python developers than at PyCon. We offer sponsors a place on our site to promote available positions, and we run a job fair on-site that has been a huge success. The Expo Hall is a great place to market your latest projects and to network with 2,000 eager Python developers. The value is unparalleled in the conference scene, especially after considering our flexibility to work with each and every organization. We even offer a 50% discount to organizations under 25 people. See https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/whysponsor/ for more thoughts.

While we’re still finalizing the sponsorship prospectus, it will be very similar to the one we used in 2013 at https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/prospectus/. We’ll share the details as soon as we complete them, and any questions can be forwarded to our Sponsorship Chair, Jesse Noller.

For 2014, PyCon will have a maximum capacity of 2,000 attendees. We’ve sold out the last two conferences and we’re expecting a third, so mark your calendars for April 9-17, 2014. Other dates to remember are our Call for Proposals in July, and we’re looking forward to opening registration in September. We’re planning for the conference schedule to be laid out in December, just in time for the holidays.

If you don’t have a passport, don’t forget that entering Canada requires one. US residents should see http://travel.state.gov/passport/ for details.

First, on Wednesday May 22nd at 7:00pm, there will be a workshop on editing OpenStreetMap. This workshop will be held at Caravan Coop, located at 5334 rue de Gaspé. For more information and to register to the event, please visit http://www.eventbrite.ca/event/6553739411

Second, on Sunday June 2nd at 1:00pm, we invite you to an onsite mapping experience. The goal of this “mapping party” is to ensure the quality of the map in the neighbourhood of the Palais des congrès de Montréal. For more information and to register to the event: http://www.eventbrite.ca/event/6554826663

Why map the neighbourhood of the Palais des congrès?

You most certainly know that Montreal will be the host of the next PyCon in 2014, and that the Montreal Python’s team plays a central role in the event organization. About 2500 people are expected at the Palais des congrès in April 2014, and we would like to welcome them with due honor. To that effect, we wish to provide attendees an in-depth map of the surroundings of the Palais, to inform them of the various restaurants and shops to visit.

On a different matter, but still regarding PyCon 2014, we have begun an Insider’s Guide for the attendees: https://github.com/PyCon/2014/wiki/Insider’s-guide. We would like to have your feedback. If you know good restaurants or fun activities to do in Montreal, please write us at pycon-montreal@googlegroups.com.

So, what do you think? Ready for the adventure?

It will be an amazing opportunity for the Canadian Python community to get together and to prepare itself for PyCon in Montréal in 2014.

We’ll see you in Toronto this summer!

PyCon Canada 2013 August 9-13 at Chestnut Conference, Downtown Toronto

If you want to propose a talk, click here:

“http://2013.pycon.ca/en/speak/”http://2013.pycon.ca/en/speak/

• Debian 7 “Wheezy” has been released
• Debian Québec is born
• Montréal-Python is going to celebrate this!

Ever dreamed of a fully functional and performant Python development workstation? Wanted to become a hacker so you attend Montréal-Python workshop but find yourself spending your time configuring your computer?
That’s history!

Come to the Debian release party this Saturday, May 11th at UQAM, starting at 12:30.
You’ll treat yourself to the brand new Debian and we’ll set up a Python development environment together, 100% free open source software based, using Debian’s packages.

Official announcement of release party organized by Debian Québec (in French) :

• http://wiki.debian.org/DebianQuebec/ReleasePartyWheezy/Invitation
• http://agendadulibre.qc.ca/event/563/

The complete address is :
UQAM, Complexe des sciences Pierre-Dansereau, Cœur des Sciences (a.k.a “La Chaufferie”), 175, avenue du Président-Kennedy (COR-700)

• OpenStreetMap: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=coeur+des+sciences
• Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/cDnce

The Montréal-Python icing on the cake: package installation for…

• famous interactive interpreter IPython
• preferred text editor
• source versioning
• virtual environments
• scientific Python
• Python for web development (frameworks, database drivers)

Fresh air that will dilate your bronchi for sure!
Be there.

Presentation material here : http://nbviewer.ipython.org/5556234

The whole Montréal-Python team wishes to invite you to Montréal-Python 37: Universal Usufruct on Monday, the 13th of May, 2013 at UQÀM.

Here is the lineup:

• Two Special Head-to-head presentations:
  • Greg Ward with “Why You Should Use Mercurial Instead of Git”
  • Rory Geoghegan with “Why You Should Use Git Instead of Mercurial”
• Josef Perktold with “Introduction to statsmodels”statsmodels http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net/devel/ is now the main general purpose statistics and econometrics package in Python.
• Michaël Ricart with “Domogik, un logiciel de domotique”
• Mathieu Martin with “Cloudflare: World-class security and performance tools for your web app”Cloudflare is a SaaS tool that offers CDN, WAF (web application firewall), downtime mitigation and more, to help make your web app more awesome. Their free tier is great for blogs and personal projects (do you have a CDN for your blog?). The paid plans are powerful and flexible enough to be a great asset for a lot of companies with a presence on the web. I will summarize what Cloudflare can do for you, how to use it (with live demos) and discuss a few caveats.
• Luis de Bethencourt with “from GStreamer import Multimedia.Unlimited_Potential”Will show by example how to use GStreamer in Python. Starting with a very easy way to write an mp3 player, then will use that as a base and by slowly adding changes have more in depth playback control, music streaming, music mixing, then to video, video filtering, and even simple video editing if time allows it. All with self-contained Python examples, 100 lines of code in each step and thorough explanation of what at each line from a bird view.

Along with our beloved regular features: Module of the Month: difflib, given by Mathieu Leduc-Hamel, and a very special double-sized Person of the Month: Fernando Pérez and John Hunter given by Éric Araujo..

Location: UQÀM Pavillon Sherbrooke, 200 Sherbrooke West, Room SH-2620.

http://www.uqam.ca/campus/pavillons/sh.htm http://goo.gl/maps/76IKD

(Please stay tuned to the blog for the room)

Schedule:

• 6:00pm — Doors open
• 6:30pm — Presentations start
• 7:30pm — Break
• 7:45pm — Second round of presentations
• 8:30pm — One free beer offered at Bénélux just across the street

We’d like to thank our sponsors for their continued support:

• UQÀM
• Bénélux
• Outbox
• Ludia
• Savoir-Faire Linux
• Caravan
• iWeb
• Shopify

See you on the 13th for a great evening!

Projects:

If you have any projects you would like to work on, please post them on the mailing list: montrealpython@googlegroups.com. If you don’t have any ideas, don’t worry: we have ideas of projects to work on too.

Suggestions:

• Our wonderful website still needs love.
• We will organize a coding dojo
• We will also have projects from http://newcoder.io to work on for people who are new to Python.

When:

Thursday the 25th of April 2013 from 7 pm to 9:30 pm

Where:

Caravan, 5334 de Gaspé, office #1204 (Montréal) http://goo.gl/maps/OAmyb

Where to sign up:

Please sign up on our Eventbright event.

We would like to thank for hosting our event!

Second of all, we would invite anyone who wishes to present at Montréal-Python to send a title for their talk, a two line description and the length, either 5, 20 or 45 minutes, to the Montréal-Python Team, and we will answer you as quickly as possible. Please submit soon!

Here is the lineup:

• Guillaume Pratte – La performance d’une API en temps réel avec Graphite
• Kamal Marhubi – Lording over your minions with salt

  Salt is a remote execution and configuration management tool written in Python. This talk will be an introduction to salt, focusing on the configuration management aspects. I’ll talk about using it with Vagrant as an alternative to Chef or Puppet. I’ll also demo using it to build up and control a machine on EC2 (network allowing).

• Dan Callahan – The End of Passwords: Authentication with Mozilla Persona

  Mozilla wants to kill the password and save the open web. This talk explores the “how” and “why” of Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system. Expect live coding, demos, and a deep dive into the architecture behind Persona.

Our regular features, Module of the Month by Rory Geoghegan and Person of the Month by Éric Araujo, will also be part of the program.

Location:

UQÀM Pavillon Sherbrooke, room SH-2620, 200 Sherbrook West. http://www.uqam.ca/campus/pavillons/sh.htm http://goo.gl/maps/76IKD

Schedule:

• 6:00pm — Doors open
• 6:30pm — Presentations start
• 7:30pm — Break
• 7:45pm — Second round of presentations
• 8:30pm — One free beer offered at the Bénélux just across the street

We’d like to thank our sponsors for their continued support:

• UQÀM http://uqam.ca/
• Bénélux http://www.brasseriebenelux.com/
• Outbox http://www.outboxtechnology.com/
• Ludia http://www.ludia.com/
• Savoir-Faire Linux http://www.savoirfairelinux.com/
• Caravan http://caravan.coop/
• iWeb http://iweb.com/

See you on the 8th for a great evening!

Details on https://openhatch.org/wiki/Montreal_Python_Workshop

Date & Location: March 29 & 30 at Notman House, Montréal

Organizers: Montréal-Python, with Julia Evans & Marianne Corvellec teaching

Audience: People who identify as women or their friends, i.e., you can come if you are a woman or are invited by a woman

Goal:

• Have participants come out of the workshop
• knowing some of the basics of Python
• with a clear idea of how to continue learning Programming
• feeling like the Montréal Python community is supportive

Please register here