Hi Everyone, it is our pleasure to announce PyCon India 2018’s platinum sponsor Indeed.
Below is Indeed in their own Words.
"We help people get jobs"
At Indeed, we help people get jobs, but it's more than just our mission. It’s a promise that extends to all our employees, as well as job seekers and employers. As the world’s #1 job site, we take pride in helping people get to where they want to be in their careers. Whether you’re still in school or looking for your next opportunity to make an impact, Indeed is dedicated to helping people explore their passions while giving them the tools to succeed with Indeed and beyond.
Today, Indeed has more than 6,700+ employees across 27 offices in 14 countries around the globe. Our global team shares an energy and enthusiasm for creating the best experience for job seekers. We are obsessive about data, and constantly testing products and concepts that will improve the hiring process. Indeed believes strongly in creating and fostering an environment where employees not only have the resources they need to do their jobs, but also opportunities to continue to learn, grow, and be their best selves. Our projected growth offers numerous opportunities for ambitious employees to accelerate their career and develop into Indeed’s future leaders.
PyCon India Content Team
Hi Everyone, it is our pleasure to announce the PyCon India 2018’s gold sponsor LiveHealth - A Diagnostic Management Solution.
LiveHealth is a next generation cloud based and mobile ready MIS for Diagnostic Centre which helps them manage their Point of Sales, MIS, Medical Instruments, EMR & reduce human error.
LiveHealth seamlessly digitises records from diagnostic laboratories through its SaaS platform and makes them available on the cloud to patients and doctors. LiveHealth works with diagnostic centres to automate their operations - to manage patients, financial transactions, automation between medical instruments, and inventory. It gives them actionable insights to drive revenue and profitability and also simplifies information exchange with other healthcare providers. Patients can use the Livehealth app to understand reports, analyse past health data, and monitor their health using health trackers, both for themselves and their family, even on a remote basis. Doctors and patients benefit from creating a standardised medical record using Livehealth platform.
PyCon India Content Team
Hello folks, it is our pleasure to announce Go-Jek, as PyCon India 2018’s Platinum sponsor.
GO-JEK is a Super App. It’s one app for ordering food, commuting, digital payments, shopping, hyper-local delivery, getting a massage and two dozen services. It is Indonesia’s first and fastest growing unicorn building an on-demand empire.
In the last 36 months, the startup’s total order volumes have grown a devilish 6666x and diversified into 18 verticals. The company runs the equivalent of three Indian unicorns rolled into one. GO-FOOD alone does more orders in Indonesia than all Indian food tech startups combined. 3 years since the mobile app launched, GO-JEK does more rides than India’s largest taxi-sharing service.
A total of 1,000,000 drivers collectively cover an average distance of 16.5 million kilometers each day, making GO-JEK Indonesia’s de facto transportation partner. GO-JEK is a verb. GO-JEK is a way of life. It is quite simply the operating system of Indonesia. 200 engineers spread across Jakarta, Singapore and India make software decisions that impacts about 260 million people in the country.
GO-JEK Tech is the product development and training center of GO-JEK. The tech team comprises of developers, data scientists, designers and product managers who work on product innovation, mining data and crafting consumer experiences. The average age of the team is 29 and it runs one of the largest JRuby, Java and go clusters in Asia.
PyCon India Content Team
Hi Everyone, it is our pleasure to announce PyCon India 2018’s platinum sponsor D. E. Shaw India.
D. E. SHAW INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED ("DESIS") is a part of the D. E. Shaw group, a global investment and technology development firm founded in 1988 with more than $50 billion in investment capital as of April 1, 2018, and offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. The firm has earned an international reputation for successful investing based on innovation, careful risk management, and the quality and depth of their staff. The firm has a significant presence in the world's capital markets, investing in a wide range of companies and financial instruments in both developed and developing economies.
Their culture rewards analytical rigor and adherence to the highest possible ethical and legal standards, and they've cultivated a collegial work environment that promotes collaboration across disciplines, geographies, and investment strategies. The firm has been built in part by attempting to do what other companies might consider impossible, or never imagine at all. A single transformative idea that ultimately works for a new business, a new trading model, or an improved back office process is worth a dozen ideas that lead nowhere. They've learned that when an extraordinary team sets extraordinarily ambitious goals, astonishing breakthroughs can be expected.
For more information on D. E. Shaw India, please visit www.deshawindia.com.
PyCon India Content Team
Hi Everyone, it is our pleasure to announce the PyCon India 2018’s first gold sponsor Pramati Technologies.
Pramati has a two-decade track record of helping enterprises become agile by leveraging its world-class software products and platform engineering capabilities. Taking a whole brained approach to engineering, coupled with an entrepreneurial culture, Pramati constantly helps its customers challenge status quo. But Pramati is different because of its people. It’s values, passion, and way of doing things are the intangibles that makes the difference to customers and communities it serves. A unique technical culture and an innovative business model helps to deliver results for each customer’s unique reality. More than 100 global product companies and F500 enterprises work with Pramati. Pramati has offices in Mountain View-CA, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru-India and owns the brands WaveMaker, SpotCues, Reve Marketing, and Imaginea.
PyCon India Content Team
Hi Everyone, it is our pleasure to announce the PyCon India 2018’s first platinum sponsor AQR.
AQR is a global investment management firm dedicated to delivering results for our clients. At the nexus of economics, behavioral finance, data and technology, AQR’s evolution over two decades has been a continuous exploration of what drives markets and how it can be applied to client portfolios. Our culture of intellectual curiosity compels us to challenge the status quo, disrupt long-held beliefs and uncover new insights.
The firm is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, with offices in Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, and Sydney. As of March 31, 2018, AQR had approximately $225 billion in assets under management.
PyCon India Content Team
PyCon India 2018, the tenth edition of the premier conference in India on using and developing the Python programming language is conducted annually by the Python developer community has started ticket sales for the mega event that is scheduled from 5th - 9th October 2018.
The conference will be having a tight schedule of workshops, keynotes, talks, workshops, and dev-sprints strung together through 3 different tracks. Any person who has a conference ticket is eligible to attend the Devsprints. Although the Developer Sprints are free, we would be having registrations beforehand to manage the logistics. The ticket structure is as follows:-
Grab the Regular tickets now from Explara.
An Early bird ticket reserves your seat for the conference on 6th - 7th October, 2018, with a pricing of INR 1200 (GST applicable), the sale of early bird tickets ends on 30 June 2018 or completion of 300 tickets.
UPDATE: Early-bird tickets have been sold out.
A student ticket reserves your seat for the conference on 6th - 7th October, 2018, with a pricing of INR 1000 (GST applicable), the sale of student tickets ends on 30 September 2018 or completion of 350 tickets.
UPDATE: Student tickets have been sold out !!
A regular ticket reserves your seat for the conference on 6th - 7th October, 2018, with a pricing of INR 1700 (GST applicable), the sale of regular tickets begins on 1st July 2018.
A late bird ticket reserves your seat for the conference on 6th - 7th October, 2018, with a pricing of INR 2500 (GST applicable), the sale of late bird begins on 1st September 2018.
You can pay through Citrus or EBS gateway via Credit Card, Debit Card or Netbanking. You can also use Paytm for your registration by accepting the terms and conditions of Explara.
See you there at the Conference!!
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PyCon India Content Team
The call for proposals for PyCon India 2018 has been up and running for a few days now. We already have quite a few exciting proposals, and it is only going to get better. The programme of a conference is undoubtedly the greatest part of the conference. It is in the talks and workshops that the participants can learn the most and speakers can make the most impact. Ever since the inception of tech conferences led by FOSS communities, talk selections have been a continuously-evolving process. PyCon India is now in its tenth year. In this time we too have gone through many different cycles of revising our talk/workshop proposals and selection processes. We pride ourselves on being not only adaptable but also welcoming towards change and learning from other conferences and communities.
This year, we have decided to engage with the audience (both speakers and attendees) well in advance of the talk proposal-review-update cycle in a very proactive manner. One of the many ways in which we hope to accomplish this is the mentorship programme for first-time speakers (you can read more about it here). Another step in that direction is laying down some guidelines about what makes a good proposal. That is what this post is about. We cannot emphasize enough that these are only guidelines, not rules, derived mostly from the experiences of Pythonistas who are regular speakers at tech conferences.
Before we get into the details, let us take a look at some myths that many novices have, about speaking at a tech conference.
An advanced talk is a good talk : As you can see in the CFP, the intended target audience for any talk or workshop is categorized under "Beginner", "Intermediate", and "Advanced". These categories have no correlation with the quality of a talk. Talks are evaluated not only based on their inherent depth but also on the impact they might have on the audience - and as such, good talks for beginners are much more likely to have an impact than mediocre talks for experts. We also tend to confuse beginner talks with easy talks. As Einstein famously said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." So, generating even the simplest content takes a lot of effort and expertise. Conversely, anyone can come up with a complicated and arcane material, but it means nothing without clarity.
Showing code is important : You may, under the right conditions, show snippets and templates of code, but live coding is generally a bad idea. A piece of code not working exactly when people are looking at it is something that happens so frequently that it is not even funny anymore. Moreover, code, by its very nature is not meant to reside on slides. Making an audience read the code, or even walking them through code wastes quite a bit of time. Yes, talk is cheap and you ought to show people the code, but a presentation is not the right place for it. Show snippets or templates and leave links for the audience to follow.
Upvotes are critical in selection : Upvotes on a proposal are only marginally important. They are used mostly as tie-breakers. The organizers are acutely aware that the people who upvote or downvote talks may not even attend the conference. Some authors go to great lengths to get their talks upvoted. This is a misdirected effort at best. This is not to say that there is no merit in promoting your own talk among your network and asking people to upvote your proposals. However, do remember that a popularity of a talk works only if it is organic. It is not uncommon to have mediocre proposals become very popular just because they have plenty of buzzwords in them. Such proposals stick out like a sore thumb and may easily be subject to stricter scrutiny.
Workshop slots are easier to grab than talks : It is no mean feat to keep an audience of 30 to 50 people sufficiently engaged for the better part of three hours. Workshops are, by definition, highly interactive and therefore, writing Jupyter notebooks for a workshop requires more effort than writing slides for a talk. It is true that the content for a workshop may not be as original as that for a talk, but since the audience is expected to code alongside the speaker and solve exercises in the course of the workshop, the content is subject to more criticism.
Loud proposals are more visible : A loud proposal here means too much of any of the following: memes, jokes (no matter how funny and non-stereotypical they may be), buzzwords or catchphrases, exclamation marks, religious jingoism towards or against a piece of technology, etc. Authors can rest assured that every single proposal will be given its due attention and care. The loudness, instead of making your proposal more visible, only makes it more difficult for the reviewers to sift through the noise and get to the real message.
These points themselves might have given you a broad idea of how the programme committees normally look at talk or workshop proposals, but there are quite a few details to follow. While there is no formula for a good talk, broadly each talk is judged on three aspects relevance, clarity and the potential impact of the talk.
The importance of the relevance of a talk to the Python community need not be emphasized. A talk about the internals of the Linux kernel, while irresistible to many of us, would not be a good candidate for a PyCon. One of the best ways of keeping things relevant is knowing your audience well. Spend some time looking at the well-received talks in other conferences, and try to balance your content accordingly. This is not to say that the history of a conference dictates its future content. On the contrary, many great talks come from breaking the glass ceiling. Keep in mind that it is very easy for audiences (and communities in general) to forget what is relevant to them, especially in this age of information overload where we are distracted by and attracted to every new article that goes viral on Hacker News. Consider this example - an interesting point of debate from a panel discussion last year was that Python has too many web frameworks. Now, your takeaway from this could be that no one wants to hear yet-another-talk-about-yet-another-web-framework. However, a very good proposal might emerge from evaluating different web frameworks, weighing their pros and cons, pointing out what could be done to fix problems, and a healthy dose of practical advice drawn from your own experiences, which would eventually motivate the audience to seek better solutions. A good speaker is one who steers the audience in a more relevant direction, even under the overload of information, just like a recommendation system. Be the best recommendation system you can be.
The clarity metric is simply a corollary to the first point made in the list of myths earlier. Keep in mind that ideas and concepts are far more sustainable in a talk than solutions and tools. And to be able to crystallize these in your presentation, clarity is paramount. The ideas themselves may be simple or complex, but they should be clear. What Donald Knuth said about writing code for computers and writing code for humans applies in conferences too. Conferences are nothing without people, and people, especially programmers, thrive on clarity of thought. When drafting your proposal, make sure that you clearly highlight the focal points. The remaining is just details, which should follow naturally.
The final aspect of the talk - its impact - can be both positive and negative. One way of determining the potential positive impact of your talk is by asking yourself questions like:
The negative impact of a talk is somewhat difficult to determine, but a few things that must invariably be avoided are toxicity, race/gender stereotypes and shaming, directed toward anyone - even toward a hypothetical individual - for any reason.
Do not forget to ask for help and take full advantage of the mentorship programme. Be active on the CFP. Actively engaging with reviewers and the audience in the comments section of your proposal can work wonders for your proposal. Note that conference slots are a very expensive affairs for everyone involved - the organizers, the speakers, and the audience. Part of the responsibility for making a talk successful lies with the organizers too. Therefore, we are as invested in your proposal as you are yourself.
All the best!
PyCon India Content Team
The time has come! And we are thrilled to announce the opening of Call for Proposals. We encourage everyone to submit a proposal on any topic they would like to share with the community.
Here are some of the important dates to keep in mind:
The proposals can be of two type:
Here are some sections under which you can submit your talk or workshop:
Presenters, regardless of experience, sometimes want a little help. If you’d like any help in proposing, preparing, or presenting your talk, feel free to contact one of our mentors! A mentor is an experienced presenter who has volunteered to help other presenters.
If you are a first-time speaker, or looking for help to give a shape to the idea that you have in your mind, or just appreciate another set of eyes, our mentors are here to help. If you would like to be matched with a mentor to help with your proposal(s), request a mentor here.
Q: Who can propose a session ?
A: Anyone who works on python irrespective of the experience.
Q: I am first time speaker, can I propose session ?
A: Yes. We accept proposals from everyone.
Q: Will someone help me fine tune the content ?
A: Yes, we have a set of reviewers who will review the content and give feedback from time to time. You can also go through these resources to make your talk successful:
Q: Can I upload the content later ?
A: Yes, it is advised to start with rough draft and iterate rather than postponing to last minute.
Q: Can I propose multiple talks?
A: Yes, you can as long as they are different.
PyCon India Content Team
There has been few major changes in the organisation of PyCon India 2018 due to some unavoidable circumstances & to have a successful PyCon India.
The community has decided to shift the venue to Hyderabad & let the new entrants take lead this year.
The Python community in Hyderabad has been growing rapidly in the last few years. The city saw the first regional Python conference held recently in October 2017 organized by the Hyderabad Python Users Group(HydPy).
HydPy will be organising PyCon India on Oct 5th - Oct 9th instead of PyCon Hyderabad this year, the new dates were kept in alignment with the schedule earlier planned for its own regional conference.
We’re incorporating workgroup structure which will take responsibility of getting things done for various teams of PyCon India 2018.
Workgroup - Core group of people responsible for the execution of tasks mandated for a given team. The workgroup is also responsible for setting guidelines on the team's working.
Volunteers - The workgroup along with the volunteers execute the various tasks in the shape and form as agreed within the workgroup.
CFP
Registration
That's about it folks. Spread the word, talk about it, let your friends and family know, and let's make the 10th year conference the best one ever.
PyCon India Content Team
