PyCon Australia is the national conference for users of the Python programming language

Farewell from Brisbane

It's time to say goodbye from Brisbane!

Thank you to everyone who helped make this conference happen, the team, the volunteers, the sponsors, the speakers, the papers team, our Miniconf organisers, our partners and of course our attendees.

Almost all of our videos have been uploaded and linked to the schedule (a couple of videos need some manual handling).

We hope that you've enjoyed yourself, learnt a lot, and made new friends: welcome to the community. You don't have to wait till the next conference to have that feeling again, if there isn't a user group in your home town, consider starting your own.

Roll on PyCon Australia 2016 in Melbourne!

Teacher assistance program

As part of Carrie Anne Philbin’s keynote announcement last week, we also announced the availability of financial assistance grants for qualified primary and secondary teachers wishing to attend the Python in Education Miniconf on July 31st.

Teachers that are interested in attending the Python in Education Miniconf, but face financial barriers to doing so, are strongly encouraged to apply for financial assistance.

These grants are made possible by the generous contributions of the Python Software Foundation and Code Club Australia, and are designed to make it easier for teachers to justify attending an education focused event hosted by a software development conference. As such, teachers may apply not only for assistance with registration, travel, and accommodation costs as described for the regular financial assistance program, but also a contribution of up to $360 towards the costs of hiring a substitute teacher for the day.

Keynote Speaker: Carrie Anne Philbin

Following on from 2014's inspirational keynote advocating Python for Every Child in Australia as part of the rollout of the Australian Digital Curriculum, this year sees PyCon Australia playing host to its first ever Python in Education miniconf. As part of that event, we are thrilled to announce our second PyCon Australia 2015 keynote speaker: Carrie Anne Philbin, Education Pioneer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, chair of the UK's Computing at School's #include initiative, author of "Adventures in Raspberry Pi", and a member of the Board of Directors for the Python Software Foundation.

As an award winning secondary Computing & ICT teacher, Carrie Anne is a vocal advocate for the merits of Python as an educational tool, and brings to PyCon Australia a wealth of experience with the UK's search for a suitable text based programming language to serve as a follow on from self-contained visual programming environments like Scratch.

Keynote: Carina C. Zona

Last week, we revealed the programme schedule for Pycon Australia 2015 (2015.pycon-au.org/programme/about). This week, it's our pleasure to announce the first of our keynote speakers for 2015, Carina C. Zona, the founder of @CallbackWomen, an initiative that aims to reduce the well-documented gender disparity in speaker line-ups at programming conferences.

For some time now, through Schemas for the Real World Carina has been advocating for developers to address the ways that seemingly incidental details of how we structure our data models can have real and lasting impacts on the way people experience the software-mediated world around them.

This year, she is taking on a new challenge, and asking us to reflect seriously on the "Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm". In this era of large data sets, and rich analytical tools, we’re able to extract remarkably precise intuitions about individuals from seemingly innocuous information. But do we have a right to know details that users didn’t consent to share, even when they willingly shared the data that leads us to a particular conclusion?

What are our obligations to people who did not expect themselves to be so intimately known without sharing directly? How do we mitigate against unintended outcomes, as when a major social network inadvertently triggered painful memories for grieving families who’d recently experienced the death of their child or other loved ones?

As Carina puts it, "We design software for humans. Balancing human needs and business specs can be tough. It’s crucial that we learn how to build in systematic empathy."

Carina is a developer, community manager, advocate, certified sex educator, and whimsical gluten-free baker. She has been an organizer & instructor for many tech women’s organizations, including formerly serving on Railsbridge’s core team, and has given talks at more than 20 technical conferences among the Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PHP communities.

She spends a lot of time thinking about the unexpected cultural effects of our decisions as programmers.

We can't wait to hear Carina's keynote and we are sure you will enjoy it as well.

PyCon Australia has endeavoured to keep tickets as affordable as possible. We are able to do so, thanks to our Sponsors and Contributors. Registrations for PyCon Australia 2015 are now open, with prices starting at AU$50 for students, and tickets for the general public starting at AU$240. All prices include GST, and more information can be found at http://2015.pycon-au.org/register/prices