Last weekend (April 27-29) we run PyData London 2018, the fifth edition of our annual conference (we also have a monthly meet-up, with currently 7,200+ members).
The event is entirely run by volunteers, with the purpose of bringing the community together and raising money for NumFOCUS, the charity that provides financial support to open-source scientific computing projects.
This year I had the pleasure of chairing the conference together with Cecilia and Florian. The organisation started in September last year when the chairing committee was formed.
These are some of the highlights of the weekend:
- A new and bigger venue, the Tower Hotel in front of the iconic Tower Bridge, we had about 330 delegates for the tutorials on Friday and 550 for the talks on Saturday and Sunday
- A great programme with 4 keynotes, 12 tutorials, 36 talks and two session of lightning talks. With more than 200 proposals, the review committee did an amazing job (thanks to Linda for leading the effort)
- A Beginners Bootcamp run the day before the conference by Conrad of PythonAnywhere
- Community-driven hackathons: an Algorithmic Art Hackathon (led by Tariq and our friends at the Algorithmic Art Meet-up), a pandas sprint (led by Marc and the Python Sprints Meet-up), and a Politics-themed hackathon (led by John and Frank of PyData Bristol)
- An Algorithmic Art Expo: our friends from the Algorithmic Art Meet-up brought in some cool toys showcasing their work
- Diversity Round Table, organised by Gina Helfrich
- Childcare: for the first time we’ve been able to offer an on-site creche, supporting parents who otherwise wouldn’t be able to enjoy the conference
- Book signing with Steve Holden (Python in a Nutshell), Ian Ozsvald (High Performance Python) and Holden Karau (High Performance Spark); thanks to O’Reilly we had 60 paperback books as gifts to our attendees
- Our Social Event with the now classic Pub Quiz organised by James Powell
For a flavour of what the event was like, you can check out the buzz on Twitter and our shared photo album.
Thanks to all the people who contributed to yet another great PyData event!
Marco Bonzanini 