PyCon 2015: How It All Happened

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What a whirlwind the past couple weeks have been! We just got back from Montreal, Canada, which hosted PyCon 2015. The conference was awesome and the people just amazing! Let me tell you all about our experience (and announce the winners of our license raffle!).

Five of us from the PyCharm team attended this conference:

From left to right: Anna Morozova, Dmitry Trofimov, Ekaterina Tuzova, Andrey Vlasovskikh, Dmitry Filippov

Lots of things kept us busy during the conference days.

First, we attended the Python Language Summit where the latest trends of the Python language were discussed, such as the development of the new PEP 484 for type hinting. As you may already know, at PyCharm we’re constantly improving our static code analysis to provide you with better autocompletion, navigation, code inspections, refactorings and so forth. We have our own way to infer types and the annotations format to help us better understand your code. At the summit, we shared the challenges we’ve come across with static analysis, as well as some of our ideas for improving Python to be more friendly to static analysis tools like PyCharm. For a long while we at PyCharm had been actively working on co-creation of the new PEP 484, so it was great to talk face-to-face with core Python developers like Guido van Rossum, Jukka Lehtosalo, and Łukasz Langa. We took a pulse of the current developments and discussed further arrangements. At the end of the conference, Guido did a closing keynote about type hints and the future plans of the community. So, many exciting things to look forward to in this area!

Python Education Summit was another fantastic event. We learned a lot about how Python is being used to teach programming to kids, novice programmers and those for whom Python is a second language. Our lightning talk covering the brand-new PyCharm Educational Edition was received very well by the community. It helped us understand where we’re all heading and what the current needs are in this domain. We’re proud that PyCharm Educational Edition is evolving in the right direction. Talking to teachers and developers who are passionate about nurturing novice developers, we agreed to collaborate on getting Python-rich curriculums adopted in some local US schools, which is one of the major problems in the community right now.

The main PyCon 2015 conference was just awesome. We felt privileged to be a part of the community that is setting a standard every day in the world of Python programming. We had a booth in the expo hall, participated in development sprints and talked to hundreds of people, answering questions about our company, products, PyCharm itself and collecting valuable feedback:

Having kicked off PyCharm 4.5 EAP prior to the conference, we were able to show off some new stuff we’d worked on lately.

It was also a great chance to meet a lot of our happy users and friends as well as new people passionate about Python and new technologies. To all the conference attendees, we say “Thank you!”. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

We also held a PyCharm license raffle at the conference, with some cool swag up for grabs. Today we’re glad to give you the randomly chosen winners:

Natasha Scott

Steven D Gonzales

Thomas Kluyver

Jason Oliver

Luke Petschauer

Jeremy Ehrhardt

John Hagen

Congratulations! Your license notifications will be mailed out to you in the coming days.

If you didn’t win, you’ll still get a 15% discount for a new PyCharm personal license (if you ticked that option in the raffle application). We will get in touch with you soon with more information on how to redeem your personal discount.

With any problems, concerns or questions, ping us in comments below.

Develop with pleasure!

-PyCharm team