PyCon India 2017: A fresher’s take

2017 had been a busy year for me and the months of October-November were no exceptions. Here’s my experience of this year’s PyCon India and all the fun that I had volunteering, learning and attending this awesome event.

PyCon India, the premier conference in India on using and developing the Python programming language is conducted annually by the Python developer community. It attracts the best Python programmers from across the country and abroad. It took place on 2nd – 5th November 2017, at Shaheed Sukhdev College Of Business Studies, Rohini, New Delhi.

I had the opportunity of attending and volunteering for this magnificent event and experience everything that it had to offer. PyCon India had workshops and dev sprints in its first two days, while the conference and the hackathon in the other two. I volunteered both online and offline by contributing to the website and the blog on the free and open-source code sharing platform Github and on the venue with the volunteer team.

I helped out by redesigning various sections on the official Pycon India conference website, bug fixing where needed and writing content for the PyCon Blog regarding updates about the conference. It was truly a great learning experience being new to GitHub and contributing to open-source, networking with students, scientists, and enthusiasts at the conference. Getting unparalleled motivation to work even harder by seeing other people build software and making the world a better place. I also helped on registration and venue management, also looked over some social media outreach on the conference days.

There were many workshops on a range of topics related to Python and the dev-sprints which help people improve their skillsets and network. Dev-sprints are both for beginners and skilled developers who like to contribute back to open source and just love writing code. Its the feeling of a community, that you feel when you sit with like-minded people and code your issues away.

The conference featured 3 keynote address whom all I interacted personally. Their stories and works were an inspiration for me to follow in their footsteps. The keynote address on How to be a mentor ? was life-changing. The enthusiasm and energy never seem to die down as there were about 34 talks and 16 workshops in a period of 4 days being given by 54 speakers.

I tried to attend most of them, but time got the best of me. Still, the conference ended on a high note with the volunteers receiving a good feedback from everybody in attendance. The panel discussion on women in open-source gave a new perspective.

The conference is a complete volunteer-driven initiative makes it even more special. As people help, volunteer and contribute because of their love and not keeping any personal gains in mind.

The hackathon was a 24-hour challenge by Hypertrack to integrate their location tracking API into an Android App having many prizes to be won. Community spaces, an event held along with the conference in which various communities presented their ideas and urged people to join the community if they were interested.

Speakers came all over the world to give talks and show their love for Python. I am really looking forward to attending more such conferences in the near future.

What more can I say? The food was awesome with near perfect management for it, the venue as you can see was as grand as ever, the people so helpful. Here are some pictures of the days at the conference.

Looking forward towards the next PyCon India 2018. This is Vipul Gupta signing off, live in the mix, guys.