PyCaribbean, Come for the Language, Stay for the Culture

PyCaribbean is more than Python, it is people, culture, and  spending  time together. Lead organizer Leonardo Jimenez wants attendees to feel like they are home when they are at PyCaribbean. “That sense of belonging and creating a bond helps the community members feel that they have a community that will support them and they can share their experience and knowledge with,” Jimenez explains.



After receiving an invite to speak at PyCaribbean 2017, which  I was unable to attend, I intentionally saved the date for 2018  . Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, hosted PyCaribbean this year.   Now, before we continue, let’s kick off this blog post the right way. Hit play, then continue reading.

Kicking off @PyCaribbean!!!! pic.twitter.com/6TCreSGCUv

— Jackie Kazil (@JackieKazil) February 17, 2018

Welcome to PyCaribbean 2018! Hosting some 280 Pythonistas from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Bermuda, all across the Dominican Republic, and more the conference boasted 50 more attendees than 2017 when it was held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. PyCaribbean is one of the earliest Python conferences started in Latin America and has since iinspired other Latin American countries to host their own Python conferences.



“The community is getting bigger and stronger [over] time,” said Jimenez “[Community members] show more interest to learn new things, get more practice and experience.”



The PyCaribbean organizers scheduled a wide  ariety of talks that were aimed at all levels  in both English and Spanish. One of this year’s speakers, Ordanis Sanchez, gave a talk on getting started in Python. As noted by attendee Rebecca Conley, this was Ordains’ first conference talk in English!

Just go out, find an issue, and make a PR! @PyCaribbean @OrdaniSanchez did a great job delivering an important message in his first talk in English! pic.twitter.com/ShMbFb2Pbq

— Rebecca Conley (@rlconley) February 18, 2018

Every conference I attend, I like to focus on a handful of take aways to share. One talk that I especially enjoyed was by Felipe Hoffa, a developer advocate from Google. Hoffa’s research concluded that not all text used in submitting an issue to a code repository will lead have the same closure rates. I learned that starting a ticket with the phrase, “I get the following...,” will have the highest probability of closure.

Most common ways to start an issue.... “I get the following” closes the most issues. pic.twitter.com/rlfjW5xb93

— Jackie Kazil (@JackieKazil) February 18, 2018

For me, the best part about this year has to be the founding of Pyladies Santo Domingo! Natacha De la Rosa and Samantha Valdez met at PyCaribbean, and they have a slick website and super CUTE logo!!!!! Swoon!!!

PyCaribbean is already making plans for next year. The possible locations sound amazing, but what doesn’t sound amazing in the Caribbean? The organizers are currently waiting on confirmation from the location before announcing. I assure you that when it is announced, it will not disappoint. Their hopes are to firstly have 400 attendees next year, secondly more participants from a variety of Caribbean countries, and lastly to create a board with different members of the Caribbean community. If you are interested, reach out to Jimenez <leonardo@pycaribbean.com.



Like with most conferences in the Python community, PyCaribbean is volunteer run. Thank you to the 40 volunteers who made PyCaribbean a success and who continue to foster community in their own cities in the Dominican Republic and beyond!

Thanks to the #PyCaribbean volunteers for a great conference! pic.twitter.com/bZoh8Opv4B

— Cristian Medina (@tryexceptpass) February 18, 2018

And that’s a wrap, or at least until next year’s PyCaribbean!

.@Pycon we need to up out entertainment / music game... between @pyconcz and @PyCaribbean, I feel like we are missing a core element. Today’s closing performance @PyCaribbean... pic.twitter.com/MabvnONI08

— Jackie Kazil (@JackieKazil) February 18, 2018

Read More

"I Found My Secret Calling As An Auctioneer": Community Service Award Recipient Jacqueline Kazil

When a pair of cufflinks in the shape of the Python logo sold for $900, Jacqueline Kazil thought, "We're on to something." The cufflinks were the most coveted item of the PyLadies Auction at PyCon in 2014. So the next year Kazil made a pair of Python socks—"2015 was the year of the sock, in fashion"—and a Python tie. The socks sold for $550. The tie sold for $600 to Jacob Kaplan-Moss, the Django contributor. He tweeted:

Yissss got the tie to go with my cuffs from last year. #pycon #pyladies

— jacobian (@jacobian) April 11, 2015

Kazil had begun volunteering with the auction in 2013, "at the last minute." By 2015 she stepped up to help collect items and auction them. Her fellow auction coordinator, Lynn Root, says, "She came in and just like, did shit. She was completely on the ball and accomplished what needed to be done."



The thousands of dollars PyLadies raises from the annual auction is spent on scholarships to send women to PyCon. "It lowers the barrier for women to attend," says Kazil. "Not everybody has a company supporting them. I remember when I was working for the government there wasn't that money allocated for sending folks to conferences."



Jackie Kazil is a 2016 recipient of the Python Software Foundation Community Service Award. The Foundation recognizes her contribution to the PyCon PyLadies Auction, and her diligent volunteer effort as chair of the PSF Grants Work Group.

Jackie Kazil

The Grants Work Group ensures that small grant applications are processed promptly in the periods between PSF Board meetings. "We make sure that grants keep flowing," Kazil says. The group also provides diverse perspectives of applications. "Our members are from around the world, and that ensures we have input about cultural factors, costs that we wouldn't think of if we didn't have this global view."



According to Lynn Root, "Jackie is a very genuine and true person who really acts on her passions." Acting on her passions has paid off in a prestigious career: She is president of the board of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation, wrote the Mesa agent-based modeling framework, is a Technical Fellow at Capital One, and recently co-authored with Katharine Jarmul the O'Reilly book Data Wrangling with Python. Kazil says, "Each feeds a different part of what I think is important. The book was created for data people or statisticians who want to learn how to code. The two authors and two editors and two target-audience reviewers were women which I think is kind of cool."



With her Mesa project, Kazil aims to consolidate agent-based modeling techniques in a reusable Python framework. "It's a type of modeling where you have so many independent variables in the system that it would take until the end of time to solve." Mesa also enables researchers to publish browser-based visualizations of their results. "It makes the models reproducible. For example economists and sociologists come from different schools of thought, but if they can 'pip install' something they can work with the same baseline model. Once that baseline is created and accepted, they have the same starting point."







In January Kazil joined Capital One as a member of the Technical Fellows program, where she mentors, teaches, and cultivates the company's engineering culture. She works with Jim Jagielski, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and a Distinguished Engineer in the Tech Fellows program, helping to open-source projects from the company. “There's increased focus on open source in the private sector," she says. "You might think, why would I want to go to a bank? But there's a lot of awesome things to work on here."



Despite her accomplishments as a software engineer, Kazil's enthusiasm for the PyLadies auction is undiminished. "I love love love the event. There was a joke going around about how I had found my secret calling. I should be an auctioneer."

Read More