Volunteering, Organizing, and Finding a Python Community

Have you thought about getting more involved in the Python community? Are you interested in volunteering for an event or becoming an organizer? This week on the show, we speak with organizers from this year’s PyCascades conference about making connections, learning new skills, and rationing your time.

We have three guests to discuss working on PyCascades 2023 and how they got involved in volunteering. Conference Chair Ben Berry, a site reliability engineer based in Seattle, is currently working on a private platform-as-a-service. Diversity Chair Madison Swain-Bowden is a senior data engineer out of Seattle, currently working at Automattic on the Openverse team. Sponsorship Chair Michael van der Kamp is a back-end engineer at Coffee Meets Bagel.

We discuss finding other volunteers, maintaining motivation, and connecting with sponsors. Our guests also share their stories of overcoming challenges, connecting with community, and finding fulfillment through volunteering.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Proxify.

Course Spotlight: Using pandas to Make a Gradebook in Python

With this course and Python project, you’ll build a script to calculate grades for a class using pandas. The script will quickly and accurately calculate grades from a variety of data sources. You’ll see examples of loading, merging, and saving data with pandas, as well as plotting some summary statistics.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:02:34 – Conference Chair Ben Berry
• 00:03:58 – Diversity Chair Madison Swain-Bowden
• 00:06:04 – Sponsorship Chair Michael van der Kamp
• 00:08:28 – Scheduling of conferences around one another
• 00:10:41 – How did you get involved in the community?
• 00:20:01 – Sponsor: Proxify
• 00:20:57 – Workplace groups and guilds
• 00:27:41 – How community helps with job referrals
• 00:32:19 – New position and added responsibilities
• 00:41:24 – How would you pitch volunteering?
• 00:44:32 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:45:45 – How do you avoid overdoing it?
• 00:52:46 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
• 00:55:16 – What do you want to learn next?
• 00:59:22 – Thanks and goodbye

Show Links:

• The Team - PyCascades 2023
• PyCascades 2023 - YouTube
• PyLadies – Women Who Love Coding in Python
• Puget Sound Programming Python (PuPPy) (Seattle, WA) - Meetup
• PySprings (Colorado Springs, CO) - Meetup
• What is Lean Coffee? - an introduction to agenda-less meetings
• Async IO in Python: A Complete Walkthrough – Real Python
• Structural Pattern Matching – Real Python
• Using FastAPI to Build Python Web APIs – Real Python
• Rust Programming Language
• Rust for Rustaceans - No Starch Press
• CircuitPython
• Michael van der Kamp - LinkedIn
• Madison on Tumblr
• Ben Berry (@benb@fosstodon.org)

Level up your Python skills with our expert-led courses:

• Using pandas to Make a Gradebook in Python
• The pandas DataFrame: Working With Data Efficiently
• Building Python Project Documentation With MkDocs

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