Chennai

Personally, I think the venue choice this year was great again, as we were able to accommodate 20+ sponsor stalls while still not overloading the halls and having ample space to conduct multiple tracks of the conference scheduled for the attendees.

As have been the regular norm with the annual PyCon India conference, the conference was graced by a footfall of over 1000 attendees from all corners of India. Many international names famous for their contributions in Python programming world also attended the conference.

If you are looking for more photographs from the conference, they are available here: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOnLxMo-JVp80gqQernNZxbHmDs5WPsBFtBtY4zZBPzLMWJHi1pPdIkDFRmrVp3KQ?key=bzRidDFDR0RLbXpycEx4YUdIMmpGc21iaWlXLWJB

Videos for the talks from the conference are available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6GW05BfqWIfsflQt05LM3FTX6cd7PGps

Volunteering Experience

Volunteer experience is one of my sought-after reasons to attend any conference in general. Being a volunteer gives you many many perks over a normal attendee: –

• Easy access to information about all that’s happening and will happen at the conference
• Unrestricted backstage access at the conference
• Better networking – meet fellow volunteers and network much easily over common tasks/ jobs

Apart from these, there also are some monetary benefits to volunteering at a conference- registration fee for volunteers is generally waived off at paid-ticket based conferences and some quite generous conferences also have accommodation options for volunteers during the conference days, free of cost.
Also, organizers usually have free goodies to give away to the volunteers at the end of the conference.

The volunteers met at the convention centre a day before the conference to prepare the goodies bags for the attendees. These bags simply consisted of a schedule page, a pen, a notebook and a couple of PyCon India stickers- one for you, and one for sharing with your pal.

DGPLUG Staircase Meeting

DGPLUG stands for Durgapur Linux Users Group. While it originated in Durgapur, West Bengal, DGPLUG has evolved into a larger, remote, decentralized community that has members from Bangalore, Pune, Delhi, Punjab, all places of India. As has been the annual convention, we also had DGPLUG’s annual staircase meeting with the past alumni of the Summer Training. We also received an awesome DGPLUG TShirt from Sayan bhaiya!

I really cherish the TShirt, now that the training has been discontinued. The training brought long lasting progressive changes in me and hundreds of other who participated in the summer training every year. I really missed Kushal bhaiya, Shakthi bhaiya, Jason bhaiya some other mentors. I still loved to meet many students from various corners of India that assembled for the meeting. This meeting was my main reason last year to attend the PyCon India 2018. I am eagerly looking forward to the next year’s meeting.

Poster Presentation

The next highlight for me at the conference was PyCon India 2019 was Poster Presentation.

As PyCon organizers put it. There are many reasons to present a poster at PyCon India which can be read in the poster below: –

Unfortunately not a lot of people in India are aware of KDE as commonly as some other open source organizations. In a hope to change that, RItuka and I aimed at presenting a poster for KDE Community at PyCon India 2019. Poster presentation was discussed with the KDE family here: https://phabricator.kde.org/T11430

So, at Day 2, we grabbed a poster stand and set up our little poster presentation stall. Some photos from our poster presentation are here: –

Since 1000+ attendees are a lot to cover within a 30 minute window, I planted KDE stickers at every booth – registration, TShirt distribution, help desk, and even planted the Konqui standee right in the middle of the hall to promote KDE as much as possible. People really liked the mascot Konqi and many posted pictures with Konqi online!

Some tweets for the poster presentation are available here: https://twitter.com/brute4s99/status/1183705289670791168

Close-up

I really loved attending the conference. Every year I learn new things when I attend any conference, and this one was no different. If anything, I loved attending the different quizzes set up by the sponsor stalls with freebies as rewards. I grabbed most of those, so I’m quite happy with my loot from the conference! 😀

Looking forward to the next iteration of the PyCon India Conference!