Tag Archives: Boston Python Workshop

The Indianapolis Python Workshop and Indiana LinuxFest

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Attendees practicing at the Indianapolis Python Workshop

I flew out to Indianapolis for the weekend of April 13th to help run the first Indianapolis Python Workshop, which was co-located with Indiana LinuxFest.

This was the second city to use our Boston Python Workshop grant from the Python Software Foundation to help bootstrap Python workshops for women with new user groups in the US. Catherine Devlin and Mel Chua were the locals and main organizers leading the show.

Running the event as part of Indiana LinuxFest presented some challenges, but the attendees were great, including some very sweet father-daughter teams. This part of the country has some strong regional events, including PyOhio and Ohio LinuxFest, and I look forward to seeing more great outreach initiatives from Catherine and Mel that capitalize on this fact.

Catherine has a write-up on the event on her blog, and I took a few photos.

Saturday afternoon instructions at the Indianapolis Python Workshop

Since I was already going to be at Indiana LinuxFest for the workshop, I got the chance to give a rehash of my “The Internet Shouldn’t Work, Networking 101″ talk. It is a beginner-level tour through the Internet’s history, governance, protocols, and current events, with telnet, traceroute, and wireshark demos interspersed. Here are my slides from the talk.

Sunday Morning Linux Review, a “weekly podcast in a news format that focuses on Linux and Open source topics”, asked if I could give a short interview for the show while I was in town. Interviewer Tony Bemus and I chatted a bit about the workshop, school, Ksplice, and Linux, starting around 41:15 in episode 27 of the show, my first ever appearance on a podcast.

The 6th Boston Python Workshop

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The 6th Boston Python Workshop ran the weekend of March 30th at MIT. It marked a full year of diversity outreach with the Boston Python user group and was the second workshop to utilize our grant from the Python Software Foundation Outreach and Education Committee.

Boston Python Workshop 6, Friday night

Additional resources:

PyCon 2012 talk: Diversity in Practice

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I gave a talk with Asheesh Laroia at PyCon 2012 called Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python user group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women.

The video can be viewed online at http://pyvideo.org/video/719/diversity-in-practice-how-the-boston-python-user. Thank you to the PyCon organizers for orchestrating the lightning-fast turnaround time on subtitling and publishing the talk videos.

The slides are available here.

The talk was very well-received, with a great Q&A and many follow-up contacts from folks interested in running outreach events in their communities. Praise from Glyph, a long-time supporter who is leaving Boston soon for San Francisco, was particularly touching. We benefited tremendously from our practice run with the Boston Python user group.

PyCon 2012 talk

Abstract:

How do you bring more women into programming communities with long-term, measurable results? In this talk we’ll analyze our successful effort, the Boston Python Workshop, which brought over 200 women into Boston’s Python community this year. We’ll talk about lessons learned running the workshop, the dramatic effect it has had on the local user group, and how to run a workshop in your city.