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I am very sad to report that John Pinner has passed away. The Python Community has lost a great friend. John received a PSF Community Service Award in 2010 for his many contributions. He was a PSF fellow and an organizer of PyCon UK from 2007 to 2014 and of EuroPython from 2004 to 2011. He was also a frequent speaker at PyCons, and at workshops and users' groups, as well as an enthusiastic and effective advocate of Python and Open Source.  John was an original contributor to  Free and Libre Open Source Software UK (FLOSS) , which started out as the  UK Unix Users Group (UKUUG) . After working 21 years as Principal Engineer for  The Rover Company Limited , he decided to found his own company,  Clockwork Software Systems . His dedication to and interest in Python are best expressed in his own words: Thanks to Linux Journal I 'discovered' Python in 2000 and have been using it ever since; together with an occasional regression to C, it covers all my programming need...

Last week the PSF Board passed the following resolution: “RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award the 4th Quarter 2014 Community Service Awards to Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka for their work creating and growing Django Girls, an educational program which has reached more than half a dozen countries, and continues to grow to many more.” Django Girls was founded by Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka as a workshop for about 20 people at EuroPython 2014 in Berlin. According to the  Django Girls Website ,  "Django Girls is a non-profit organization that empowers and helps women to organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and support." I asked Ola Sitarska for her reaction to receiving the PSF award and she responded: "Receiving the Community Service Award was a wonderful surprise and amazing honor. I never expected that to happen and I couldn't be more grateful for all the support me and Ola received from the Python community whil...

"Membership has its privileges!" Si nce the new PSF bylaws were adopted in 2013, there have been several new membership categorie s that allow for voting rights. Unfortunately it has taken some time for the PSF to devise a form to allow members to report their eligibility for those categories. We apologize, but here it is at last:  Voting Membership . We know that many of you have made valuable contributions to the language and the PSF, so we hope that you will take the next step and claim your right to vote. Please review the membership criteria at  Membership Bylaws . And for those of you who are not yet PSF members, we encourage you to join under the Basic Membership category. All it takes is to sign up here:  PSF Membership . Thanks to Director David Mertz for the creation of the form and to Directors Marc-André Lemburg and Nick Coghlan for their assistance. Addendum: Just to clarify, if you are already a voting member (e.g., as a PSF Fellow), there is no need to do a...

Personal Note: In 2013, I attended my first PyCon in Santa Clara, CA. At the time, I was a complete novice at programming, but interested both because my partner had been a Python geek for a long time and because I was embarking on a new career as a freelance tutor, writer, and educator, and wanted to learn about the educational potential of the open source tech movement. At the end of the conference, the announcement of a surprise gift to be given to each attendee was met with the kind of enthusiastic, almost frenzied joy I have only seen previously at rock concerts when an unexpected superstar steps onto the stage to accompany a lesser known headliner (I would give an example here, but it would certainly date me). At the 2013 PyCon, each attendee got a  Raspberry Pi —a tiny, adaptable, extremely affordable ($25-$35 USD), yet very powerful, single-board computer that would prove to be a catalyst for the spread of computer literacy to young and young-at-heart people worldwide. Imag...

The esteemed, international scientific journal  Nature  has just published an article that names Python as  THE  programming language to use for scientists and researchers. The article, written by Jeffrey M. Perkel,  Programming: Pick up Python a powerful programming language with huge community support.  makes clear that programming skills are necessary tools for all working scientists. And Python is increasingly becoming the language that is considered the most powerful, flexible, and easy-to-learn tool available for working with what has become the raw material of today's science—big data.  Photo credit: Kirby Urner  CC-BY-2.0 Perkel's account begins with a case example. Dr. Adina Howe, an Environmental Engineer, realized upon taking a research job that she needed programming skills. Python was the language recommended to her by her boss at her first research lab job. Currently, as a Professor of Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa S...

One function the PSF is happy to do is to send a PSF Director to  PyCons  in various parts of the world to give a talk and to provide information about and encourage membership in the PSF. Last week, PSF Director, David Mertz, attended  PyCon Belarus  in Minsk where he spoke about a new Python language feature  ( Python's (future) type annotation system(s) )  and met many amazing  Python  users.  Along with David, the other invited keynote speaker was  Austin Bingham , originally from Texas and currently co-owner and founder of  Sixty North  in Stavanger, Norway. Austin spoke on  Python refactoring with Rope and Traad. According to David Mertz, having a PSF Director attend and participate at these conferences "allows us to support the PSF mission, to make new contacts outside the US, and to promote the new membership model." The January 31st conference, the first ever held in Belarus, was a one-day affair that took pl...

Earlier this week, I posted about a workshop the PSF sponsored given by  Geek Girls Carrots.  Since then, I've been in touch with organizer, Zuzanna Podwińska, who provided the following additional information.  Geek Girls Carrots is a community of women who are interested in IT and new technologies. Our goal is to encourage women to take up IT-related careers, and to promote women who already work in the field. To achieve this, we organize regular meet-ups as well as various coding workshops. At each meet-up, we have a speaker - usually a woman who works with new technologies - and a networking session, which is when members of the community get to know each other and inspire each other. People who come to our meetings are from various walks of life - some of them professionals, some considering changing their career paths, some are just hobbyists. What connects them all is love for new technologies. Our community was started by Kamila Sidor and Kamila Stępniowska in War...

PSF Python Brochure PDF (low resolution version) We are happy to announce that we have successfully distributed the first 5,000 copies of the PSF Python Brochure to Python conferences and user groups around the world. Even without doing any major announcement of the possibility to order the brochure for conferences and user groups, we easily received enough requests to have the first print run completely distributed in just a few months. Brochures were sent to PyCon US 2014 in Montreal, EuroPython 2014 , PyCons and open source conferences in India, UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium and to many professional users around the world. Promoting Python to new audiences The feedback we received was positive all around. Conference attendees were really happy to be able to easily show and prove how Python changes the world, to make the point that learning and using Python is a good investment . The brochure helps them in promoting Python in their local and professiona...

For many people, myself included, it's hard to see the way that my individual dreams and desires may be part of a bigger movement, and may, in fact, contribute to the projects and concerns of a larger community. But if you're part of the Python community, indeed you are part of something big, something special, and something that will support your efforts to use Python, as well as to educate and empower others to learn programming and to join the open source movement. One example of the way in which the PSF supports its members is in giving grants to fund workshops and events like one held in Warsaw in January. The PSF contributed $1,000 USD to the  Geek Girls Carrots Warsaw  workshop. Not a huge amount, but enough to make a big impact. According to Zuzanna Podwińska, the organizer of the event, “With your help, we’ve managed to invite 42 students and 14 mentors, who during 2,5 days wrote on average 286 lines of code each, ate 20 kg of carrots, and drank 85 liters of coffee an...