From Aug 26th to Aug 28th 2016, we  held our third annual PyCon MY in the International University of Malaya-Wales (IUMW) City Campus on Jalan Tun Ismail, Kuala Lumpur.

Aug 26th: Workshop Day.

Aug 26th was Workshop Day. This year we had Boey Pak Cheong from Pytech Resources conduct the training, themed Building with Python. The workshop was geared towards newcomers of python, but have some knowledge of programming in other languages. The training used python3 as a base.

A total of 16 people purchased the tickets for the training, priced at MYR150.

We had a slight confusion on the start time of the workshop because we had made a mistake by announcing the start time was at 8.30AM on the online schedule instead of at 10AM as per the purchased tickets. Fortunately, nearly all of our attendees came based on the time of the Peatix ticket. We apologize for the confusion.

Aug 27th and 28th: Conference Days.

Conference Day started at 9AM with attendees coming in to register as early as 8:50AM. We had a small issue of some attendees getting lost in the campus trying to find the registration desk. We had anticipated this and had placed volunteers to be easily visible at points where we think will be problematic, but unfortunately it didn’t work out very well. This is something we’ll need to work out better in future PyCons.

Tarek Ziade from Mozilla started the first conference day with his keynote: Python, the not-so-secret weapon at Mozilla

Tarek talked about the thousands of ways python is being used in Mozilla, and why python is chosen in those cases.

We had HDE Inc. from Tokyo over as our Platinum Sponsor, and it’s sponsored talk session was by Jonas Obrist who talked about asyncio.

For the 1st conference day, we had a total of 9 talks across 2 tracks and 3 lightning talks at the end.

PyCon MY Dinner on Aug 27th

We had a dinner after the 1st day of conference, to give our speakers and staff an opportunity to get together over food after a day of conference.

The second day of conference was kicked of with the keynote from Steve Holden titled Python As a Positive Influence.

For the 2nd conference day, we had a total of 7 talks across 2 tracks and 3 lightning talks at the end. Unfortunately we had 2 last minute cancellations by our speakers, so we have to move the schedule earlier by around 40 minutes.

Before the second day’s lightning talks, we had a briefing session about next year’s PyCon APAC which MY will be hosting. Many attendees came to listen to the briefing showing great interest in how the organizing will be done, and we even had some people come forward to volunteer themselves to help out.

Wrapping up

This year’s PyCon MY talks ranged from topics such as why python is being used in web development, to board game building, to educational uses of python for high school student, to python being used to easily prototype custom protocols, to even community building and diversity.

What we would like to see more in future PyCon MY is more gender diversity for speaker and attendees, on top of more python use cases example in education and scientific or research use cases using python.

We unfortunately had a few last minute cancellations from our slotted speakers and had to move the schedule up and finish slightly early than planned.

Pictures of the conference are released under Creative Commons (CC-BY) license and can be accessed here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskG1kkxW

PyCon APAC 2017

For next year, we will be hosting the Asia Pacific version of PyCon, known as PyCon APAC. Follow us on Twitter @pyconmy, or join us on our Facebook group for updates!