Hi everyone!

We’re ramping up to hold the first PyCon APAC in KUL on the 26th and 27th of August this year (with development sprints scheduled on the 28th Monday) so I wanted to drop a note on how things are coming along with preparation.

Sponsorships

As of now, we have 4 paid up Silver Sponsors, and 2 paid up Platinum Sponsors. All except two sponsors are foreign based companies. We’re still behind our sponsorship targets, so hopefully between now and August we can secure more sponsorship to support PyCon APAC 2017.

Ticket sales

There are 98 tickets sold so far, with half of these from local participants. 10% of our total participants are females. 80% of the attendees are working people.

We had 10% female participation in the previous PyCon MY 2016, and personally I would like to see a 20% female participation for our conference this year, which will show an improvement from the past. Ideally it should be a 50/50 rate, looking at how the population of Malaysia is structured. Hopefully once we have our last tie-up workshop done with Women Who Code, we’ll see an uptake in interest and participation from female tech practitioners.

If you’re a student, and you want to come but can’t afford to, please apply for our Financial Aid program. Conferences are a great place for students to improve their knowledge and meet people that just might help get you started on your career.

Program

Today we have closed accepting new CfPs and we’re in the process of finalizing it at this point in time, but we’ve received a total of 67 proposals for the originally slated 18 talk slots (not including LTs) for the whole of 2 days. This will be an acceptance rate of 27%. It is amazing and humbling to see many bright people willing to share their knowledge.

A bulk of the CfPs are about machine learning, AI and data processing. Other topics are about web programming, education and project best practices. Most talks tend to be intermediate level, but 30% of the talks are geared towards beginners and the rest on advanced topics. So maybe you can expect a 3:6:1 ratio between beginner, intermediate and advanced topics.

We will definitely try to accommodate by maybe trying to increase talk slots  but as much as it pains us there will be many of you that will not be accepted. There is just too little space and too little time. We’ll be contacting the selected speakers within a week or two, and will be publishing the program schedule by 1st of Aug 2017.

Keynotes

Unfortunately Wes McKinney had to cancel his appearance for our keynote but we will have Luis who has extensive experience and knowledge on big data processing coming all the way from New York.
Jessica is still scheduled to be our keynote. I believe she will be inspiring us on her story of activism, and using code for the common good, but of course, we don’t know what she will be talking about (yet).

And that’s about it. Remember to follow us on Twitter too to get the latest announcements concerning PyCon APAC 2017!

Featured image by Kevin Dooley