PyCon 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio

Keynote Speakers

<hr> <h2 style="text-align: center;" id="russell">Russell Keith-Magee</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img style="max-width: 256px; border-radius: 25px; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px; border-color: #009CBD;" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/pycon-assets/2019/images/2019/03/27/russell-keith-magee.jpg" > </p> <p> Dr Russell Keith-Magee is the founder of the BeeWare project, developing GUI tools and libraries to support the development of Python software on desktop and mobile platforms. He is also a 13 year veteran of the Django core team, and for 5 years, was President of the Django Software Foundation. In his day job, he wrangles data pipelines for Survata. </p> <p> He is a frequent speaker at Python and Django conferences around the globe, sharing his experiences as an Open Source developer, community maintainer, and (unsuccessful) startup founder. He lives in Whadjuk Noongar country - otherwise known as Perth, Western Australia. </p> <hr> <h2 style="text-align: center;" id="sha">Shadeed “Sha” Wallace-Stepter </h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img style="max-width: 256px; border-radius: 25px; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px; border-color: #009CBD;" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/pycon-assets/2019/images/2019/03/29/shadeed-wallace-stepter_shTerH0.jpg" > </p> <p> Shadeed "Sha" Wallace-Stepter, from San Francisco, California spent the first part of his life dealing with poverty and the many by-products that come as a result of it. During this part of his life he embraced the fast-paced, violent and destructive street life. Today Sha finds his behavior during this time interesting, now viewing it all as being a desperate and ill-advised strategy to pull himself out of poverty. </p> <p> The next part of Sha's life was spent serving a 27-year to life sentence in prison for assault with a firearm and attempted robbery (a crime committed in his junior year of high school). This would be the most pivotal part of his life because it would be during this time that Sha discovered entrepreneurship, Python, video and audio production, and the power of storytelling. He also learned to be accountable for the harm caused as a young person and what it means now to make living amends. </p> <p> The most recent part of Sha's life started less than a year ago. After serving more than 18 years in prison, on August 17, 2018 California Governor Jerry Brown commuted Sha's life sentence and released him from prison. Sha intends to spend this part of his life being of service by promoting inclusion and working to build a community that sees the value of all its members based on who they are today, and not who they were during the early parts of their lives. </p> <hr> <h2 style="text-align: center;" id="jessica">Jessica McKellar</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img style="max-width: 256px; border-radius: 25px; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px; border-color: #009CBD;" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/pycon-assets/2019/images/2019/03/29/jessica-mckellar.jpg" > </p> <p> Jessica McKellar is a founder and the CTO of Pilot, a bookkeeping firm powered by software. Previously, she was a founder and the VP of Engineering for a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she then served as a Director of Engineering. Before that, she was a computer nerd at MIT who joined her friends at Ksplice, a company building a service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux that was acquired by Oracle. </p> <p> Jessica is a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America's Diversity Outreach Chair. For her outreach efforts in the Python community, she was awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award. </p> <p> Open source meets criminal justice reform in Jessica’s work with The Last Mile, a job training and re-entry program that has implemented the first computer programming curriculum inside US prisons. She teaches Python at San Quentin State Prison in California, hires formerly incarcerated software engineers, and uses that bridge between the tech industry and prisons to get people activated and acting for decarceration. </p> <hr> <h2 style="text-align: center;" id="steering-council">Python Steering Council</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img style="max-width: 256px; border-radius: 25px; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px; border-color: #009CBD;" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/pycon-assets/2019/images/2019/04/01/steering-council.png" > </p> <center style="font-size: larger;"> Barry Warsaw<br> Brett Cannon<br> Carol Willing<br> Guido van Rossum<br> Nick Coghlan </center> <p> Elected as perscribed in <a href="">PEP 8016</a>, the Python Steering Council is a 5-person committee that assumes a mandate to maintain the quality and stability of the Python language and CPython interpreter, improve the contributor experience, formalize and maintain a relationship between the Python core team and the PSF, establish decision making processes for Python Enhancement Proposals, seek concensus among contributors and the Python core team, and resolve decisions and disputes in decision making among the language. </p> <p> This session will be moderated by Ewa Jodlowska, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation, to introduce the Steering Council to the community, share what this innagural group has undertaken since being elected in February 2019, and hear more about what is to come. </p> <hr> <h2 style="text-align: center;" id="nina">Nina Zakharenko</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img style="max-width: 256px; border-radius: 25px; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px; border-color: #009CBD;" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/pycon-assets/2019/images/2019/04/03/nina-zakharenko.jpg" > </p> <p> Nina Zakharenko is a software engineer with over a decade of experience. She currently focuses on Python at Microsoft on the Cloud Developer Advocacy team. In the past, she’s written software for satellite control computers at HBO, code that's helped people connect over their passions at Meetup, and implemented time-wasting features on Reddit. </p> <p> Nina loves teaching developers and has spoken at conferences like PyCon Russia, EuroPython, and DjangoCon in the US and internationally. This year, she's looking forward to attending her seventh PyCon, where you'll find her co-organizing Mentored Sprints for Diverse Beginners. </p> <p> In her spare time, she enjoys snowboarding and hiking, drinking scotch, and tinkering with hardware, LEDs, and wearable electronics from her home base in Portland, OR. </p> <hr>