#pyladies

The schedule for PyCon Australia 2016 is now up. Here’s some PyLadies picks to look out for!

FRIDAY

11:10 (Science & Data miniconf): Building brains by Paula Sanz-Leon

11:10 (Education seminar): Teaching Python with Minecraft by Digital K

11:50 (DjangoConAU): Search-First Writing for Developers by Heidi Waterhouse

14:20 (Education seminar): Teaching geometry using Logo/Python turtle module, or how to sneak programming into maths class by Vivian Li

15:00 (Science & Data miniconf): Using Jupyter notebooks to develop and share interactive data displays by Ioanna Ioannou

16:10 (Science & Data miniconf): Big data biology for pythonistas: getting in on the genomics revolution by Darya Vanichkina

16:50 (Education seminar): Exploring Kivy in the classroom - GUI and App development for Python by Amanda Hogan

16:50 (Science & Data miniconf): A Girls Guide To Growing A Moustache with Python by Heidi Baxter

SATURDAY

11:10: Tutorial: Technical Blogging for Python Programmers by Thursday Bram

11:10: The Power ⚡️ and Responsibility 😓 of Unicode Adoption ✨ by Katie McLaughlin

14:20: I wish I learnt that earlier! by Rachel Bunder

15:00: Imposter Syndrome by Bianca Gibson

Conference dinner - invited speaker Solange Cunin of Quberider

SUNDAY

11:50: From Humanities to Tech: How a Religion PhD came to be learning Python by Lauren Bernauer

11:50: Have It Your Way: Maximizing Drive-Thru Contributions by VM (Vicky) Brasseur

11:50: Reproducible Research in Python by Jodie Burchell

13:40: Releasing Calendar-Versioned Software by Amber Brown

15:00: Turning stories into websites by Donna Benjamin

15:00: Functional Programming for Pythonistas by Bianca Gibson

15:00: Mental Health in Development by Eloise Macdonald-Meyer

(Adapted from an email I wrote. Seems a shame to write for an audience of 1.)

So you want to increase the number of women at $MELBOURNE_EVENT. (Let’s assume you understand why a Code of Conduct is important, you’ve got one in place and you’re prepared to enforce it.) Can you offer sponsorship, or discounted/free tickets to your events? Can you offer childcare or take other steps to make your events more (explicitly) friendly to women? I don't know if it's easy to organise but it might be interesting to arrange a showing of a doco about women in tech such as CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap or GTFO.

To find women, a good start would be building relationships with the founders/attendees of women-in-tech groups. Some events allow men to attend, either solo or as the guest of a woman. I'm running PyLadies Melbourne, so if someone said to me “I have a discount voucher code for my event for your members”, I would probably pass it on if it seemed relevant and had a CoC.

Here are some other Melb WIT groups I know of: Startup Victoria's Female Founders group is good. Friendly Getting-Shit-Done kind of vibe. Skews more business than tech as the name suggests. Girl Geek Academy is running the #SheHacks weekend hackathon in 2 weeks! The same people are behind Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne. Women Who Code I haven't been to, but they seem pretty active. Ditto Code Like a Girl which really exploded in publicity the last couple of years. The League of Extraordinary Women is (much) more business than tech focused but they might be worth a look. Their annual event is coming up late August. There is also at least one women-focused coworking space in Melbourne - One Roof.