History of PyCon Taiwan

thinker organized PyCTW, the predecessor of PyCon Taiwan, in both 2008 and 2011. They are one-day events gathering Pythonistas in Taiwan together.

The first PyCon Taiwan was founded in 2012, by yyc and volunteers from communities. The topics mainly focused on scientific computation as well as introduction to Python-based tools. The organizers decided to follow the Everybody Pays policy originated from PyCon US: Everyone, including the staffs and speakers of PyCon Taiwan, is required to pay for the ticket. The principle, which we honor to this day, distinguishes PyCon Taiwan from other conferences in Taiwan. The chairperson, yyc, cheerfully recorded this milestone in his blog.

In 2013, the re-elected chairperson, yyc, decided to expand the scale of PyCon Taiwan, and tried several new events. A paid Python tutorial was hosted in collaboration with caterpillar before the conference. It was highly successful. We also held the Birds of a Feather (BoF) event for the first time, featuring with a night market style activity, in which participants enjoyed the buffet with live music performance, and walk among booths hosted by various communities. These new events became a signature for PyCon Taiwan. yyc again summarized some thoughts about the conference in his blog.

We turned to host PyCon APAC/Taiwan, as PyCon for the APAC area, in both 2014 and 2015, lead by chairpersons Tim Hsu and Keith Yang. We were lucky to invite Jessica McKellar, director of Python Software Foundation, and many prestigious contributors in the community as our keynote speakers. During the BoF, we launched a problem-solving competition in collaboration with CheckIO, as an entertaining activity. We also arranged programs like Show Time and Job Event in order to promote sponsors. Tutorials covering several topics were held, ranging from Python introduction to web crawling, data mining, signal processing, and even interaction with Raspberry Pi.

PyDay, an activity for new programmers hosted jointly by PyCon Taiwan and top universities in Taiwan, was also held at the first time in 2015. Keynote speakers from PyCon Taiwan came to the PyDay event, and share their experience throughout sessions.

We passed the APAC flag to South Korea in 2016, and put our focus back to the native Taiwanese community. But PyCon Taiwan, now under the slogan “Implement the Future, Together!”, was strong as ever, and received a overwhelming amount of proposals and participants. We were lucky to invite jserv and Audrey Tang, both famous Taiwanese community leaders and established hackers, as well as foreign speakers including Paul Hildebrandt, senior engineer at Disney Animation Studio, Steve Dower, software developer at Microsoft, and Amber Brown, manager of the Twisted project. Paul brought us an enlightening speech about how Python is applied to animation production in Disney, which the audience greatly enjoyed. Along with the first local keynote speakers at PyCon Taiwan, we also made new attempts including a FinTech session, interactive games combining sensor technology and a vending machine, and experience-sharing talks about teaching programming to young adults. The photo albums have our most tresurous memories.

2017 is our most futuristic PyCon Taiwan ever. All of our keynote speakers, including globally renowed machine-learning expert Hsuan-Tien Lin, are not only recognized in their repective fields, but also community leaders, trend-setters, and visionaries for the next generation. In line with the community-focused theme, we also held an unconference session for the first time, looking forward to spurring discussion in the community, to great success. The late-night party is also expanded to include contributions from community members with great talent. Adrian Liaw’s piano performance was such a treat.

The largely same team were brought back to host PyCon Taiwan in 2018. Continuing the established theme, the image is set to “acceletation”, both in the technical sense and community-wise. Join and accelerate with us!