PYCON NIGERIA 2018 REPORT
“Python: Building the Universe We Love” was the theme for the 2018 edition of the Python Conference Nigeria. It was yet another successful hosting of Pythonistas from around the world in the city of Lagos, Nigeria.
Expanding on last year’s conference, the organising team decided to make this year’s conference a 3-day affair that held between Thursday, 13th September and Saturday, 15th September 2018.
The venue used for this year’s event was the same as last year’s venue: the Lagos Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Ikeja — Lagos. Howbeit, the first day of the conference, which was mainly for tutorials, held at Vantage Hub, Ikeja — Lagos.
A lot of Python communities from around the globe were represented by attendees who came from Canada, US, UK, Namibia, Senegal, Zimbabwe, and Benin Republic.
The tutorial day was run alongside a Django Girls workshop, which had 30 ladies be introduced to programming.
Pre-conference, we received a total of 20-tutorial and 88-talk submissions amongst which only 6 tutorials and 35 talks were accepted. It is interesting to note that about 28% of these talks were presented by women Pythonistas, which is up 8% from last year. For a full listing of the sessions, please refer to the schedule on the website.
We had an attendance of over 50 persons for the Tutorial sessions, with 220+ attendees for the talk sessions.
This year, PyCon Nigeria featured a PyData track, which ran concurrently with talk sessions on the last two days of the conference. These sessions were packed with talks from many Pythoneers from all around the country, plus Keynotes delivered by Rebecca Conley and Tim Akinbo. Asides the major talks, some attendees were given room to present lightning talks lasting no longer than 5 minutes each.
Sponsorship
PyCon Nigeria 2018 would not have been the success that it was without the support it received from amazing sponsors.
We greatly appreciate the continuous support we received from our parent organisation, the Python Software Foundation (PSF).
We also thank our Platinum sponsors Google Developers and Python Software foundation, our Gold Sponsor: Django Software Foundation, our Silver sponsors: Sikilabs and Diamond Acre Software, our special/diversity sponsors: CowryWise, Elastic, VanHack, Gitlab, our Patron sponsors: Yan Dah of Try Beans, Kafayat Adeoye of Eko-Konnect, and finally our swag sponsors Digital Ocean and Sticker Mule.
Because of these partnerships and their belief in us, we not only held a remarkable conference, we were also able to sponsor over 50 people to attend the conference via free tickets, transportation or accommodation .
Finally, our special thanks goes to CowryWise for donating five Python books to a few lucky attendees, as well as Michael Iyanda for gifting some attendees with Heroku dyno hours.
Media
Experience PyConNG in 5 minutes:
The conference brochure can be accessed at:
https://github.com/pyung/pyconng2018resources/blob/master/Brochure%20(3).pdf
Many beautiful pictures taken during the event are accessible at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/155110254@N05/albums
Videos of the amazing talks/presentations made at PyCon Nigeria 2018 is shared via the community’s YouTube account at:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE2LJQvu0iDzXEnhBev7mfgjEOrLNwLbN
Just like many of our attendees we are looking forward to a better and bigger PyConNG in 2019, and cannot thank you enough for a successful 2018. We will close this report with the below tweets from the conference.