We organizers of PyCon 2016 are grateful that, amidst a roiling stock market and uncertain economy, so many sponsors have stepped forwardto assert that their relationship with the Python community is worth investing in. And we are particularly happy to announce that our highest level of sponsorship has been filled.
That’s right — a Keystone sponsor has stepped forward: Heroku is our Keystone sponsor for PyCon 2016!
If you have attended a recent PyCon, you might remember visiting Heroku’s elegant booth in the Expo Hall. And many more of you in the community have used Heroku before to deploy web projects large and small — in their own words:
“Heroku is a cloud platform that lets you build, deploy, manage and scale apps. We’re the fastest way from
gitpushto a live app, because we let you bypass infrastructure and deployment headaches. You just focus on your code, and we make the rest easy.”
Speaking from personal experience, when I helped build a Django app for a non-profit: it is dismaying to explain to a small organization how much work is traditionally involved in self-deploying a new app. An organization would rent or purchase a server, monitor its logs, keep it patched and updated, install the app and Django and the other Python dependencies, install PostgreSQL, give the app access to the database, and establish backups that they then have to monitor and archive.
All of that disappeared when I pointed the organization at Heroku. Their app now serves users every day, without their staff having had to spend even a moment worrying whether their PostgreSQL write-ahead log is working properly, whether a critical operating system patch is overdue, or whether the database is being backed up.
I asked the folks at Heroku why PyCon is on their list of conferences each year:
“We know that building the best platform for Python developers is easier when we can talk to them and find out what’s happening on the ground. So, we’re thrilled to be participating again — so thrilled that we’re the Keystone sponsor of PyCon 2016. We can’t wait to explore Portland with you all, and build some really wonderful apps and memories along the way.”
And how did Python itself get on their radar in the first place? Has the language been a successful choice of target for their platform?
“Python is simple and elegant — which is exactly what your deploys on Heroku feel like. We’ve been seeing amazing growth in Python on Heroku, and that’s why we have folks on our team like Kenneth Reitz, who can advocate for the needs and interests of the community. He makes sure that Pythonistas are happy with the Heroku experience.”
The Kenneth Reitz they mention is, as you probably know, the famous author of the Requests library. When not working on his open source projects, he has spent the last several years crafting Heroku’s support for hosting Python-language applications.
We look forward to seeing Heroku in the Expo Hall at PyCon 2016, and are excited that they have stepped forward this year to take on the responsibility of the Keystone sponsorship. Thank you, Heroku!