This coming weekend is the start of PyCon US 2016 in Portland, USA. And as usual, we’ve sponsored the conference and will be bringing some of our engineering team. Here’s where you’ll be able to find us:

Booth

For many people, the main attraction is the Expo Hall. Here most of the sponsoring organizations will have booths set up to tell you about what they do, and Microsoft is no exception. You’ll find our booth right near the entrance (unless there’s a last minute change).

Those who follow our blog won’t be too surprised at what you’ll find – we’re going to be talking about Visual Studio, Azure, Azure Machine Learning and a few new things we’ve been saving. Everyone there will have a laptop and be ready to walk you through almost anything that you might want to do with Python on our platforms.

(Unlike some other companies, we will not have recruiters there to try and convince you to move to Microsoft HQ. But if you’re interested, come by and we’d be happy to chat – or email pythonjobs@microsoft.com if you aren’t going to be there but still like the sound of working on Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, or Jupyter.)

Talks

This year, we have two talks. First will be our sponsor workshop, which will be in Room A106 at 9am on Sunday 29th. The description on the site is a bit vague, but you can expect a whirlwind tour of everything we do. No laptops required, but consider having something to make notes on so you can follow up with us later if something interests you.

We also have a talk about Pyjion, which is one of our experimental projects to add a JIT compiler to CPython (without the compatibility issues that have plagued earlier attempts). That talk will be on Monday at 11:30am in Oregon Ballroom 203-204.

You can also expect some impromptu sessions, so keep an eye on the lightning talks and open-spaces for more!

Sprints

As usual, after the conference is done we all get back to work. But for many of us, we’ll be doing it from the same venue! The sprints start immediately after the last day of talks, and some of our engineers will be there working on everything from CPython through to our own tools and libraries.

If you’re staying around, it’s a great way to get started contributing to a project, and for many projects it’s the sole opportunity we get to actually see and chat with remote teammates. Bring a laptop and come by and see us.

Missing PyCon?

If you aren’t going to make it to PyCon this year, don’t worry. All of the talks and many sessions will be recorded and put online, and anything we announce will also make it to this blog. It’s also not the only chance to get in touch with us – we’re here on the blog all year round, and also at our various project sites linked in the sidebar. Feel free to reach out at any time.

For those who are making it to Portland this year, hope to see you there!