2019 videos available, and the future of North Bay Python

Hello Friends, Pythonistas,

North Bay Python is done for another year! We’re grateful to everyone who attended this year’s event, and helped support our speakers, who collectively delivered one of the best programs we’ve seen at any Python conference. Thank you all.

Videos from this year's event are now online, so if you missed any talks, or you want to share talks with friends who couldn’t make it, you can find them at https://youtube.com/northbaypython 

As we announced at the conference close, we’re not planning to hold a North Bay Python conference during calendar year 2020.

There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, October and November is fire season in California. In 2017 and 2018, we narrowly missed being affected by air quality and other fallout from nearby fires. This year, we explored cancelling the event. If we’d been scheduled just one week earlier, the conference would not have happened. There was another air quality advisory just two days after the conference on account of yet another fire.

It’s our duty to you, our audience, to not put you at risk. We also don’t want this event to be an undue stress for us, our vendors, or our community. So, we need to get out of the fire season.

Secondly, our team is shrinking. Some of our wonderful inaugural organizing team have moved out of the region. Some of us have new commitments vying for our free time. Running a quality event with a shrinking team means placing more responsibility on the shoulders of fewer volunteers, and that’s unsustainable. You expect a quality conference, and we want to be able to deliver it without burning ourselves out in the process.

So, we’re looking for new team members. We need to grow our team deliberately, to build a team who can maintain the trust we’ve built — and tried to maintain — with our community. That will take time.

Let us know if you’d like to take part in planning our next event.

What next? To us, March and April look like a good time of year to run an event in Petaluma. The weather is similar to November (maybe with more rain), and the hills that surround the city will actually be green. But March and April is increasingly crowded with Python conferences, and we need the cooperation of a few of them to carve out the time we need.

If all goes well, we’ll be back in Petaluma in the first half of 2021.

Thanks for your support, and see you soon.

—The North Bay Python team