Edit: 2015/7/1: Sessions will now be held each day of the conference during the afternoon coffee breaks from 3 – 3:30 PM.

Edit: 2015/7/2: Sessions will be held in room 210 on the main level of the conference center.

This year at SciPy 2015 I’d like to run some informal “office hours” help sessions to help people with any questions they might have. I can imagine questions about:

• scientific Python libraries (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, matplotlib…)
• software installation (Anaconda, conda, pip…)
• software packaging
• Git & GitHub
• the command line (shell)
• web applications
• much more!

The sessions will be during the afternoon coffee breaks 3 – 3:30 PM each day of the conference (Wednesday – Friday). The SciPy organizers have very kindly reserved room 210 for the sessions. Follow me on Twitter for any last minute updates.

If there seems to be significant interest I’ll try to find times for some additional sessions, but that might be hard to do.

Whether you’ve got questions or answers, I hope you’ll join!

In the interest of helping to improve the diversity and beginner friendliness of the SciPy conference, I’m offering to help first-time speakers from underrepresented groups with their talk proposals and potential talk preparations for SciPy 2015. If that sounds like you and you’d like my help editing a proposal and/or preparing a talk, send me an email.

Notes:

• The deadline for proposals is April 1
• The conference is July 8-10 in Austin, Texas
• SciPy has a Code of Conduct
• SciPy is committed to diversity
• SciPy has some financial aid
• I will be at the conference
• I’m not a conference organizer, but I have in the past helped with talk selection (and may again this year)
• I have never given a talk at SciPy (except lightning talks)

P.S. If you’re looking for some talk ideas, try this post.

The SciPy 2015 call for proposals is open until April 1. In case anyone wants to give a talk but doesn’t have an idea I came up with a few:

• introduction to testing with a focus on numerics
• guide to profiling
• introduction to packaging and distribution
• scidb
• xray
• bcolz
• which tool to use for which job (cover core packages)
• data visualization options
• write a numpy ufunc in Python, Cython, and C
• roundup of high-performance options (C, Cython, Numba, Parakeet, etc.)

Thanks to Rob Story for some suggestions. If you’ve got ideas for talks you’d like to see, leave a comment!

(I will be at SciPy 2015, but I’m organizing a Software Carpentry tutorial so I probably won’t be submitting a talk proposal.)

P.S. If you’re a first-time speaker from an underrepresented group thinking about giving a talk at SciPy 2015, I’m offering to help with proposal editing and talk prep.