Hi everyone!

I have a couple of random questions as we approach the launch!

Ewa and/or Betsy, I noticed there's a "Tutorial Survey" link at the bottom of
the main left-hand menu. Is that meant to be there, given that the tutorials
all seem to have their own survey link embedded within their own page?

Hi Felix - I have disabled the "tutorial survey" link.

Hi Carmen,

In addition to the "Speakers" issue mentioned in my previous email, I've found a number of serious data problems when reviewing everything in detail today. These are major issues that would prevent launching the guide to the public in the near future.

1) Talks/Tutorials have the "Abstract" listed twice, instead of the "Description" field. For example, looking at my talk: https://builder.guidebook.com/#/guides/66563/build/schedule/sessions/13716055/ we can see that the text starts out with "Free/Open Source software is...". If you then scroll down a bit, you can see it says "Abstract" in bold, and then the same text repeats. However, the Description part (which starts out with "Anyone who uses Open Source...") just isn't present anywhere. I'm guessing something in the data import on your side was supposed to put the description first, followed by the abstract, but instead the abstract got included twice. Including both would be best, but if something on your end means that only one of the two can be used, I'd prefer to have the description, not the abstract.

2) All non-ASCII text has serious character encoding problems. In my initial email I used the example of someone whose name contains the letter "Ł" (Łukasz Langa). If you find him in the guide, you'll see that he shows up as "ukasz Langa", i.e. the first letter of his name is completely missing (https://builder.guidebook.com/#/guides/66563/build/custom-list-items/5402771/). The same thing happens in a bunch of other names and talk descriptions. Using my talk again as an example (https://builder.guidebook.com/#/guides/66563/build/schedule/sessions/13716055/). There's a sentence in the abstract that should read "We’ll examine a number of popular licenses, and in what ways they differ — and how you can use them to achieve different goals." This sentence uses a curly-quote in "We'll", and a dash between "ways they differ" and "and how you can use them". In the Guidebook text, however, that's all gone. Instead, the first time the abstract shows up, those characters are completely missing; instead it says "Well examine a number of popular licenses, and in what ways they differ and how you can use them to achieve different goals." Note the "well" instead of "we'll", and how the two clauses are just run together without a dash between them. The second time the sentence shows up in the second abstract, those characters are completely mangled: "We’ll examine a number of popular licenses, and in what ways they differ â€" and how you can use them to achieve different goals." I'm guessing something in the import process isn't reading UTF-8 encoded text properly.

3) Sponsor tutorials do not show up in the Master Schedule. It looks like they're entered as just a list, not as scheduled items? There's no track for them and attendees can't add them to their calendars.

4) There are also a smaller item that I'm working on fixing from my end, but if there's something you can do on your side to make the changes automatically with your tools that would be great: Talks aren't in tracks according to their categories and levels. Instead the name of the category is just in the description. For example, in my talk, it says "Novice - Community", instead of it being part of the "Level: Novice", and "Category: Community" tracks. I've fixed this for all the Tutorial sessions, and will work my way through talks doing the same thing soon.

Also, a question about that: in the data files I sent you, I tried to convert the category "Python Core (language, stdlib, etc.)" to just say "Python Core". As far as I can tell, the text "(language, stdlib, etc.)" shouldn't show up anywhere. Yet I'm seeing it on some of the talks in the guide. Did I miss converting the data somewhere, or did you get different data from the conference website or something like that? I'd prefer if we could stick to just the data in the exported files that I sent over, since there are a number of minor tweaks like that in it.

On the plus side, I'm happy to report that the "Preview in app" export seems to be working now. I'm guessing something was just stuck yesterday, but it's fine now.

Thanks,

On Sat, May 14, 2016, at 13:33, Felix Crux wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>
> I have a couple of random questions as we approach the launch!
>
> Ewa and/or Betsy, I noticed there's a "Tutorial Survey" link at the bottom of
> the main left-hand menu. Is that meant to be there, given that the tutorials
> all seem to have their own survey link embedded within their own page?
>
> Carmen, I'm having trouble with the "Preview in app" export feature. After
> making changes on the web, I'm deleting the local copy on my phone and
> generating a new preview export on the website. However when I enter the
> password and download the new version it doesn't actually have any of my
> changes -- it's still the old one! Any idea of what I might be doing wrong?
>
> Also for Carmen: I'm a bit confused by the "Speakers" list in the main menu.
> It doesn't seem to contain all of the speakers, but I can't figure out
> what the pattern is of who is included and who's not. Is it just something
> left over that should be deleted? Or should it be updated to include everyone?
>
> I also ran another data export to pull a few last minute changes. There were
> only a few, so I've gone ahead and made all the changes to the guide already.
> I'm just mentioning it here and attaching the latest data export so that if
> anyone needs it we can all be working off the same base.
>
> Cheers!
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 04 11:55, Carmen Kuncz (Guidebook) wrote:
> >

Hi everyone!

I have a couple of random questions as we approach the launch!

Ewa and/or Betsy, I noticed there's a "Tutorial Survey" link at the bottom of
the main left-hand menu. Is that meant to be there, given that the tutorials
all seem to have their own survey link embedded within their own page?

Carmen, I'm having trouble with the "Preview in app" export feature. After
making changes on the web, I'm deleting the local copy on my phone and
generating a new preview export on the website. However when I enter the
password and download the new version it doesn't actually have any of my
changes -- it's still the old one! Any idea of what I might be doing wrong?

Also for Carmen: I'm a bit confused by the "Speakers" list in the main menu.
It doesn't seem to contain all of the speakers, but I can't figure out
what the pattern is of who is included and who's not. Is it just something
left over that should be deleted? Or should it be updated to include everyone?

I also ran another data export to pull a few last minute changes. There were
only a few, so I've gone ahead and made all the changes to the guide already.
I'm just mentioning it here and attaching the latest data export so that if
anyone needs it we can all be working off the same base.

Cheers!

Hmm ok then for the Lyft message I added the info as a custom list. For the Heroku ad I will think about what to do :)

Thanks Carmen.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Hi Carmen -

I was thinking of more of a pop up message when the app is opened. Is that possible? For the banner ads we will have our top sponsor logos appearing.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Hi Carmen,

We need to add in two pop up messages for the Guide. Is it possible? It would be great if we can rotate the two every time the app is opened. If so, below is what we need:

* Lyft discount code. I am attaching the logo that can be used. The text can be:

"COUPON CODE: PYCON
20% off coupon which can be used on 4 rides in the geofenced area. The total discount off each ride cannot exceed $10"

* Keystone sponsor: I am attaching their pop-up design. If this size does not work, please let me know.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Thanks Carmen! I haven't had a chance to check it all out in depth yet, but
what I've seen so far looks good!

I've just run another data export to make sure we've got all the latest
content. I've attached it to this email.

The changes relative to last export (2016-04-13) are:
* Removed poster "Statistical Machine Translation with NLTK (Reloaded)".
* Removed poster "The Art of Turtle Programming".
* Updated info for sponsor tutorial "IBM: Hands-on session:
Developing analytic applications using Apache Spark™ and Python".
* New sponsor tutorial: "Heroku 101: Deploying Python Web Applications".
* Updated speaker name for talk "Diff It To Dig It".
* Updated description for talk "Prototyping New APIs with Flask".
* Updated description for tutorial " Efficient Python for High-Performance
Parallel Computing".
* Removed speaker Al Sweigart.
* Removed speaker Liling Tan.
* Updated bio for speaker Anton Malakhov.
* Updated bio for speaker Russia Madden.
* New sponsor tutorial speaker bio for David Taieb.
* Changed name for speaker Sep Ehr (to Seperman).
* New Coffee Sponsor "Indeed Prime".
* Changed Gold sponsor "Venmo" to "Venmo / Braintree".
* New Job Fair Sponsor "Amazon Web Services".
* New Job Fair Sponsor "Virtustream".
* Updated description for Keystone Sponsor "Heroku".
* New Platinum sponsor "New Relic".
* Updated description for Silver Sponsor "CrossCompute".

Phew! That list is longer than I expected; but most of the changes in it
are pretty small.

Thanks again for getting all the content in so we can preview it. I'll try
to confirm this week (or at the latest next weekend) that those empty files
are meant to be that way and let you know.

All the best,

Felix

This is great - thank you!

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Hi Carmen -

I tried to download the poster for Guidebook promotion but the link is super long. Is there a way to shorten it? I am attaching an image of what it looks like now.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Thanks Carmen!

I can confirm I've now got access (had to click "accept" on the invitation in the top right dropdown menu). I'll look through it over the next few days and let you know if anything comes up.

I'll also get you new cover art & venue details to replace last year's.

FYI - I updated the cover art. Feel free to improve upon it though :)

Hi Carmen,

Thanks for the new link. I am able to view the 2016 guide. Is it OK to already the "promote" section? This way I can print the posters for onsite.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Thanks Carmen!

I can confirm I've now got access (had to click "accept" on the
invitation in the top right dropdown menu). I'll look through it over
the next few days and let you know if anything comes up.

I'll also get you new cover art & venue details to replace last year's.

I know I asked about this in the original email, but is there anything I
can do to make it easier to link speakers to their talks? Last year I
did it manually, but if there's something I can provide like a
spreadsheet in a certain format, I'd be happy to do so. Otherwise I
guess they'll need to be done by hand?

Cheers,

Hi Carmen,

Thank you for working on this. I have an account on https://gears.guidebook.com/ and so does Felix. Mine is under ewa@python.org and I believe Felix's is under felixc@felixcrux.com.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Hi Carmen,

Can we access our guide in gears yet? I would love to be able to access to Guidebook promotional material as I am working on printing signs for our conference this week.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

All right; that should do it! Attached is the latest version of the data.

The most notable change is of course that all the Markdown has been converted
to HTML. There are a few other things included too:

* New posters: "Building Python with Gradle" and "The Breathing Earth"
* New bios: Gina Schmalzle and Stephen Holsapple
* New sponsor: Heroku
* Updated sponsor logos for Clover Health, PDT, and Keystone
* Several updated talk descriptions and speaker bios

How does it look? Let me know if any of the formatting is causing trouble, and
I'd be happy to tweak it some more. Approximately when could we start playing
around with a preview of the guide? Thanks!

--
Felix

That sounds great; thank you for the info! That's pretty much all the kinds
of formatting Markdown has, so that makes things much easier. I'll work on
this over the next few evenings and have an updated version for you later
this week. Thanks for the help!

--
Felix

Sounds good; I'll switch all newlines to <br>s.

The reason I ask about bold etc. is that currently all descriptions (talks,
speakers, tutorials, all of them) are in a text-based format called Markdown
(but I'd be happy to convert it to whatever works for you).

Markdown looks very much like plain text (it's meant to), but it actually
contains formatting instructions. For example, italics are denoted by
surrounding text in asterisks *like this*, and **double asterisks** mean
bold. There's also stuff like links, and headings, which look like:

### I'm a heading!

You can see some examples of this in the tutorials_schedule.csv file. Check
out the tutorial called "Making an Impact with Python Natural Language
Processing Tools". You can see how it looks online here:
https://us.pycon.org/2016/schedule/presentation/1778/

Note how the description contains text like:
### Python Development Environment
and how that becomes a headline on the web page. There are also links, like
the one that reads: "[Python](http://python.org)". Finally, there's text
that shows up in a fixed-width font using backticks (`), like `virtualenv`.

Those examples would typically be translated into HTML tags like <h3>, <a>,
and <pre> or <code>.

If you can summarize for me what formatting exactly the app can handle, I
can convert everything to use it. For things that aren't supported (like
bold) I'll at least remove the extra stuff, so we don't get silly
double-asterisks in the app text.

Sorry for the mixup; I don't know what formatting the app can use, so I left
everything in Markdown and mentioned it in the original email. I'd be happy
to convert it to whatever works! Cheers,

--
Felix

No problem; I'll get that to you ASAP. Would it be better to use line breaks (<br>) or paragraphs (<p>)? If it doesn't matter I'll likely go with paragraphs.

What about other formatting, like Markdown headings; should they be turned into <h1>s etc? Bolded text that's currently **like this** into <strong> or <b>? Or is everything else fine?

Cheers,

--
Felix

--
Felix

Hi again!

Please find attached the latest version of the data for the guide.

Is there an ETA on when we could start playing around with a rough draft? It
would be helpful even if it's in an incomplete state, since it would let us
figure out what we might be overlooking. Currently I don't see anything for
this year when I log on to https://builder.guidebook.com/#/guides/.

There are a number of changes in this version of the data:
* New sponsors: Flowroute and Netflix.
* Sponsor logo changed: House Canary.
* New/updated sponsor tutorials.
* Schedules now show actual room to be used, not just e.g. "Session A".
* Speaker bios added/updated.

Let me know if you need anything! Cheers,

--
Felix

Hi Carmen,

Please find attached an initial attempt at bundling up all the content
into a usable export. I hope it's workable enough to get things going,
but I'll follow up shortly with whatever is else is needed.

The attached zip file should contain comma-separated (.csv) files with
the details of all the talks, speakers, etc. The first line of each file
has headings describing what each column is. Note that some rows
(particularly speaker bios and talk descriptions) contain embedded
newlines, but all of those entries should additionally be enclosed in
double quotation marks. The files are UTF-8 encoded, and several of the
speakers do have names containing non-ASCII characters like 'Ł', 'é',
etc, so that's worth watching out for. There are also logo images for
all the sponsors in the zip file.

*Talk descriptions are currently exported as raw, unprocessed,
Markdown*. I'm not sure what kind of formatting Guidebook supports, so
I've left that as-is for now. If there's something more useful I can
convert it to, just let me know. I do think we'll want to figure out how
to process that formatting and get it reflected in the app, though.

There's currently nothing in the data export that *links speakers to
their talks*, which I know the app can do. If there's some data format
that can be bulk-imported to your systems to get that automatically,
just let me know and I'd be happy to work on it. In previous years,
however, we just linked them up manually.

Please don't hesitate to *let me know if there's any way I can process
or rework the data* to make it easier for you/your tools to work with --
the nice thing about being a programming conference is we're generally
happy to build our own tools to make things simpler! I would much rather
put in the work on my end to automate whatever data processing you need
to make it possible to bulk-upload changes, instead of having you or me
need to go in and fix things manually one-by-one.

At present, this is the* list of issues/missing data *that I'm aware of
and am working on:
* Keynote speakers are not included in the speaker bios.
* Plenary sessions (e.g. keynotes, opening remarks) are just listed as
"plenary" with no description in the schedule.
* Special events (e.g. PyLadies auction, 5K run, dinners) are not
included in the schedule (special_events_schedule.csv is empty).
* Meals/breaks show up once per track/room, but they really should just
be listed once.
* "Special" pages such as venue information, code of conduct, etc. may
need to be input manually - I don't mind doing it.
* Speaker photos are not included (maybe that's OK -- we didn't have
them last year either).
* As mentioned earlier, some text is in raw Markdown; and I don't know
if that's a format Guidebook can ingest.
* Floor plan map is on its way, and we'll need to link talks to the room
they're in.
* Some general information still TBD; I will get it to you ASAP
(see below).

Finally, here's the *info your requested in in the Guide Basics
spreadsheet*:
Guide Name: PyCon 2016
Guide Start Date: 2016-05-28
Guide End Date: 2016-06-05
Timezone: Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) (UTC -7)
General Information, Venue, Icon, Cover Image, Maps: I will get these to
you ASAP, or just fill them in myself and let you know.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/us.pycon.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pycon
YouTube: Not set up yet, will let you know
Photos: No (I think, for now at least)
RSS Feed: http://pycon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Homepage: https://us.pycon.org/2016/
Feedback/Surveys: I believe we'll use this, but I don't think the survey
has been designed yet. Will get it to you.
Notifications: Sure, let's have this.
My Schedule: Definitely want this feature.
Notes: Sounds good.
Live polling: I don't think we'll use this.

All right, I think that's most of it for now? Sorry for the enormous
email; I'm trying to be very thorough both to keep everyone in the loop
and to remind myself of exactly what work I still need to do!

Again, please don't hesitate to let me know if I can change or process
the data in any way to make it easier for you, or if anything in the
export looks weird -- it's all automated, so it's entirely possible
something broken snuck through without human review.

Cheers; all the best!

--
Felix

Hi Carmen,

Thank you for checking in!

I am not yet ready to start this yet. I will begin the process on Friday of this week and I will ping you if there are any questions.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Yes, that is my cell phone number. Talk to you tomorrow!

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Hi Carmen,

Let's chat at 1pm PT tomorrow.

Have a good afternoon!

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Hi Carmen,

Are you available this afternoon? I am available any time now until about 4pm CT.

Best regards,

Ewa
Director of Operations
Python Software Foundation
Cell: 415-319-5237

Hi Ewa,

I would like to introduce you to our awesome guide building team! They are the experts that will handle the data entry for you, and will work to create an easy to use event guide. I have shared your event information with the customer success team, and someone will be contacting you within one business day to get started on your guide. Good luck!

Best,

Katie

--
Katie Herrgesell
Sr. Corporate Account Manager
Office: 650.319.7233 ext 126
Mobile: 216.570.0531
www.guidebook.com