[Python-africa] PyCon Zimbabwe

[Anna Makarudze]

Dear Pythonistas,

How are you all? I am doing fine and hope you are all well.

On behalf of the organisers of PyCon Zimbabwe 2016, our very first PyCon by
the way,we would like to thank you all for the support you gave us before
and during our conference. We would like to appreciate all who took part in
setting up as well as publicizing our crowdfunding project which was our
main source of funding for the event. Sorry, I will not name you in this
post but  we are so grateful for your support.

We would like to tell you that PyCon Zimbabwe was a success. We were hoping
for 60 participants and we managed to get 59 registered participants so we
missed our target by 1! We also had visitors from USA, Amanda Gelender from
GitHub and Mike Place from Saltstack as our keynote speakers. We had our
own Gabriel Nhinda from UNAM, Namibia and Petrus from Cape Town, South
Africa as part of the speakers line up.

I will not get into details about the logistics though everything was fine
for a first conference. What challenged me most was the inspiration in all
the talks given at PyCon Zimbabwe. We only had 4 international speakers and
the rest were local and they gave superb presentations to our amazement as
organisers. We were both shocked and stunned with the response from a
Python community we had no idea of its existence. We hope to start meeting
as PyLadies soon and we also hope to start partnerships with some of the
universities represented at the PyCon next year to help advance Python in
Zimbabwe.

All our troubles, all our efforts and all the challenges we faced were
worth PyCon Zimbabwe. It was a great conference and we also managed to
introduce 20 men and women to Python and Django through a Django Girls
workshop.

All I can say in short is, PyCon Zimbabwe was an awesome conference, you
should have been there to witness for yourself!

That's from me. Humphrey can also tell you his side of the story!

Kind regards,

Anna
PyCon Zimbabwe Organiser
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