from turku import archipylago

print(f'Hello {archipylago.community}')

Introduction

Hi there, I'm Juhis. I'd like to tell you about our new community.

The first tech conference I ever attended was PyCon Finland right here in Turku in 2011. I was a second year computer science student and the conference was conveniently organized at the campus and the student ticket was cheap. I listened to a couple of talks and got a cool conference badge to take home.

The first tech conference talk I gave was few years later in PyCon Finland 2016. Ever since I've traveled around Europe attending and speaking at various Python meetups and conferences: Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tallinn, Berlin, Prague, Ostrava and Amsterdam to name a few.

I would say Python community is where my heart is and where I feel most at home. Now it's time for to start a new Python community here in Turku.

Archipylago, a play on the words archipelago and Python, is a developer community where we organize monthly events: meetups, sprints and casual gatherings. We want to foster a welcoming community for both beginners and experienced developers alike. That's always been a guiding idea in all the communities I've ended up building.

I'm grateful that Dan joined on the idea, came up with the fantastic name and is part of the team getting this community going.

Over the years, Turku has had wonderful Python communities and activities from aforementioned PyCon Finland to meetups organized by Python Turku and most recently Turku.py. We're building on top of that and hope that people who've been active in those communities in the past will join us.

Our plans

We are starting with 8 main events for 2024 with additional social gatherings sprinkled in. From there, we see where the community takes us.

The first draft of 2024 calendar looks like this:

• January: meetup
• February: sprint
• March: meetup
• April: sprint
• May through August: summer break
• September: meetup
• October: sprint
• November: meetup
• December: sprint

This means 4 meetups and 4 sprints. But nothing is set to stone yet and we do want to get the community involved in organizing these things.

For meetups, we follow the classic meetup style: an evening event with a 2-3 talks about Python and related topics, hosted at different company offices and time for chatting and making new friends.

For sprints, we are organizing hands-on "bring your own laptop" style events, possibly on Saturdays where we either go through some workshops, work on open source projects or take a look at new tech or library and hack away together.

For social gatherings, we'll organize something where we leave laptops home and get together for afterworks, lunches, and so on where there's no organized and scheduled program but a way for the people in the community to get to know each other.

We would be happy to hear your thoughts on these plans.

Join us

If you're a developer interested in Python, join us in TurkuDev discord's archipylago channels and register in Meetabit to make sure you don't miss out when we start sharing information of the upcoming events.

If you work in a company that uses Python, how about you host our meetup? Get in touch either in Discord or via email (juhamattisantala at gmail.com) and let's chat!

And if you'd like to share something in an upcoming meetup or sprint, get in touch too! You don't need to be an expert presenter or a seasoned senior developer: everyone's welcome and we can help you with your presentation too.

We are part of a larger developer community collective under the umbrella of TurkuDev together with our friends Aurajoki Overflow, Turku ♥ Frontend and Turku WordPress meetup.

Together, let's make this a great Python community.

PS. We are missing a logo

If there are any graphically talented individuals in our community, we're looking for a logo. In our vision, the logo of archipylago would be a long snake, kinda like a sea monster, that dips in and out of the water with the words "archi", "py" and "lago" on top of its over-the-water body parts.

Before we go out and buy one, we'd love to see if anyone in the community would like to contribute and leave their mark in our shared future history.