Sponsors

Praekelt Foundation

Praekelt Foundation builds open source, scalable mobile technologies and solutions to improve the health and wellbeing of people living in poverty. Our programmes have reached over 50 million people across 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Foundation was founded in early 2007 by Gustav Praekelt and Robin Miller in response to the opportunities created by the rapid and unprecedented spread of mobile phones across Africa. Gustav, a digital entrepreneur and obsessive technologist, recognised how many of the mobile technologies his consultancy developed could be used to give communities access to services and information which had previously been inaccessible.

Our Python Projects

Jmbo

Jmbo is a CMS built on Django enabling you to rapidly build multilingual web and mobi sites with the minimum amount of code and customization. Say Jmbo (that’s Jaambo) to a new way of creating and publishing content for mobile phones!

Read more at jmbo.org -- or grab the code from github.com/praekelt/jmbo.

Vumi

A super-scalable conversation engine for delivering SMSes, star menus and chat messages. It’s event-driven and built on top of Twisted, RabbitMQ and Riak and comes with a great set of unit tests.

Read more at vumi.org -- or grab the code from github.com/praekelt/vumi.

St James Software

St James Software is a Cape Town-based software company developing a web-based product in Python used by clients all over the world, predominantly in the industrial process control sector.

Our main product, j5, is a market leader in configurable, web-based control room logging applications. This replaces paper-based logbooks and non-scalable systems such as spreadsheets, and becomes a central planning, communication and reporting tool for the people operating an industrial plant, with a view to safety and environmental compliance. It contains our own application-building framework, and some standard applications - a shift handover system, task planning system, etc. We also create customized applications for our clients, and are expanding the set of products we develop as a result.

Our largest customer bases are in the petrochemical and refining industry (oil refineries, liquified natural gas production and distribution, gas pipelines, etc), and power generation and distribution. We also have clients in many other industries including utilities, mining, railway, academia and nuclear research (synchrotrons!).

We were established in 1999, and started developing Python web applications in 2002. The principal libraries we use are sqlalchemy, cherrypy, genshi and dojo. We're also developing mobile applications that take our products into the field. We have a friendly and diverse team (currently 15 developers, plus project managers, QA and documentation and admin people), with a mixture of work from home/office, and an agile approach to development. We like cake, and we're very excited about PyConZA :)

2go

2go is a mobile messaging app for feature phones and smart phones that allows free messaging between friends as well as a place to meet new people. 2go has over 10 million active users across Africa, principally in Nigeria and South Africa, delivering over 7 billion messages per month.

Google

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's mission in Africa is to make the internet an integral part of every day life in Africa, by increasing it's relevance and usefulness, eliminating access barriers for potential users, and developing products that are meaningful for the countries in the region. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Google seeks to inspire developers everywhere by providing them with information and resources, training, and entrepreneurial support.Google works with many developer communities, and most closely with the independently led Google Developer Groups (GDGs). There are 3 recognized GDGs in South Africa (Cape Town and Pretoria and Wits University) and over 50 more on the African continent. These groups meet up, to organize bootcamps, workshops, hackathons and bigger events like Barcamps for the wider technologist community.

For more information on Google's developer offerings visit developers.google.com.

For more information on our activities in Africa, visit our Africa Blog, google-africa.blogspot.com/ or follow us on Twitter twitter.com/googleafrica.

Amazon

Help build the cloud!

In 2005 Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened a Development Centre in Cape Town. In 2006 the Cape Town team launched Amazon EC2. In 2012, Amazon is building an AWS Support group based in Cape Town.

What do we do?

The Cape Town based Development Center plays a central role in building the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the web service that pioneered cloud computing.

AWS Support provides global technical support to a wide range of external customers as they build mission-critical applications on top of AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.

What do we need?

Exceptional Engineers with very strong technical skills and experience. You should be obsessed with customer satisfaction, have a background in computer science and be passionate about cloud computing.

RSAWEB

Established in 2001, RSAWEB has extensive industry experience. Our commitment to customer service excellence and our in depth technical understanding, allows us to retain partnerships with some of SA's leading brands from a wide array of sectors.

We take pride in offering our clients the best in service and support, and our SLA's ensure all clients absolute peace-of-mind, with a 24-hour help-desk fully supporting and monitoring all services. We have invested heavily in our infrastructure and have a strong presence in South Africa and Internationally with data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and POPs (points of presence) in London, Europe and the USA.

We believe that great technology doesn't have to be complex and expensive; our motto 'technology meets life' implies just that. We bridge the gap between IT innovation and everyday life - and our team take pride in doing this every day.

Unomena

Unomena is a digital agency based in Cape Town, South Africa. We focus on solving problems to produce intelligent designs, deliver engaging experiences and build meaningful connections. We work with great clients all over the world to create thoughtful and purposeful products.

Python Software Foundation

The Python Software Foundation is the non-profit organization tasked with promoting, protecting, and advancing the Python language and community. The Foundation runs committees focused on outreach and education, development sprints, trademarks, the python.org infrastructure, and much more. Through donations from individuals and sponsors, and building on the profits of PyCon US, the Foundation is able to fund many projects, awards, and grants around the Python world, including local conferences like PyConZA.

Last year the PSF launched a new type of membership - Associate Membership. Funds raised through the associate membership program support the Foundation's goals and allow for support of more initiatives in the Python community. For more information, please visit psfmember.org.

VOSS

VOSS Solutions is a software company that offers a UC management platform that designs, deploys and operates UC services in the public and/or private cloud.

ThoughtWorks

ThoughtWorks is a software company and community of passionate individuals whose purpose is to revolutionize software design, creation and delivery, while advocating for positive social change. Our clients are people and organizations with ambitious missions; we deliver disruptive thinking and technology to empower them to succeed. In our 20th year, over 2300 ThoughtWorks employees are currently serving clients in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, South Africa, Uganda, the U.K., and the U.S. Over the years we've made significant contributions to the Open Source community via projects like CruiseControl, Selenium, NUnit and JMock, and ThoughtWorks is home to some of the world's leading developers. We are at the forefront of the Agile, DevOps and Cloud Computing space, and wrote the book on Continuous Delivery. We also quite like Python!




PyConZA brought to you by Praekelt Foundation