No More Spreadsheets! Building PyLadiesCon Infrastructure with Python and Django

Mariatta

PyLadiesCon is an online conference for the Global PyLadies community. It is one of a kind conference with programming spans 24 hours and offering talks and contents in multiple languages. Run entirely by volunteers, we face unique challenges specific to the nature of our conference.

One of the ways we have been managing the various aspects of PyLadiesCon is by using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets for volunteer sign ups, spreadsheets for program scheduling, spreadsheets for sponsorship. Any information you want about the conference, we have a spreadsheet for that.

While spreadsheets are great for capturing data, they come with drawbacks when it comes to online collaboration with various team members, causing frustrations and confusion among our team of volunteers.

In 2025, PyLadiesCon team said no to spreadsheets and instead started building our conference infrastructure: an open source web app for managing various aspects of our conference. Learn more our challenges in managing the online PyLadiesCon conference, and how we're solving our problems with Python and Django. Contribute to the project, and support the PyLadies community.