pyOpenSci at SciPy 2025 - science, Python and Community

pyOpenSci at SciPy 2025: Community, Contribution, and Packaging Know-How

We’re heading to SciPy 2025 in Tacoma, Washington, and we couldn’t be more excited to connect with the incredible scientific Python community in person! This year, we’re showing up with tutorials, conversations, and community-driven events designed to support open science and lower the barrier to contributing to open source.

Here’s how you can connect with us throughout the conference:

Learn Packaging with pyOpenSci (Tutorial)

pyOpenSc is back this year, teaching a hands-on tutorial on Python packaging for scientific software. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to strengthen your skills, this session is for you. You’ll leave with a better understanding of how to create Python packages that are shareable, reusable, and aligned with scientific best practices.

When: Monday, July 7, 2025, at 1:00 pm PDT
Where: Room 613/614, Greater Tacoma Convention Center
Learn more / Register: SciPy 2025 Tutorial: Learn Packaging with pyOpenSci
Who’s teaching:

Leah Wasser: Executive Director and founder of pyOpenSci and open science community builder
Carol Willing: Long-time Python core developer and Jupyter contributor
Jeremiah Paige: Pythonista and packaging expert
Tetsuo Koyama: Software engineer and scientific open source contributor
Inessa Pawson: Open Source program manager at Open Teams, and advocate for inclusive open source

Note: Tutorial registration is separate from your main conference ticket, so grab your spot early if you want in!

BoF: Let’s Talk About Python Packaging Pain Points

When: Thursday, July 10, 2025, 1:15–2:10 pm PDT
Where: Room 315, Greater Tacoma Convention Center

We’re thrilled to be hosting a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session this year—a full-circle moment, since pyOpenSci first kicked off with a BoF at SciPy in 2019. This time, we’re gathering folks to talk candidly about the pain points and friction in Python packaging for scientific software. Join us for an interactive session. Share your pain points to help direct the work that pyOpenSci does over the upcoming year, and learn how to get involved.

About the BoF

This Birds of a Feather session invites attendees to join a community conversation around the challenges and solutions in packaging scientific software using Python. From figuring out where to start with packaging to troubleshooting wheels, reproducibility, and publishing to PyPI or conda-forge, we know many of these steps aren’t well-documented or can feel overwhelming.

This session is a space for maintainers, contributors, and users to share:

What’s worked and what hasn’t in their packaging journey
Resources, tools, or templates that have helped
Ideas for how the community can better support each other

Open Code, Open Science — What’s Getting in Your Way?

Collaborating on code and software is essential to open science—but it’s not always easy. Join this BoF for an interactive discussion on the real-world challenges of open source collaboration. We’ll explore common hurdles like Python packaging, contributing to existing codebases, and emerging issues around LLM-assisted development and AI-generated software contributions.

We’ll kick off with a brief overview of pyOpenSci—an inclusive community of Pythonistas, from novices to experts—working to make it easier to create, find, share, and contribute to reusable code. We’ll then facilitate small-group discussions and use an interactive Mentimeter survey to help you share your experiences and ideas.

Your feedback will directly shape pyOpenSci’s priorities for the coming year, as we build new programs and resources to support your work in the Python scientific ecosystem. Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned developer, you’ll leave with clear ways to get involved and make an impact on the broader Python ecosystem in service of advancing scientific discovery.

Session Conveners:

Leah Wasser – Executive Director and Founder of pyOpenSci
Inessa Pawson – Open Teams Open Source Program Manager, NumPy Steering Council Member
Tetsuo Koyama – Scientific computing and visualization developer, PyVista team
Jeremiah Paige – Python packaging expert
Avik Basu – Scientific open source contributor

Sprint With Us!

When: July 12-13, 2025
Details: Breakfast at 8:00 a.m., Kickoff at 9:00 a.m.

Join us during the SciPy sprint weekend to work on real-world problems in open science.

You can help us:

Improve and write documentation
Review tutorials
Translate our Python packaging guide
Contribute to our infrastructure

Our sprints are:

Beginner-friendly
Focused on Python packaging, documentation, and translation
Collaborative and welcoming

No prior open source experience? No problem. We’ve got guided lessons and mentors ready to help you take your first (or next!) step as a contributor.

Check out our help-wanted project board to get a sense of some of the ways you can contribute or help pyOpenSci during the event.

You won’t want to miss these pyOpenSci community member talks

Make sure to support members of the pyOpenSci community who are speaking or presenting at SciPy 2025!

Let’s cheer each other on, learn together, and continue making open science more accessible!

pyOpenSci Community Member Tutorials

Shiny for Python – Building Production-Ready Dashboards

When: Tuesday, July 8th, 2025, 1:30–5:30 pm PDT Where: Ballroom D, Greater Tacoma Convention Center

If you’re ready to level up your Python dashboards, don’t miss Daniel Chen’s hands-on workshop at SciPy 2025: Shiny for Python – Building Production-Ready Dashboards. Held on July 8, this half-day session will walk you through creating scalable web applications using Shiny’s new Python framework. You’ll learn to refactor apps with modules, write tests with Playwright, and deploy dashboards for free.

Daniel brings deep teaching experience from his roles at Posit and UBC, making this ideal for Python users looking to expand into interactive web development—even if you’ve never touched Shiny before.

Check out the dashboard templates in advance: Shiny for Python Templates

Reproducible ML Workflows with pixi

When: **Monday, July 7th, 2025, 1:30–5:30 pm PDT Where: **Room 315, Greater Tacoma Convention Center

Don’t miss Reproducible Machine Learning Workflows for Scientists with pixi—a practical, hands-on tutorial at SciPy 2025 led by data physicist Matthew Freikert. This half-day workshop tackles one of the most frustrating pain points in scientific computing: building reproducible, CUDA-enabled environments across diverse machines.

Matthew will walk participants through using Pixi, an fast, and efficient environment manager that supports conda, to create robust Python workflows with PyTorch and JAX. You’ll learn to install hardware-accelerated environments, solve for multi-platform lock files, and deploy them via container images—no prior CUDA or ML expertise required.

Come prepared to code and leave with a repeatable setup for your AI/ML experiments.

Learn more about pixi: https://pixi.sh

3D Visualization with PyVista

When: **Monday, July 7th, 2025, 1:30–5:30 pm PDT Where: Ballroom D, Greater Tacoma Convention Center

Get ready to bring your data to life in 3D Visualization with PyVista, a hands-on SciPy 2025 tutorial led by PyVista co-creator Bane Sullivan and core developer Tetsuo Koyama. Taking place July 7, this session will introduce you to PyVista—a Pythonic interface to VTK that makes 3D plotting as intuitive as using Matplotlib.

Used in over 2,000 open-source projects, PyVista is the go-to library for interactive 3D visualization across fields like engineering, geophysics, and scientific computing. You’ll explore real-world datasets, master PyVista’s data structures and filters, and learn how to integrate with libraries like meshio and trimesh. Plus, you’ll get hands-on with Jupyter plugins for server- and client-side rendering.

Whether you’re a Python beginner or a power user looking to deepen your visualization toolkit, this tutorial is for you.

Get set up before the workshop: https://tutorial.pyvista.org/getting-started.html#installation

pyOpenSci Community Member Talks

Packaging a Scientific Python Project

When: **Wednesday, July 9th, 2025, 1:55–2:25 pm PDT Where: Room 317, Greater Tacoma Convention Center

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the rapidly evolving Python packaging ecosystem, Henry Schreiner’s talk at SciPy 2025 is a must-attend. In Packaging a Scientific Python Project, Henry walks attendees through best practices for preparing scientific software for distribution using the Scientific Python Development Guide—an evolving resource he helped author.

This session covers everything from backend selection and GitHub Actions to packaging compiled components with tools like scikit-build-core, pybind11, and cibuildwheel. Henry will also demo the repo-review tool, which checks your project against current best practices—right in the browser using WebAssembly.

Whether you’re starting a new package or upgrading an old one, you’ll walk away with modern workflows and tooling that make robust, reproducible packaging less painful—and more powerful.

Connect with us

There are lots of ways to get involved if you are interested!

If you read through our lessons and want to suggest changes, open an issue in our lessons repository here.
Volunteer to be a reviewer for pyOpenSci’s software review process.
Submit a scientific Python package to pyOpenSci for peer review.
Donate to pyOpenSci to support scholarships for future training events and the development of new learning content.
Check out our volunteer page for other ways to get involved.

pyOpenSci at SciPy 2025 - science, Python and Community

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