Funding a Python conference the year AI learned to write Python

In 2007 I started studying Computer Science without even knowing what printing text on a screen meant. My first real project was a text editor in C, and I remember the moment it clicked: this goes so much further than I thought.

Nineteen years later, I spent my evenings trying to convince companies to pay for a Python conference, in the same year an AI learned to write Python for them. This is what happens behind PyConES 2026 Barcelona, seen from inside the sponsorship team.

How I got here

Isra and I met studying at the UPC. Years later, when I came back to Barcelona, we ended up working at the same company, Perk. Life has a funny way of going full circle. He has been part of Python España for years, and when PyConES was coming to Barcelona for the first time, he asked if I wanted to join the sponsorship team.

I won’t pretend I knew much about sponsorships. What I did know was the other side of the table. I had been sending talk proposals for years, and I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at PyConES and EuroPython, twice each. Every time I got in, I tried to convince Perk to come along as a sponsor too.

So I had stood at our stand, representing the company, many times. I knew what a company needs from a conference, what it is looking for, and what makes someone inside it say yes. That, it turned out, was what I could bring.

And in the interest of honesty: this year, Perk is the main sponsor.

November evenings

I started in November 2025, reading other people’s sponsorship pages at night. EuroPython, other PyCons, anything that could tell me how someone else had solved the problem I had just signed up for: how do you ask companies to fund something that belongs to the community?

EuroPython was the reference I kept coming back to, so we followed its model: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and a single main sponsor at the top.

The whole thing is built around Gold, at €6,000. It is the most affordable package that is also the most balanced, and the tiers above it are there to make that obvious. There are only six Gold spots, so once they are gone, companies have to choose.

Some of the details came from having been on the other side of the table. More and more companies ask their suppliers to register on a procurement platform: create an account, fill in forms, upload documents. That work falls on the Python España volunteers organising the conference, and with many sponsors it adds up fast. So “extra paperwork” is only included in some tiers.

Another detail: this year, sponsors are invited to the speakers’ dinner. That is where the most active people in the community actually sit down and talk.

Then there was the brochure. Every company asks for it first. For years that meant a PDF. This time I wanted a URL, so the dossier became a web page: no layout to fight with, one link to send, and always up to date. It shows which spots are left and who has taken them, and when a new question comes in, the answer is live in minutes.

January

We opened sponsorship in January 2026. It was the month Claude Code changed how a lot of people thought about writing software. It was a revolution, no doubt about it, and companies got scared, or simply did not know how to react.

Almost every conversation was hard. I honestly thought we were going to have a funding problem.

The question was always there, even when nobody said it out loud: if an AI can write your code, why would anyone pay for a conference about a programming language?

I have thought about that a lot, and I think the answer is the opposite of what it seems. These models do cognitive work that is genuinely extraordinary, and when Claude Code hands you a solution, very often it is Python. You had better understand what it is doing. These models might have happened some other way, but in the history we actually have, Python was the flagship.

PyConES is about the language and the technology behind it. Python core developers come to give talks. Engineers bring what they are building. It is a bridge that brings together a community that is changing the world. If anything, the companies building frontier models should be there too.

Then it turned

I still cannot tell you exactly what changed. But at some point, companies started coming back. Many reached out on their own, interested in a conference in Barcelona, one of the big tech hubs in Europe.

I think they realised you cannot replace engineers with a system. You still have to understand the code you ship. Yes, the code these models write is very good. It can do impressive things. It also gets things wrong, and when you take something to production, everything changes.

All six Gold spots are sold. All three Platinum spots are sold. Six of the ten Silver spots are taken. We reached the budget we were aiming for with more than a month to go before the doors open on November 6, in the Historic Building of the University of Barcelona.

That money is what keeps tickets cheap for three days with meals included. It pays for childcare, for diversity grants, and for live sign language interpretation.

The way I see it, a conference like this sits where three worlds meet. Companies want visibility and, yes, they want to hire. Their engineers want to show what they are building. And then there is the community, which goes far beyond anyone who pays: people using Python for biology, physics, medicine, and thousands of things none of us would think of. Python España and the sponsors go hand in hand. Without them, none of this happens.

A team I have never met

All of this happened on top of my job at Perk. The only way I found to make it work was to be strict. During the day I was on Discord to answer quick questions, but I would not dig into anything. The real work happened in the evenings, at home, in blocks I kept just for this: writing to sponsors, following up, negotiating. Otherwise you end up chewing on it all day, and I would rather switch off until I sit down and actually do it.

There are five or six of us working actively on sponsorship. We live in different places, so it has all happened on Discord, going round and round on how to bring companies in and how to make the event more attractive and more inclusive. Apart from Isra, whom I see at the office, we have never sat at the same table. The first time will be in November, at the conference. Bravo, team.

What I take with me

It has been months of hard work, and we learned so much that a second PyConES in Barcelona would be far easier to run.

If Python gets you excited, if you like building things with it, the kind of things that have changed the world, this is your place. It is an open, accessible community, and you understand each other straight away. Being part of putting it together has been an honour.

Everything started with printing text on a screen. This is where it led.