Anwesha Das, over at Law Explained India, was one of the speakers at PyCon India 2016.

(Update: Anwesha rocked Pycon 2017 in Portland. The awesome folks there, seem to have put up the talks in near real time! Anwesha’s talk is here. Check out the rest, here. End update)

And she to me, is a shining beacon of hope, when it comes to actually making it as programmer in this community. All she does, and the way the community responds is heartwarming

A lawyer by trade and a nerd at heart, she along with her team of bravehearts rocked PyLadies at Pycon India. From what (admittedly little) I’ve seen, this fearless group seems to be the only active PyLadies group in the country.

More power to them! And I really, really pray, may their tribe grow! India could do with lots more women, who in my opinion are better at programming than us lads. (And were in fact the first members and drivers of the profession)

Her talk involved around generating awareness about the various software licenses in existence and their application to out software projects.

Being well aware of the ignorance, apathy and/or the strong dislike programmers have towards anything that is not coding, she walked through the various licenses that we could use, illustrating each one with examples.

Notable, was the amount of work she put into a project, where she grabbed and sorted the various licenses for the top few thousand packages on PyPI and used that map to make her points regarding licensing.
You can go have a look-see here.
Not just that, she’s been filing bugs to push developers to adopt a license, in case they did not have one :)

The last third of the talk, (in fact, the meat and potatoes) was on Best Practices for Developers when it came to choosing licenses for the project.

You can actually go read all about it here

Her point, in summary, (besides the how to) was to be intentional about what license you’d choose, to be aware of it’s ramifications, not just on you, but on the users as well.

I hope, PyCon India puts her video (and also the others) online soon.

Thank you, Anwesha. You were awesome!