How we became what we are

Minsk Python Meetup has run since 2013. The shape of the community changed most clearly in the second half of 2018: talk of independence, several partners instead of one main host, experiments with new formats, and — a year later — the first full stretch of that model.

Timeline

1. 14 June 2013 — first meetup

   In early summer 2013 Wargaming asked why Minsk had plenty of Python developers but no local “interest club,” and set out to start a Python community with monthly meetups. The first evening, on 14 June, drew about 140 people of roughly 200 registrations, with four talks — Alexander Semenyuk, Stas Rudakou, and Nikita Lesnikov (Wargaming) and Alexander Zaitsev (Caspowa). Wargaming’s own write-up is on Habr.

   Maksim Melnikau and Maksim Kulsha were part of the early core. Kulsha already represented Wargaming as a Python Software Foundation sponsor from April 2013.

2. Late 2013–2014 — a community meetup that still depended on Wargaming

   The archived Python Wiki page described Minsk Python as a monthly informal meeting organised with help from local companies, with organising work “open, but not public”: if you wanted to help, you approached active people, and a lot of backstage work stayed invisible. Free-microphone slots appeared in announcements. Outside speakers already widened the circle — for example Andrey Vlasovskikh in November 2013 and Roman Imankulov among recurring voices. By April 2014 Dmitry Ovchinnikov had spoken at a meetup (Wargaming’s Habr write-up of the April meetup).

   From November 2013 Tatsiana Tsygan was building Minsk Python Meetup as part of a wider run of professional communities — DataTalks, CG Class, Gamedev Social Club, and others — in a Wargaming employer-brand role that lasted through November 2016. She stayed with the community after that job ended.

3. ~2015 — second organising wave, and a wider ecosystem

   Around 2015 Darya Filonchyk joined the organising circle. She had been at Wargaming since September 2014, first as a copywriter; from September 2016 her work there included recruitment, brand marketing, and event promotion. The first PyCon Belarus ran on 31 January 2015. The Python Software Foundation’s write-up describes it as the first such conference held in Belarus, a one-day event at EventSpace with Wargaming among the sponsors. Dmitry Ovchinnikov, already a Minsk Python Meetup speaker in 2014 and a member of the community, moderated the conference’s first track. Monthly meetups were still described as held with Wargaming’s support, with talk proposals going to company infrastructure such as meetup@wargaming.net.

4. 30 November 2016 — the ownership problem, already named

   After visiting Boston Python, Stas published a comparison note: Minsk meetups “have always been organized by Wargaming” — venue, food, photo/video, sometimes speakers from out of town — and that made the meetup feel company-owned, so other people and companies stepped back. He sketched an independent community with several kinds of sponsors and community-led decisions: essentially the shape Minsk Python took in 2018. The later break was not a surprise invented that summer.

5. 2017 — a visible community organising layer

   From 2017 through 2020 Stas Rudakou took on a visible share of the organising: finding speakers, rehearsals and slide reviews, drawing up programmes, organising and moderating. That sat on top of the older company-supported model.

6. Early 2018 — still before the break

   Meetup announcements through the first half of the year still name Wargaming as the supporting company — the same line that had been there since the first meetup.

7. August 2018 — becoming a community

   In the community chat, organisers talked openly about independence and a new funding model: find several partners so meetups stay free; if partners do not appear, consider another format or small contributions. Asked whether Wargaming was stepping back, Tatsiana Tsygan described it as giving up a monopoly on the topic. When someone said a meetup is an event, not a community, she answered that the plan was to turn the meetup into a community. On 16 August 2018, meetup announcements name PandaDoc — the first company besides Wargaming in that year’s write-ups.

8. Late September 2018 — de facto independence

   By the end of September, people in the chat were already saying the community had become fully independent and that its survival depended on the group itself. What followed in practice was multi-partner organising: other venues and companies (PandaDoc, SPACE, bars, free spaces) and an identity closer to a community-driven, non-commercial meetup than to a single-company event.

9. September–October 2018 — new partners and Wagtail Space

   Organisers prepared a pitch for potential partner companies and asked the chat what people valued about the group. In early September Mikalai Saskavets joined the community chat. Later that month, Wagtail Space Minsk was announced there as something the group had not done before: two days of coding instead of “only lecture formats.” The sprint was initiated by Mikalai Radchuk (Torchbox / Wagtail) and organised with Tatsiana and Stas from the Minsk Python community; Saskavets took part as a contributor. iTechArt first appears on 27–28 October 2018, as venue sponsor of that weekend. People in the chat took it as the first Python open-source sprint of that kind in Minsk.

10. 2019 — first full year of the new model

    2019 was not the start of the transformation; it was the first full year of the independent model that emerged in late 2018. The organising circle widened — among others, Mikalai Saskavets joined programme and hosting work alongside Tatsiana, Stas, and newer organisers (Sergey Khaletskiy and Andrei Sviridov among them). On 15 May 2019 the meetup programme included both a talk on Django contributing (aimed at people unsure whether they should open a PR to a large project) and Профессиональное сообщество. Куда и как дальше движемся — a discussion of what a professional community is and where to go next.

    On 14 September 2019 the community held a sixth-anniversary full-day meetup at SUP (Masherova 11/1) — registration from 10:00, programme until evening, four main talks plus a free microphone — rather than a typical weekday evening. Speakers from the organising circle included Andrei Sviridov, Sergey Khaletskiy, and Mikalai Saskavets. A short recap video is on YouTube. There was no separate Minsk Python Hacktoberfest that year.

    By late 2019 the multi-partner pattern was already working in practice: for the 28 November meetup, Evolution Gaming provided Event Space and iTechArt supported video; for the 26 December meetup, PandaDoc provided the venue, LeverX/emerline supported the festive side, and iTechArt again supported video. See Partners over the years.

11. 2020 — Pet Projects, then Hacktoberfest

    Classic lecture-style Timepad meetups paused after December 2019 (the next listed regular meetup is 31 March 2021). February skipped a normal meetup because of PyCon Belarus (21–22 February). The community did not go quiet: from late February a hands-on Tuesday format — Python Pet Projects — carried most of the activity, then in October the first dedicated Hacktoberfest gatherings under the meetup banner (Mikalai Saskavets and Tatsiana Tsygan among the organisers). That Hacktoberfest series continued in later Octobers; see the Hacktoberfest hub.

12. 2021 — online meetups resume, then stop

    Regular online meetups returned on 31 March 2021 (after a long break). On 20 October 2021 organisers tried an offline evening “as in the old days,” with a stream and COVID rules for in-person guests. On 18 November 2021 they framed a return to monthly online meetings — organised with help from On The Spot and Orca Security — and that livestream turned out to be the last regular meetup. Recording on YouTube. After that evening there were no further regular online or offline meetups. By about 2021–2022 almost all of the older meetup partnership had ended.

13. 2021 onward — Hacktoberfest keeps going

    What remained as the community’s recurring public format was Hacktoberfest: online kick-offs (and, in 2020, a Final Night) without company partners. After the first edition in 2020, the community returned in 2021, then again in 2024 and 2025. October open-source meetups became the main way the group still gathers in public.

Python Pet Projects, 2020

After PyCon Belarus, on 25 February 2020, the first Python Pet Projects meeting ran at SUP. Tatsiana described it as gathering in that format for the first time: bring your own work, help each other, preferably open source, preferably Python, optionally in small groups. About 13–14 people showed up — among the work that day were small bots, PyVideo-related tasks, and an early version of a new community site.

10 March was a second offline/hybrid evening at SUP with only about four people on site, while Discord voice was already in use. Two weeks later, on 24 March, COVID pushed the gathering fully online. The same week the content of the format shifted: with few people ready to lead invented pet projects, organisers decided to spend more time helping existing open-source projects — features, fixes, review, even triage.

On 7 April a session focused on Wagtail again: Belarusian localisation moved roughly from about 35% to 50%, plus work on a developer demo deploy. That is the same upstream project Tatsiana had worked on at Wagtail Space Minsk 2018. After that, the meetings settled into a weekly Tuesday rhythm (Hangouts, then Discord) through spring.

On 28 May those Tuesday sessions produced a public community website — minskpython.github.io — framed as a site for the meetups and for the wider local Python community.

By June, Hacktoberfest was already being explained in the working chat. On 18 June Tatsiana wrote that for several months the community had been meeting on Tuesdays to practice Python and prepare for Hacktoberfest in October.

The original Pet Projects run ended on 7 July 2020: organisers said the meetings had not found a wide response among Minsk Pythonists. A beginner-oriented coding subgroup continued on its own through July–August (talks plus practice). In September the community was invited formally into Hacktoberfest; the first dedicated October events are on the Hacktoberfest 2020 page.

People along the way

Current Meetup Keepers are listed on the homepage. Below is a short hall of fame for people who organised, moderated, or helped hold the community together — including years when the meetup was still tightly tied to company support.

• Tatsiana Tsygan Active (meetup work from Nov 2013)

  Sponsors, venues, finding speakers, organising and moderating events.

  From November 2013 she was building the meetup as part of her work on professional communities, in a Wargaming employer-brand role through November 2016, and she stayed after that job ended. In 2018 she was central to the independence conversation and helped organise Wagtail Space Minsk.

• Mikalai Saskavets Active (community from 2018; organising from 2019)

  Organising and hosting events, working with speakers, moderating — including Hacktoberfest kick-offs from 2020 onward.

• Alex Zaitsev Active (telegram chats admin; speaker from the first meetup)

  Telegram chat moderation and administration (main Minsk Python Meetup chat and the Python Jobs chat).

  He spoke at the first meetup on 14 June 2013 — the only one of the four speakers not from Wargaming. Still one of the longest bridges into the later community.

• Sergey Khaletskiy Was active 2019–2020

  Drawing up event programmes, organising and moderating events.

• Andrei Sviridov Was active 2019–2020

  Drawing up event programmes, organising and moderating events.

• Stas Rudakou Speaker from 2013; organiser 2017–2020

  Spoke at the first meetup (14 June 2013). In 2016, after visiting Boston Python, he wrote that the meetup felt company-owned. From 2017 to 2020 he found speakers, ran rehearsals and slide reviews, drew up programmes, and organised and moderated — including Wagtail Space with Tatsiana.

• Kirill Vackevich Was active 2020

  After the original Python Pet Projects meetings ended in July 2020, helped lead the self-organised beginner Discord group — talks on Tuesdays and coding practice on other weekdays.

• Ivan Styazhkin Was active around 2019 (Dojo); speaker through 2021

  Ran Coding Dojo Minsk in 2019 (Sunday kata practice). Continued as a meetup speaker into late 2021 — last talk on the community YouTube channel from the 9 December 2021 event.

• Artsiom Siamashka Was active ~2019–early 2020 (Dojo)

  Continued Coding Dojo mentoring and kata work on minsk-python-dojo after Ivan’s visible session commits (GitHub activity as hartred roughly April 2019–March 2020). Also spoke at the meetup — including the May 2019 talk on what a professional community is.

• Maksim Kulsha Founding-era (~2013)

  On the Wargaming employer-branding side of the launch. Represented Wargaming as a PSF sponsor from April 2013 and worked on Minsk Python Meetup events.

• Maksim Melnikau Founding-era (~2013)

  Early technical and open-source face of the meetup. His materials from the August, September, and November 2013 meetings are still on Slideshare.

• Darya Filonchyk Around 2015

  Joined the organising circle around 2015. At Wargaming from September 2014, first as a copywriter, then from September 2016 in digital marketing: recruitment, brand, and event promotion, through August 2018.

• Dmitry Ovchinnikov Organising team from late 2013; speaker by April 2014

  Dmitry was part of the Minsk Python Meetup organising team from late 2013 and spoke by April 2014. At the first PyCon Belarus in January 2015, he was a member of the Minsk Python Meetup community and moderated the conference’s first track.

Partners over the years

These companies and the café hosted or supported meetups while the community still ran regular events. They are listed here as former partners. By about 2021–2022 almost all of that partnership had ended.

The last regular meetup (18 November 2021) was online, with help from On The Spot and Orca Security — watch the recording. Later October gatherings under the Hacktoberfest banner had no company partners.

Café «Beetlejuice»

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