Download pyconau tweets with Twython. Because of twitter's rate limiting this will take a while to execute. Also, the files wind up pretty large (~300mb per rate limited block)

pyconau_2016_tweets.py

# coding: utf-8
from __future__ import print_function

from datetime import date, timedelta, datetime
import json
from time import sleep

from twython import Twython, TwythonRateLimitError

APP_KEY = 'YOUR_APP_KEY'
APP_SECRET = 'YOUR_APP_SECRET'

twitter = Twython(APP_KEY, APP_SECRET, oauth_version=2)
ACCESS_TOKEN = twitter.obtain_access_token()

twitter = Twython(APP_KEY, access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN)

querystring = '#pyconau OR @pyconau since:{:%Y-%m-%d}'.format(date.today() - timedelta(days=8))
# technically, the max is 7 days, but 8 just to quickly get around timezone shenannigans
querystring_user = 'from:pyconau since:{:%Y-%m-%d}'.format(date.today() - timedelta(days=8))

with open('pyconau_2016_tweets.json', 'wb') as f:
    tweet_ids = set() # avoid adding duplicate tweets if possible
    
    for qs in [querystring, querystring_user]:
        max_id = None
        while True:
            some_results = False
            try:
                cursor = twitter.cursor(twitter.search, q=qs, count=100, max_id=max_id)

                for result in cursor:
                    if result['id'] in tweet_ids:
                        continue
                    
                    f.write(json.dumps(result))
                    f.write('\n')
                    max_id = result['id']
                    some_results = True
                    tweet_ids.add(result['id'])
            except TwythonRateLimitError as e:
                pass

            print(max_id)
            if not some_results:
                # Assume if there are no results, we've finally run out of tweets to be returned by the search query
                break

            # rate limit is 180 requests every 15 minutes. So sleep in between timeouts...
            sleep(60*16) # 16 minutes to be on the safe side

        print("Done", qs, datetime.now().isoformat())

print("Done @pyconau tweets", datetime.now().isoformat())