My mother is 86, and she is declining. Things that used to be easy for her now seem completely foreign. She was a programmer, writing software before I could read, so it is very strange to see her like this.

She no longer uses a computer. If I mention some photos I found online, she asks if there’s any way she can see them, as if she has never used the internet. This is a new reality for me, but is easier than a year or two ago when she still tried to be constantly online. As things got more confusing for her, she struggled and complained “the computer is haunted.” Now she doesn’t have the computer as a source of friction, but also not as a center of activity.

In many ways, she is following a similar path to her own mother, my Grandma O. Like her, my mom is accepting the changes in her relationship to the world. She is able to laugh at it a bit. But it will still be difficult, especially because we know it is a progression that is not going to get better and will very likely get worse.

The new her is very different from the original her. She was not timid. She came out as gay in the mid ‘70s and ran a feminist bookstore. She worked as a programmer. She got a PhD in computational linguistics just because she was interested in the topic. These were the things I was used to hearing about from her. She never lacked for enthusiasms, projects and accomplishments.

She was always energetic and feisty, ready to engage in debate. This picture does a good job capturing the spirit of many of our interactions in the past:

Now she is mild and somewhat resigned. She says things like, “I don’t think much anymore.” I know there are other ways this could go. Some people get very angry as their abilities fade. In that sense, this is a good trajectory, but I am still sad to see her shrink.

Last week we had a family gathering at my sister’s house, the usual location for these big events. My mom has been there many times. But now she didn’t recognize it. I sat with my mom and sister over lunch. They were discussing the dining room we were in. It wasn’t familiar to my mom. She wasn’t upset about it, just looked around and said, “no, I don’t remember this.”

My mom was enjoying her salad, but eating it with her hands. I pointed to the fork on her plate and asked, “You don’t like the fork?” She looked at it as if it was some unimportant detail of the tablecloth, and kept eating with her hands. She wasn’t bothered, just calmly proceeded in her way.

At the end of the party, my mom and her wife Fumiko were getting ready to go. Fumiko had scheduled a ride-share car, so we went out to the street to wait for it. We brought out a chair for my mom to sit. The time for the car came and went, but no car arrived. There were five of us out there: me, my sister and brother, my mother and Fumiko. My brother and Fumiko were trying to figure out where the car was. They were looking through the app for information. They re-read the email confirming the scheduled ride. Should we keep waiting? We could request a new ride. Would we be charged for the missed scheduled ride? It was a whole thing, lots of discussion and questions.

In the middle of this, without warning, my mom tried unsteadily to get up from her chair. Two of us quickly intercepted her. The uneven pavement seemed particularly treacherous for her. We supported her arms to keep her steady.

“Mom, where are you trying to go?”

“I want a place of certainty. This place seems very uncertain.”

She was right: out there on the sidewalk we were all uncertain. But I have to wonder if she was also talking about her larger experience in a world that is less and less understandable for her.

In the back of my mind, I wonder what my own future holds. But that is decades away, and my mother’s situation is now. I don’t know what her next steps down will be like. She has already changed a great deal in the last year.

I think we would all like a place of certainty. I know I would, but I also know I am not going to get it soon.

I saw this dodecahedron with an Islamic-inspired pattern designed by Taj Ragoo. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to make one. I studied the pattern, wrote some Python, and made myself a PDF. I cut it out, folded it, glued it together, and now I have one of my own:

I love that this elegantly combines two pure geometric forms: the Platonic dodecahedron (12 uniform pentagons), and an Islamic pattern using five-pointed stars.

Looking closely, details emerge:

Each face has ten small stars in a ring. I’ve lightened them a bit in the front face here. At the center of each face is a ten-pointed star (highlighted in red), made of two overlaid five-pointed stars.

The real genius of the pattern is at the corners. I’ve highlighted one in blue. It’s a star made of the same parts as the central ten-pointed star, but there are only nine points. It works because three pentagons lying flat touching at a point occupy 324 degrees, leaving a 36-degree gap.

When the dodecahedron is folded together, the gap is closed. 36 degrees is exactly one-tenth of a complete 360-degree circle, so exactly one point of the ten-pointed star is missing, leaving a perfect nine-pointed star using the same shapes, spread over the corners of three pentagons. Beautiful!

If this appeals to you, follow Taj on Instagram: he’s got more Platonic/Islamic mashups to enjoy. The paper versions are just prototypes of the final versions he makes in wood.

Of course, you can get my PDF and make one for yourself:

The Python code to draw the net isn’t great: it has no real parallels to the structure of each face. It’s a lot of math and line drawing to get things in the right places. My ideal would be to have a toolset that used a tile-placing abstraction, to be able to do more interesting designs. Some day.

It was a joy to work on this though. It was a slow process of studying the original, working out the math, then mulling over coding approaches. The code was developed in small steps over weeks. Then printing initial versions, marking them up, working out the tab structure. Some copies were colored to understand how the lines flowed across the whole dodecahedron. It was good to be working in both the mental and physical worlds:

Update: it looks like the design was originally by Dana Awartani: Dodecahedron Within an Icosahedron.

Perhaps because 64 is a power of two, and a square and a cube, but also for other reasons, it pops up in lots of places. Here are some of the things I’ve associated it with over the years:

¶ Crayola 64-crayon box: as a kid, this box seemed like the ultimate luxury, the Rolls-Royce of crayons. So many colors, and the box had a built-in sharpener. Advanced technology!

¶ A chess board has 64 squares, and is used as the setting for the age-old question about doubling: would you rather have one billion dollars, or a penny on the first square, then double the number on each next square? It’s an eye-opening demonstration of exponential growth and how big numbers can get. Take the chess board: you’ll have 184 million times more money!

¶ I grew up in New York City too late to visit the 1964 World’s Fair, but its aura hung over the city. I was always fascinated by it, and still am. It epitomized the early 60’s optimism about the future. This Love of Theme Parks video does a good job capturing the Fair’s original spirit and the current state of the location, and explains the important part Walt Disney played in the whole thing.

¶ As a power of 2, it appears in many tech things: Nintendo 64, Commodore 64, base-64 encoding, 64-bit integers, 64-bit computing in general, and so on and so on.

¶ The number famously appears in the Beatles’ song When I’m Sixty-Four. A surprising fact about the song is that it’s one of the first Paul McCartney ever wrote, when he was about 14 years old. It’s an old-fashioned tune because he wasn’t aware of rock and roll yet, or maybe it hadn’t even happened yet. It’s thought they put the song on Sgt Pepper because Paul’s father was turning 64 that year.

There are many historical artifacts and monuments in Boston. This is one of my favorites:

It’s in the center of the Granary Burying Ground, the third-oldest cemetery in Boston. Casual tourists will assume the monument marks Ben Franklin’s grave, but they are wrong: it is for his parents.

Ben Franklin wrote an inscription for his parents’ grave. The marker deteriorated and in 1827 was replaced with this large obelisk and a new plaque.

The plaque is far from the walkway and hard to read even up close:

It reads:

JOSIAH FRANKLIN AND ABIAH HIS WIFE
lie here interred.

They lived lovingly together in wedlock fifty five years. And without an estate, or any gainful employment, by constant labor and honest industry, maintained a large family comfortably, and brought up thirteen children and seven grandchildren respectably. From this instance, reader, be encouraged to diligence in thy calling, and distrust not providence. He was a pious and prudent man; she a discreet and virtuous woman.

THEIR YOUNGEST SON,
in filial regard to their memory places this stone.
J.F. Born 1655 __ Died 1744, Æ. 89.
A.F. ___ 1667 _______ 1752, __ 85.

The original inscription having been nearly obliterated
A number of citizens erected this monument, as a mark of respect for the
ILLUSTRIOUS AUTHOR,
MDCCCXXVII

I love that neither the original inscription nor the re-dedication mentions Ben Franklin by name. He wanted the focus to be on his parents, and the citizens of 1827 understood and kept their words in his style. He writes lovingly about his parents and their lifestyle, and keeps us thinking about them, not him.

I also like the word “reader” in there. Even when writing tombstones, Ben couldn’t resist his Poor Richard’s Almanac pedagogical style.

A few blocks from the cemetery is a plaque on Court St marking the location of James Franklin’s printing shop where Ben was an apprentice:

You can see in the picture there’s a one-block-long narrow dingy alleyway typical of downtown areas. It’s used for vans and dumpsters. I guess because it’s the location of the Franklin printing shop, this unremarkable and depressing passage is named “Franklin Avenue”. I would have expected something grander based on the name.

Maybe Ben wouldn’t have wanted something grander?

This is the mascot for Boston Python. It’s called Snake Way for Ducklings:

My son Ben drew it, which makes me very happy. He also drew Sleepy Snake. Wearing this image on a shirt around PyCon, I had to explain it a number of times. People in Boston understand it almost immediately, but others need more background.

In 1941, Robert McCloskey wrote a children’s book called Make Way for Ducklings. It’s a classic, selling millions of copies and never going out of print. We read it to our own children growing up many times.

The book is the story of Mrs. Mallard making her way through Boston guiding her eight ducklings (Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Oack, Pack, and Quack) to a pond in Boston’s Public Garden. It has charming pencil illustrations:

The book led to a sculpture in the Public Garden near the actual pond:

The sculpture is sized and placed for kids to play on, and is widely known and beloved in Boston. The ducks are dressed in costumes for all kinds of occasions: holidays, sports events, even Star Wars day. On Mother’s Day, there’s a duckling parade: families bring their children dressed as ducklings. In Boston, the ducklings are a big deal.

And it’s not just fiction.

So it seemed natural to Ben to riff on the ducklings for Boston Python. One observer thought a snake eating the ducklings seemed kind of dark, but you can see the ducklings are still quacking, so they are fine!

BTW, Boston also has Duck Boat tours, but that’s completely different.

Last week was PyCon US in Long Beach California. As always, it was a jam-packed intense time. I’ll try to report on my experience. The videos aren’t uploaded yet, but I’ll link to them later when they are.

This recap is longer than I’ve done in the past. I don’t know why, it’s just how it came out. I want to convey a sense of what I get out of PyCon and what you can get out of PyCon.

Thursday

Opening reception

I came with five of my colleagues from Netflix. I got to the Thursday night reception with Anika (first PyCon) and Josey (first PyCon with me). They said, “we’re going to count how many people Ned says hi to!” They were at 16 after five minutes and gave up. I don’t blame them. The reception is a very social time, and I have lots of friends I really enjoy seeing there.

New friends and backpacks

Besides seeing old friends, one of the great things about unstructured time like the opening reception is meeting new people. Tower Research Capital was giving away full-size Osprey backpacks at their booth. This was easily the most appreciated swag at PyCon. At the booth a clump of us were wondering what was required to get one. While there I met Maria, Camila, and Vinícius. They are from Brazil, and were very friendly. They will re-appear in this story a few times.

BTW: nothing was required to get a backpack, just ask and you get one. Everyone was very impressed.

Volunteering

A good PyCon life-hack is to do some volunteer jobs. In particular, being a session runner is great. Pick a talk you want to go see anyway. Volunteer to be the session runner. Your duty is to go to the green room 15 minutes before the talk, meet the speaker, and help them get to the room on time and get set up. It’s a good way to make a connection with the speaker and help them at a particularly stressful time. It helps PyCon run smoothly. Also: the green room has coffee and snacks all day long!

As it happens Vinícius was doing a talk Friday about t-strings I wanted to see, so I signed up to be his session runner.

Friday

(No) breakfast

Friday morning, I discovered that PyCon was not providing breakfast. This was unfortunate because conference meals are one of those unstructured times you can interact with lots of people. My strategy has usually been to look for a table that has people that don’t seem like me (in whatever ways), and meet people. Without a provided breakfast, I was instead eating a muffin in the quiet hotel lobby by myself. I understand why we were on our own for breakfast (conference food is expensive to provide), but I missed the congregating it encouraged.

Maybe next year there will be a way to get people to gather over breakfast without paying conference-food prices.

Fireworks disaster

The opening plenary by Deb Nicholson pumped the room up with excitement. But then came the opening “keynote” by Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao. I use the term sarcastically because it was not a keynote. It was an undisguised sales pitch for some kind of AI thing, complete with a QR code for discounts. It was a tone-deaf disaster of epic proportions. People (including me) walked out in the middle and were not shy about it.

To make it even worse, Fireworks isn’t a sponsor of the PSF or of PyCon. Before the keynote, a few sponsors were given a chance to say a word. Anthropic gave $1.5M and spoke for two minutes about the importance of Python to their work. Then Fireworks had 45 minutes to sell products without giving anything!? It was extremely distasteful.

The conference organizers were not at fault. Speaking to them afterwards, it was clear they were as blindsided as the rest of us. I don’t think anyone blamed PyCon for it, but it was definitely a missed opportunity. You want an opening keynote to lift spirits and launch people into the conference. Not a good start.

Brazilian energy

At Vinícius’ t-strings talk, his friends were in the front row waving Brazilian flags and occasionally blowing an air horn. They were also audible during large plenaries when Brazil was mentioned. I thought it was great and would love to hear more groups making noise when their segments or interests are in focus. It helps to give a sense of the breadth and scope of the community, and the strong sub-groups you might not have been aware of.

Art open space

Mario Munoz ran an open space all Friday afternoon about Python and Art. I don’t consider myself an artist, but I’ve enjoyed making math-generated image projects. I got in touch beforehand to ask if my generative art projects would be on-topic. He said they would, so I dropped in.

I showed some things I had made like truchet-tiled images or harmonic pendulums. The conversation quickly turned to, “is it art?” and if so, “who is the artist?” I created the programs, but then either a random number generator or the user clicking squiggles was making the choices. In the resulting image, who is the artist?

I don’t have an answer, but it was interesting to hear people’s perspectives. I loved that in the midst of a highly organized conference with lots of “serious” topics like devops or security or AI, a few of us could sit quietly, noodle on a guitar and ponder what makes art.

PyCon open spaces allow for all kinds of in-depth discussions and interactions. This was a perfect example.

Mia’s docs change

At last year’s PyCon, I met Mia, who was very interested to make some improvements to the Python docs. She landed one change, but then I didn’t hear from her over the rest of the year. We ran into each other again in the art open space, and we sat down afterwards to talk some more about contribution.

We settled on a change to the docs home page, and she made that happen. Earlier this year I heard Jack Skinner on a podcast describe conferences as “co-working spaces with interruptions called talks.” Sitting with Mia was like a 30-minute sprint to find a change and get started on it enough so that the rest of the work could happen afterwards.

Lightning talks

Some of my favorite parts of PyCon are the lightning talk sessions. These are five-minute talks about anything, proposed and selected the day before. Because they are short, people will talk about all kinds of things. Because they are not “formal”, the selection process can select for variety rather than Importance.

I keep coming back to the breadth of how Python is used and what it means to people. Lightning talks are a concrete way to see that.

This year, some of the talks included:

• Adam Silkey’s rousing oration about running for local political office
• Choosing the ideal cat emoji
• Yapping
• Why you should run Python betas
• Cumbuca.dev, promoting diversity in tech in Brazil, run by my new friends Maria and Camila
• A PyPI that installs from floppy disks(?)

Of course this is just a small sampling. I encourage you to find the lightning talks and watch them all.

Lightning talk?

At dinner Friday I mentioned an idea I’d had for a while for a lightning talk. I’d never given it because I was only excited about it during PyCon, and didn’t feel like I had the time to do the slides well enough. Stay tuned.

Saturday

Lightning talk!

Saturday morning, I thought more about the lightning talk, and how making the slides was the blocker. So I tried using Claude to make the slides. I wrote an outline and tried a bit to get the slides built. When I saw that it seemed likely to work out, I submitted the talk for consideration. By lunch, I got the email saying I was on for Saturday night. Fun! I kept tweaking the slides over the course of the day.

Pablo’s keynote

Pablo Galindo Salgado gave the morning keynote. He spoke in Spanish, with simultaneous captioning in English. He spoke with heart and passion about the collective effort to create Python. In particular he lamented the effects of the AI onslaught on the Python core team and on open source projects in general.

Comparing open source work to building a cathedral, he took a long view on the skill- and community-building that are natural by-products of open source work. AI threatens to wash that all away, and maintainers aren’t sure what to do about it. We want to maintain the interpersonal dynamics that underpin everything we do, but AI makes it too easy to make all the wrong kinds of contributions and interactions.

Pablo was emotional, personal, relevant, and inspirational. He connected with everyone in the room. On Friday I was joking that everyone agreed on two things: the backpack swag was great, and the Fireworks keynote was awful. Now everyone agreed on three things, because Pablo’s keynote was a keeper, one for the ages.

PSF Members lunch

The PSF Members lunch is a place to have a lunch in a smallish room, with time for questions of the PSF. Two themes emerged from the questions: the first is that running a conference is very expensive and getting worse. 2027 will be in Long Beach again, but there’s no location chosen yet for 2028. I got the sense that the PSF is re-thinking the conference to maybe reshape the costs.

The second theme was about non-US attendance. Many people chose not to travel to the US because of the current political situation, and I don’t blame them. When asked why we don’t do the main PyCon outside the US, Deb Nicholson pointed out that some US people would not be comfortable leaving the US and then trying to get back in. This is on top of the logistical problems of trying to run a conference outside your own country.

Juggling

Saturday afternoon, I continued a PyCon tradition: running a juggling open space. My strategy is to bring a couple dozen beanbags, camp out in a highly trafficked hallway, and teach anyone who’s interested. This year I had beanbags shipped to the hotel, and then gave most of those away at the end of the session. We had a lot of fun, some people learned some basics, and some were genuinely surprised to be gifted beanbags to take home.

Long walk

It took longer than I thought to wrap up the juggling open space, so I had to hurry to the big stage for my lightning talk. But for some reason, we weren’t allowed to walk through the venue as we had that morning. We had to go outside and around a long block to walk back in a different entrance. That was bad enough, but I was given the wrong directions, so walked about twice that distance. I was very stressed and very thirsty, but did manage to get to the stage in time to get ready.

Silence is Golden

My lightning talk was “Silence is Golden”. It was about leaving quiet time during discussions so that reluctant speakers can find a place to insert themselves. What made the talk fun to do was riffing on PyCon’s usual Pac-Man rule, which says to leave a wedge open when standing in a circle so that new people can join you. The riff is to make a similar rule for time: if you draw a clock with a hand sweeping out the time that people are speaking, you can get a Pac-Man shape, with an open mouth for the time to be quiet so that someone new can speak.

Making the clock animation was the thing I didn’t know how to do myself but Claude did for me. That let me focus on how to get the message across and not get lost in the mechanics of SVG details.

I followed Simon Willison’s extremely energetic, fast-paced, loud lightning talk summarizing a year of LLM progress in five minutes (pelicans on bicycles), so it was an interesting contrast.

Afterward people told me they really liked the talk, including Eric Holscher who had first formulated the Pac-Man rule. Nice. One of the Sunday morning lightning talks mentioned “Silence is Golden”! That’s one of the great things about lightning talks: they can be inspired, created, proposed, selected, and presented all during the weekend.

Sunday

Sunday was low-key for me compared to the first days. Maybe I was really low on sleep. No, I definitely was. I tend to sleep at most four hours a night at PyCon.

We had more lightning talks. amanda casari did another good keynote tapping into concern about AI and how it would affect our work. Rachell Calhoun and Tim Schilling did a keynote about how they run Djangonauts, an upskilling program for new contributors. All of the big-audience events helped to reinforce the overarching themes that bind us together: working with each other, for each other.

In the final closing session, I was really pleased to see my Boston co-organizer Fay Shaw be awarded a PyLadies Award! She’s very energetic and richly deserved it.

Reflections

What I didn’t do

There are always far too many things happening at once to do everything I’d like. I didn’t attend any of the Security track, the Packaging Summit, the Maintainers’ Summit, the organizers’ open space, the PyLadies auction, and so on and so on. I didn’t do anything outside the conference center other than dinners. Maybe next year I’ll walk over to take a look at the Queen Mary.

People there and people not

I can think of a number of people I didn’t see at PyCon that I expected to. I know there were many from outside the US who stayed away. I think back to PyCons of the last decade, and the visible people who seemed central to Python and PyCon then, but who now no longer are and no longer attend. That’s OK, the individuals change over time, but the community retains its essential nature. Some of the visible faces now are actually quite new to PyCon. Someone who attended for the first time this year might be one of the driving forces next year.

We live and breathe, we grow and evolve. We remain the same.