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.

One of the hard parts of moving from school to “the real world” is adjusting to all the ways that school is artificial. It’s different from the real world.

I’ve been thinking about this because of questions I see young learners commonly asking. Too often the questions are meaningless in the real world, and even if you could get answers, the answers would use useless.

How long does it take to learn Python? In school, learning is divided into discrete labelled chunks. A class called “Beginning Python” might last four months. Everyone in the class will be taught the same things at the same pace. The objectives are laid out by the teacher, and at the end you will get a grade.

Outside of school, learning happens as needed, at your own pace, guided by your own goals. Only you will know if you have learned enough, deeply enough, for what you want to do.

An answer will be useless to you anyway: will you feel bad if it’s taking you longer than them? Maybe they started from a different point than you did. Maybe they are learning different material, or to a finer degree of detail. Comparison is the thief of joy: learn what you need, the way you need to.

What does “learn Python” even mean? There’s no end to what might be included in a broad term like “Python”: there’s the language itself, the standard library, and the enormous ecosystem of third-party packages. Add to that the culture and conventions, and maybe even the community. Nobody knows all of it. It doesn’t stay still, Python keeps changing, growing, and expanding. You have to decide for yourself what’s important for you to learn. The point isn’t to finish it. Classes in school can be finished; topics in the real world cannot.

School gives you neatly labelled units with clear-cut criteria at the end. The real world doesn’t work that way.

No, but how long did it take you? It doesn’t matter. Everyone’s situation is different. In school, your classmates are very similar to you: you’ve been taking roughly the same classes with the same material all your life. Outside of school, everyone is much more different. My pace, my learning style, my needs are all different than yours. Comparing won’t help you learn.

How will I know when I am not a beginner? In school, classes have labels like beginner and advanced, or remedial and gifted. Outside of school, these labels are meaningless. Knowledge isn’t laid out conveniently in a straight line. For example: I’ve been using Python for 25 years, and know more about one particular dark corner of Python (sys.settrace) than almost anyone. At the same time, I know literally nothing about tkinter. Am I an expert or a beginner?

If someone could tell you whether you were a beginner or not, what would you do with the answer? In school, it tells you that you are ready to take the next course. But in the real world, no one needs the answer. What’s important is whether you understand the next concept, tool, or technique to make progress in whatever you’re building. Focus on your own goals and path, and keep moving forward. Labels are fake.

Why do I need to learn topic XYZ? School curricula don’t always match what you need to know. Your software engineering course may include theoretical math that computer scientists want to teach you, but that math may be very hard to use directly in the real world. Some of those concepts are good to know, some might be artifacts of mismatched goals.

Schools need to deliver their packaged pathways to many students. You only need to learn the things you need for your path. You won’t always know ahead of time what you’ll need. School can be a good way to learn things that many people like you learn. Once you are on your own, you get to (and have to) choose the topics yourself.

Is it still worthwhile to learn programming? Technology is moving very fast these days, especially because of the rise of AI in programming. Schools are much slower to adjust. A school’s course now may not match what employers want to see in four years. At today’s pace of change, it’s impossible to guess what employers will want to see in four years.

Learn how to learn, and stay flexible. Communication will always be key, so keep talking to people.

Choose a goal. Move toward it. Do what you need to do.

BTW, I see now that this post is very similar to a post from six years ago: How long did it take you to learn Python? I guess people are still asking, and I feel strongly about it!

I wrote a Sphinx extension to eliminate excessive links: linklint. It started as a linter to check and modify .rst files, but it grew into a Sphinx extension that works without changing the source files.

It all started with a topic in the discussion forums: Should not underline links, which argued that the underlining was distracting from the text. Of course we did not remove underlines, they are important for accessibility and for seeing that there are links at all.

But I agreed that there were places in the docs that had too many links. In particular, there are two kinds of link that are excessive:

• Links within a section to the same section. These arise naturally when describing a function (or class or module). Mentioning the function again in the description will link to the function. But we’re already reading about the function. The link is pointless and confusing.
• A second (or third, etc) instance of the same link in a single paragraph. The first mention of a referent should be linked, but subsequent ones don’t need to be.

Linklint is a Sphinx extension that suppresses these two kinds of links during the build process. It examines the doctree (the abstract syntax tree of the documentation) and finds and modifies references matching our criteria for excessiveness. It’s running now in the CPython documentation, where it suppressed 3612 links. Nice.

I had another idea for a kind of link to suppress: “obvious” references. For example, I don’t think it’s useful to link every instance of “str” to the str() constructor. Is there anyone who needs that link because they don’t know what “str” means? And if they don’t know, is that the right place to take them?

There are three problems with that idea: first, not everyone agrees that “obvious” links should be suppressed at all. Second, even among those who do, people won’t agree on what is obvious. Sure, int and str. But what about list, dict, set? Third, there are some places where a link to str() needs to be kept, like “See str() for details.” Sphinx has a syntax for references to suppress the link, but there’s no syntax to force a link when linklint wants to suppress it.

So linklint doesn’t suppress obvious links. Maybe we can do it in the future once there’s been some more thought about it.

In the meantime, linklint is working to stop many excessive links. It was a small project that turned out much better than I expected when I started on it. A Sphinx extension is a really powerful way to adjust or enhance documentation without causing churn in the .rst source files. Sphinx itself can be complex and mysterious, but with a skilled code reading assistant, I was able to build this utility and improve the documentation.

Human.json is a new idea for asserting that a site is authored by a person, and for vouching for other sites’ authorship. I’ve added one to this site.

It’s a fun idea, and I’ve joined in, but to be honest, I have some concerns. When I made my human.json file, I looked through my browser history, and saw a number of sites that were clearly personal sites that I liked. But if I list one, am I claiming to know that there is no AI content on that site? I can’t know that for sure.

I haven’t let this stop me from adding my own /human.json, and I’ll be interested to see what comes of it.

Human.json isn’t a new idea. There have been a number of attempts to add structured data to web pages:

• <meta name="author"> tags are a simple way to claim authorship. I was surprised to see that this site didn’t have it, so I added it.
• JSON-LD is a way to embed structured metadata into a page.
• FOAF (Friend of a Friend) was an earlier attempt to model interpersonal relationships with structured data, as was XFN.
• humans.txt is not structured, it’s a .txt file. This makes it all the stranger: if it’s free-form text to be read by people, why not an HTML page?

These ideas are all appealing in their ways, but I don’t think the messy complicated real world will yield to our desire for structure and categories.

To get a sense of the current state, I wrote a simple web crawler to explore human.json, meta tags, and JSON-LD. Currently it finds 214 vouched sites and 60 people’s names across 40 human.json files. This is a very small number, but the proposal is only two weeks old.

Like any hand-edited files, human.json files are strict: four of the human.json files I found had errors. But beyond simple editing mistakes, people use structured data incorrectly. As an example, Flickr embeds JSON-LD that claims there’s a person named “Flickr”, right next to where it says there’s a website named Flickr and an organization named Flickr.

Flickr’s goof about being a person isn’t such a big deal. But the goal of human.json is to indicate human authorship. If I were using AI to generate web content (ugh, “content”), I’d do whatever I could to mark it as human. The vouching is meant to build a web of trust, but it will be easy for the network to spring a leak and grant trust to sites that don’t deserve it.

Human.json wants to declare a binary categorization: your content is AI-generated or it isn’t. What about a site with 100% human-written text and also AI artwork? Should it be vouched for? The world doesn’t often provide us with tidy yes/no distinctions.

There is already discussion about how to address some of these issues, but I think at heart structured data like this is trying to sweep back the sea of complex human reality.

I don’t mean to be overly negative. I love these “small web” touches. I like anything that gets people talking to each other. When I found errors in human.json files, I sent emails to the authors, and got nice emails in return. Connection!

I like that human.json is simple; I don’t like that it is simplistic. But we can’t blame human.json for that, it’s a common pitfall in all attempts to organize the messy world.

I’ve added my file. We’ll see where it goes.