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 citizens 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.