My PyData London 2026 Conference Highlights
PyData London is a conference bringing together data scientists and engineers from all over the world for workshops and talks covering everything from document parsing to weather forecasting. This was my fourth year volunteering and I was really excited for the conference, not least because Aiven would be sponsoring this year which was a great opportunity to give back to a community that means so much to me.
I went into the conference hoping to learn something and catch up with friends old and new, as well as seeing some of the folks I met on my tour of UK PyData groups. Now that the dust has settled (and I’ve had some time to recover from a packed weekend) I’ve written up my highlights from the event.
Friday (Workshops)
After arriving bright and early with a cab full of last year's conference supplies (97 PyData rubber ducks anyone?) I settled in for a day of workshops. It was difficult to pick between the three tracks but I ended up going to the Docling workshop, the MCP OTel workshop, and Cheuk’s workshop about LightEval—all of which were fantastic, although the Tom Nook “Tanuki” MCP from Fei and Tun’s workshop definitely stole my heart and Cheuk’s workshop was by far the most challenging.We rounded out the day with the social at Fleets I (badly) organised (mentioning that there was a tab before we arrived would have been smart, sorry John S and John C who kindly sponsored)!
Saturday
Saturday kicked off with an amazing keynote from Rachel-Lee Nabors which was a much needed story about the winding paths careers can take, the importance of community, and hope in a time of layoffs. I’m extremely grateful to Rachel-Lee for speaking, I can’t overstate the positive impact this talk had and I know I wasn’t alone in coming away inspired and hopeful.
I spent the rest of the day on the Aiven booth having conversations about our work on Diskless Kafka and our free and developer tiers. I got to chatting with MK from NumFOCUS about my PyData maps project and his awesome Give Me 5 series.
It seemed like by Saturday (almost) everyone had figured out the badge maker Aiven sponsored, and every time I walked past I could see people making a badge which was really cool. Likewise our Disk Invaders arcade cabinet definitely captured people’s attention with no fewer than 82 games played over the weekend.
I was also interviewed by Cheuk along with some friends for her YouTube channel about our experiences at PyData London. We wrapped up the day with a social event in the venue and then I grabbed some dinner with the other organisers nearby.
Sunday
I had the pleasure of MCing the lightning talks Sunday morning which was a real treat and we had some fantastic speakers, all of whom kept to the 5 minute time limit like absolute pros. We didn’t make it through everyone who signed up but everyone who didn’t get a chance to speak has been invited to speak at the PyData London Meetup.
At lunch the PyData organisers meetup quickly ran out of chairs and we ended up hunting for more. There were some great opportunities and having 30+ UK PyData organisers all in one place meant it was easy to work through the problems some organisers are facing. It was also a great reminder of just how big the UK PyData community is.
After lunch I went along to Damian’s talk exploring the correlation between NIMBYism and cancelled renewable energy projects. This was my third time seeing this talk and I enjoy it more every time! The last talk of the event I saw was Adam Hill’s talk on creating quizzes based on PDFs with LLMs as judges.
Looking Forward to 2027
As ever this year the volunteers were amazing and put on a fantastic event that I was proud to be a part of. I'm really looking forward to next year's event. The conference closed out with the volunteer dinner, where we celebrated another successful event and the bittersweet end of John Carney’s time as conference chair. John is a lovely guy and has done a fantastic job these past few years, but I know we’re in safe hands with Prashant and Jiarui as our chairs for 2027.See you at the next one! And if you want some PyData in the meantime, why not check out your local group?