I had a great time at my first PyCon UK over the weekend: the community was really friendly and I feel like I missed as many good talks as I saw which feels the mark of a good conference to me.
Day One: Highlights 🐍
I started the day with a nice wander around Manchester before the conference and a great breakfast at Brunchos before heading over to the Contact Theatre for the welcome session.
There was an awesome keynote from Hynek Schlawack about Python’s Super Power followed by David Seddon’s great talk on why other collection types are often better than Python lists.
Hannah Hazi’s talk about recovering from Long Covid as a programmer was full of useful information about the ongoing impact of Covid and a first hand account of surviving long covid.
I had a lot of fun at David Asboth’s talk about using exec to put Python in your Python so you can code while you code (all the best Python features have big red warning boxes in the docs).
CJ Shearwood’s brilliant talk “I’m a Luddite, Why Aren’t You” was an insightful and moving history on the intersection of technology and labour organising with lessons as relevant today as they were in 1800.
We had some awesome lightning talks from Eli Holderness, Lydia Cordell, Anthony Harrison, Jyoti Bhogal, Perla Godinez Castillo, Alex Willmer, and Sheena O’Connell. I took the opportunity to speak a bit about notanother.pizza and community organising in another “Meetup is terrible now” lightning talk.
My favourite talk of the day was a lightning talk from Daniele Procida, the unassumingly titled “What is your favourite film?”. It was as delightful as it was thought provoking - I won’t spoil it, watch the recording if you get the chance!
Day Two: Highlights 🐍
In the morning I had the pleasure of facilitating a session on making ASCII Art with Python for the young coders track alongside some awesome volunteers including Ekaterina Savenya and Nese Dincer. The volunteers who facilitate the young coders track are beyond awesome.
It was really interesting hearing from Kristian Glass about the work of the The UK Python Association and how instrumental they are in supporting the Python community (and not just in the UK!)
The tale of PEP 765 as told by Irit Katriel was a great story of how to find and fix a problem in open-source even when not everyone agrees that the problem should be fixed.
Aivars Kalvans talk on solving a Python mystery took me back to my time in the DevOps trenches and had some great pointers for troubleshooting Python applications in production.
Naturally my favourite talk of the day was the presentation from the young coders sharing their learnings from the day - to say these kids were awesome is an understatement, I do public speaking for a living and I don’t think I’m half as confident in front of a conference audience as these young people!
There were some more brilliant lightning talks covering everything from pencil preferences, to building a crow army, to getting started self-hosting, to exciting news from open-source.
Also there was a badge maker 🤩
Day Three: Highlights 🐍
The morning keynote []”Playing the long game”](https://youtu.be/b0GqRDfumR8?si=Qo6FE8ql9yJVc4s9) by Sheena O’Connell was an insightful session about development in a world of Language Models with some great advice for developers regardless of experience.
Deb Nicholson’s talk about coping with your project becoming popular was full of extremely good advice for both software projects and any community facing projects writ large. I particularly liked the point around letting people know what you need help with and politely pushing back on companies that think you work for them. If you’re in any kind of community organising role this talk is essential reading!
John Carney and I helped facilitate a hallway track conversation with some community organising folks with some really useful insights into volunteer experience, keeping your institutional knowledge somewhere other than in your head, and avoiding (or not avoiding as it happens) burn out.
I’m super excited for t-strings to come to Python now after Dr. Philip Jones shared his work on using them to dynamically build SQL queries in Python. Then of course there was the awesome talk from my wonderful colleague at Aiven Tibs about building an app using CLIP, PostgreSQL® and pgvector. Always fun nerd sniping Tibs with a question in the Q and A!
There was another round of awesome lightning talks including from the amazing Dawn Gibson Wages with a hero’s journey of Python development.
Day Four: Sprints and Contributions 🐍
I had a great time participating in the BeeWare sprints and earning my challenge coin with some tiny docs changes. It was also great helping Ekaterina Savenya and Dan Taylor make some contributions as well, although I feel I might have been more than a hinderance than a help when it came to updating Town Crier 😅 A huge thanks to Russell Keith-Magee for running the session and generally being an exemplary maintainer of such a cool project!
A huge thank you to the The UK Python Association and the organisers and volunteers that put on PyCon UK this year. I had a wonderful time and it was such a treat to spend the weekend with so many interesting people, already looking forward to the next one!
All recordings are now available at the PyCon UK YouTube channel