PyCon US 2023
PyCon US is the largest annual convention for the Python programming language. The event took place from April 19 to April 27 in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was thrilled to contribute with a tutorial, attend insightful talks, and checked the PyCon news announcements.
News, such as the PyPI organizations feature, and retrospectives like the one conducted by Guido Van Rossum were key part of the conference.
Talks
PyCon has two tracks of talks, one in English and another in Spanish called “Las Charlas”. All of them will be available on YouTube in near future. You can find them here.
The most fun talk I attended was on how to Create interactive games using MicroPython and electronics. It introduced me to the new world of MicroPython and how to program games using a board called micro:bit. The micro:bit board was design for children, it doesn’t have pins or connectors that can harm them and it already comes with a lot of pre-programmed features. Check out the 30-second “Chase the dot” video (sound on) and see how much fun is to program these small games.
Tutorials
It was gratifying to contribute to the event by tutoring advanced topics in Jupyter Notebooks. The tutorial Going beyond with Jupyter Notebooks: Write your first package using literate programming was well-attended and presented the usage of nbdev for writing Python packages using Jupyter notebooks. The tutorial also introduced advanced topics like testing, code quality tools, and how to build UIs for Jupyter notebooks. All the tooling presented is used in Palaimon’s workflow to build and document its products. The presentation is available here.
Announcements
The biggest announcement was the introduction of organization accounts for the Python Packaging Index (PyPI), which was one of the most requested features of the platform. PyPI will now be easier to use with large teams that need to manage sub-teams and multiple packages. This feature will be free for community projects and available at a small fee for corporate projects.
This is crucial for the financial sustainability of PyPI, as the number of downloads has been growing (57% in the last period) and its infrastructure is currently subsidized by AWS. The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has been working diligently on the financial sustainability of the organization. They announced that PyCon US now accounts for 75% of its annual income (previously was around 90%) and reported a pilot partnership with an educational program that may serve as an additional source of income for the organization.
Keynotes
The keynote “Python: The People’s Programming Language” by Carol Willing really stood out to me. Carol delved into distributed computing and network concepts to discuss resilient community networks. It was an intimate talk that touched on personal challenges and community accomplishments.
Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python, initially played a trick on us with the talk “Feed CPython to ChatGPT: can we use AI to make Python faster?”. He later discussed previous PyCon US events, shared stories, and provided insights about Python’s past and future.
Conclusion
PyCon is a diverse and inclusive conference that embraces the community. The tutorials, talks, and keynotes are awesome, but the best part of the event is connecting with people, sharing knowledge, and discussing topics you’re passionate about. The biggest challenge of the conference is making the most of your time there.