Pybites Podcast

#162 - Pycon US 2024 Debrief

• Julian Sequeira & Bob Belderbos

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In this episode we share our experience + takeaways from attending Pycon US 2024.

* correction: where Bob said "Hablemos Español" he actually referred to: http://hablemospython.dev


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Books:
- Scarecrow
- Four Thousand Weeks
- Algorithms
- Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)

Seeing other people using the conference for everything, for learning, but also the networking. Someone in our community, someone that we know actually had a wonderful opportunity come up from this. You know, they found there could be a potential employment opportunity. There's lots of calls that will be happening as a result, but it was a wonderful experience. That person was able to go around and hand out business cards, meet with these people, and when people said, hey, you should talk to so and so, they were actually to go and introduce them to the person. So it was really, really nice and uplifting to see that coming out to the conference actually can help people and will help people if they do the right things of networking and not being too afraid to reach out to people. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Baldebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Pie Bytes podcast. This is Bob Elderbos. I'm here at Julian Square physically and same. We're together. We're together at this. Wherever are we? Kind of obvious, I think Pittsburgh. So we are at Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania. In the US for. For the Python convention. Pycon us 2024. We're actually not at the convention right now. It's Monday morning. The sprints are done. Yeah, the conference done. Sprints are taking place. Sprints are so taking place. But yeah, so we're pretty tired. So we're actually just recording this from this beautiful apartment that we got through Airbnb or something like that. And it's awesome. So we'd love to show you the view for those of you watching on YouTube, but the cameras are going to mad in the Pittsburgh skyline. Exactly. We're going to keep this pretty crisp and pretty to the point, but we wanted to share a few thoughts from Pycon 2024 us now that it's done and just what we thought about it, what some of the highlights were for us, some tips, all that sort of thing. So do you want to go first? Sure. Of course. There were a lot of interesting talks, and a lot of them I did not attend because Mitchell, probably the next bullet point is the people, but a few I did, and I watched the Charlie Marsh rough talk, and he really got into how these speedups with rust worked. I went to a couple of code quality talks, one by the author of Robust Python, and that was very interesting. I did that mostly the first day, and then, of course, we got into networking and meeting up with all these beautiful people. And, you know, the talks will be on YouTube. So I made a deliberate choice. But again, as always, with conferences, you come here and you get a lot of inspiration and ideas. It was more AI, of course, but overall, the talks there was also a great variarity. So now, as always, after a conference, I come back home, I'm hungry, I want to learn more, and I think that's a unique feature of icon. Yeah. And I think a key point that Bob made is that don't feel pressured to attend every talk. Obviously, if it's from someone that you've been dying to see or that sort of stuff, prioritize it. But if you can't make every talk, it's okay. I mean, many of the talks happen at the exact same time, so you're gonna have to choose anyway. But it was such a cool experience because you randomly run into people and you might think, oh, crap, I've got to go to this talk, but I want to see this person. And it's okay to miss it because it's going to be recorded anyway. And actually, the app this year allowed you to stream the talks live as they were happening through the app, I think so that was pretty cool. But that leads to the next point, which is people, and by far in large, the most valuable and special thing about coming all this way, because you traveled how many hours and 23 hours? 27. Right, 27, not including the commute to the airport. So it was a long way, but it was so worth it because we got to meet with so many people. Meet the pie Bytes community. That was super special. We had that community meetup on Saturday, but we got to meet all of our friends, people that we've connected with over the past six to seven years, catch up and talk about new opportunities and partnerships and all these sorts of things. So the networking, the connection with other human beings in this space, is completely under stated before you get here. You just don't even think it's going to be that much or that impressive. But, like a perfect example, you know, Bob was having a good chat with Michael Kennedy from the Talk Python to me podcast. And even though we communicate with Mike over email quite often and that sort of stuff, it was because we were in person having this chat that this potential opportunity and partnership came up. So, yeah, I think it's time and space. You can have a virtual coffee chat, but you're never going to sit for 3 hours at a bar with drinks and. Yeah. And that space creates a lot of depth, and that's unique, I think. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. So what else was on? People needed the proof that we're not some AI. We are real people. We exist in the physical dimension. He's gonna pinch me in a minute. Just. We recorded notes on the phone, so what else on the phone? Yeah, well, but while we're checking that, I was gonna say the. Yeah, the APAC meetup. But just quickly, the pie Bytes meetup on Saturday was super special. We had everyone who is in our community who read the email or responded, showed up, and we had this wonderful, wonderful time. We only had an hour, but we took everyone out for a beer and a cocktail, and then we came back, took a group photo, and it was just lovely to meet a lot of people who we've known for years, for years, who've been supporters. One of them, Chris Patty's even been on our podcast. And then also getting. Getting to meet new people who we hadn't met before in our community, who just randomly reached out, said, yeah, I'll come along. And it was wonderful. Yep. Yeah. And we will link the LinkedIn post with the photo. Yeah, we have a lot of happy faces. It's a special moment for us. Exactly. We also have. We'll put a post in the circle community as well. Yeah. What do you want to say about APac? Oh, yeah, the Pycon APAC. So I didn't know there was an APAC version of Pycon or events. I thought in Asia Pacific, they were just the individual events, country to country. So it was really nice that they brought the whole python pycon apac team over. All the leaders of the different pycons over there for Australia, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, whatever, and all the others. There's plenty more. And they brought them over, and we got to chat. It was really, really cool to hear more about that. So my hope now is to be more involved in the python Pycon space in Asia Pacific. And I'm hoping to go to the Indonesia APAC 2024, which I have a similar experience, because I stopped by. By the booth of hablamosespanol dot de v, I think, from memory. So we speak Spanish. Oh, yeah. Big spanish speaking community. They have discord. So check it out, and, you know, you can search for the stuff online. But again, the servant Dipindi. Right. Just happens at Pycon. So it opens a lot of new opportunities you otherwise would not really have looked into if it was not for that for that being there, randomly walking around now, that was actually the other cool part, is just by walking around, you just see all these new things. And admittedly, I felt that this conference was not as big as Cleveland, so I missed. Bob and I both missed 2022 and 2023 in Salt Lake City, so we don't have that as a reference. But Cleveland felt a lot more packed. It felt like there were more people. It felt like there were more booths set up. And definitely at the career expo that was on yesterday, it felt very sparse over here. It felt like there was, what, eight or ten companies that came here for the career expo, but in Cleveland, there were heaps. I remember Pokemon was out there as well. There's so many different things. And it was packed, and this was very empty. So hopefully, you know, we'll see more attendance pick up. Sparse is better than dance, right? Maybe for a conference, you want a bit more dance. Not for a conference, but there was also a little bit of a butt, right? Oh, yeah. So, you know, everything's. So. I highly recommend coming out to Pycon. Of course, the food was great as well. Yeah. The food actually got a lot better, too. Whoever they used for catering smashed it this year. It was a. I remember in Cleveland, some of the food was pretty. We had it once, and we said, you know what? We're gonna go eat them and then have, like, high carb dips in the afternoon. It was, like, sustained and. Exactly. A lot of greens and veggies. But, yeah, there was a bit of a thing. Right, with the masks. Yeah. So one of the polarizing things about Pycon 2024 this year, the mask mandate that they had. So, as you know, we're not going to go into the detail, but a lot of people were like, why? Why are we doing this? And, you know, we put it on. We said, we'll play ball. We'll do it. The unexpected effect of that. And we're not getting into the politics here. I'm just going to call a spade a spade, right. It made it very difficult to connect with people. Made it very. Well. Not impossible. Not impossible. Bit more of a barrier. So, for example, you couldn't just see people across the floor and know that it was them. Especially if you're looking for people that say, for us, like, in our community, they. I don't know exactly what all of them look like. They might know what we look like, but even with the masks on our face, it makes it much harder. So, perfect example. One of our lovely community members, Blaze, was standing there he was looking after the pycon, the PSF table on the first day. And while he was there, I walked past and it was literally. And I told him this, it was literally because of his hair that I looked twice. I'm like, is that. And I had to stand there. I think we both stood there for a good 5 seconds staring at him like, yeah, you had the badge, right? And the font on the badge was pretty big, so that helped. But we were looking. It was a little bit weird. No, we were looking side on first, right. And so you couldn't see the badge. So I'm like, is that blaze? I think it is, I think. But had the mask not been there, we would have seen it straight away. And then, of course, when you talk, it's a bit more difficult, but to hear people, it was muffled and it was mixed. So to me, it really did detract from the experience. I understand why they wanted to do it, but for me personally, I found it quite annoying. And that's just an opinion, but that's, you know, that's how it goes. So hopefully next year things will be safer for everyone and there will be more of a choice. So we'll see if that happens then. We had something about networking, right, and partnerships. Yeah. So one other cool thing that's come from this is seeing other people using the conference for everything, for learning, but also the networking. Someone in our community, someone that we know actually had a wonderful opportunity come up from this. You know, they found there could be a potential employment opportunity. There's lots of calls that will be happening as a result. But it was a wonderful experience. That person was able to go around and hand out business cards, meet with these people. And when people said, hey, you should talk to so and so, they were actually to go and introduce them to the person. So it was really, really nice and. And uplifting to see that coming out to the conference actually can help people and will help people if they do the right things of networking and not being too afraid to reach out to people. Yeah, of course, you do have to make that concerted effort. Right, exactly. Be interested, ask questions. So just remember, you can be a passive participant or you can just say, this is an opportunity. I'm not going to squander it. If you have that goal, of course I'm going to do something, and that's what this person did. And it looks like a wonderful opportunity is there to be snatched, you know, so I love it. Yeah, I think that's it. It's overall very inspiring. You see so many things. For example, one thing we saw, again were physical books, and we're not reading physical books and sparked kind of an interest. And, yeah. So there's a lot of next things and ideas we take out of this. But I think the takeaway, I mean, it's been said many times. Right. You come for the Pisces, they for the community thing, really. Here has been the people. Yeah. That has been invaluable. Yeah. We've had wonderful opportunities to chat and connect with people. We've met the count, the founders, for code speed. Yeah. Just a whole plug in to measure performance with every pr. So again, a lot of hard ears. Yeah. And I was very happy to see more Australians. That was cool. Meeting some more Aussies in the room. That was fantastic. And I just think overall, you know, even experiencing a new city can be very refreshing. And getting yourself out of that normal home environment that you're in, your home city to go somewhere else really frees the mind. So as Bob and I, we've stayed a good ten to 15 minutes away from the conference center walking distance. And it just means every day that we're walking, we're talking, we're coming up with ideas. You know, we want to re release our Python tips book. That's what Bob was hinting at. And in such a way that it's going to be a physical book, you know, so there's all sorts of cool. And the career tips. Yeah, exactly. So those things are coming now. That's it. We have a. We have a few things to do before we go, but we fly home tomorrow. It's going to be a nice long trip back. I think I'm on the second longest flight that you can do on the planet. Dallas to Sydney. 17 hours is going to be a long trip, but we're stacking up on books. So while you're reading. Yeah, I'm reading. Well, I didn't buy this. I brought this one. Thank you. To my neighbor who let me borrow this book. Matthew Riley, Scarecrow someone. I think it's book three in that series. So fiction. I'm very happy to read that on the plane. And we also indulged and went to a bookshop yesterday. What'd you pick up? Algorithms, panos, luridas, how to tell a story, which is useful if you're posting to social media or, I think anybody has a story to tell, right. If you're content creator or not, in 4000 weeks, it's a long time on the list. Productivity book. A lot of people talking about it. So let's give it a go. Time management for mortals. And an LLM book, llenn book from Sebastian Rashka, machine learning guy. So definitely not read that. Beautiful. All right, well, everyone, you know, a special shout out and thanks to everyone in our community who did make the time to come see us. A very special thank you as well to our coach and teammate Hugh Tipping, who came from New York. So he came a long way. Of course, now I'm joking, but he came out here just to see us when an experienced Pycon as well, and we spent a lot of time with him and it was wonderful. And then all of our friends here as well who made the time, it was just very, very special to be greeted with such warmth when we came all that way and were jet lagged and tied. So it was very nice. Special shout out as well to Pamela. Dinner. Diner. Diner. Pamela's Diner in Pittsburgh. Amazing. Yeah, and they're every day for breakfast because I think we explicitly, implicitly had a bucket list item of refilling coffee. Yeah, we don't, in Australia they don't have drip coffee, so you don't go to coffee shops and have them refill your coffee mug every 2 seconds. And that was super special. Like a tv show. Yeah, we got a good three cups of coffee and then we're good the whole day. Exactly. It's wonderful. Amazing place over here in Pittsburgh. Go check them out. And we don't get any affiliation for that. We just seen that purely out of. So it's time to go brew coffee, customer satisfaction and get back to work. Yeah, go checking in and join our community Piebites circle and yeah, we'll be back next week. Exciting stuff. Perfect. All right. All right. Thanks, Bob. Thanks, everyone. Bye. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pybite friends. That is Pybit es friends and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show. And to join our thriving community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community. That's Pibit es, forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.