This year’s PyCon UK was held in late September in Manchester, at the awesome Contact Theatre. A handful of us Bennett folks attended, and had a great time!
Organising the conference
This year, the PyCon UK organising committee included 5 (five!) members of the Bennett Institute: Katie Bickford, Alice Wong, Providence Onyenekwe, myself and - of course - Becky Smith, who chaired and masterminded the entire thing. The above photo shows her during the opening ceremony, welcoming us all to the start of the conference.
Alice and Providence also organised Django Girls workshop at the conference, which was a huge success!
Setting up and running our booth
The Bennett Institute was one of the sponsors of PyCon, which meant we had a booth to run! Some of us arrived on the Thursday before the first day, and we got to work setting up our little corner of the conference.
We had some really lovely conversations with attendees, both telling them what it is that we do here, and hearing from them about how they use Python in their jobs and lives.
For me, PyCon UK was a bit of a reunion, a chance to catch up with some great people from the Python community again. I felt proud to be able to represent the Bennett Institute and to talk about the great work we do. I was pleased with how many people had either heard of us or were enthusiastic about our work once we'd explained it; in particular the approach we take to privacy, security and transparency with the OpenSAFELY platform.
I loved watching the many and varied talks. I noticed some common themes emerged about how we as a community can do better at including or supporting others; things like considering internationalisation/localisation or how best to support more junior developers. Something for myself, and the wider Python community, to reflect upon. Although the fact that we're having these conversations is a testament to just how welcoming the community is and how core inclusivity is to its values.
Seeing (and giving!) talks
As someone who was part of the programme committee for this year’s PyCon, I can confirm that all the sessions were amazing. However, as with any multi-track conference, you can’t see it all. Between the Bennett staff, we did get to attend a good chunk of the talks and workshops, and below I’ve collated some of the ones that we thought were worth watching.
Firstly, our very own Katie Bickford gave an excellent talk about the perspective of a junior engineer, and spoke about her experiences at the Bennett Institute over the last year. We, of course, are all biased, and thought it was incredible, but I did hear other attendees saying that it was the best talk of the conference. Decide for yourself!
Our next recommendation, courtesy of Tom Ward, is one on building SQL queries using t-strings by Phil Jones, who’s built an entire library around using t-strings (a new feature in Python 3.14) to dynamically and safely build SQL queries.
Nishtha managed to make it to quite a few talks, and particularly recommends the following:
- The Localisation and Translation of Programming Languages, which was the keynote of the second day, given by Felienne Hermans (This one was also recommended by Tom, and everyone else that I heard talk about it).
- How to build a cross-platform GUI app with Python, an excellent talk about BeeWare by Russell Keith-Magee.
- Why
len('😶🌫️') == 4and other weird things you should know about strings in Python by Yngve Mardal Moe and Marie Roald (I love this kind of talk; showcasing weird language internals is always so cool!).
Each day, there were also lightning talks: 5 minute talks on any topic, not necessarily Python- or software-related. Attendees are invited to submit topics, and then some of the organising committee get together during the day to decide which ones will happen later.
The first day is always an interesting one, because attendees are often nervous to submit talks, so we usually end up with a higher proportion of seasoned speakers breaking the ice (which is how I ended up doing the first lightning talk of the conference this year). By the second day, people are excited and keen to give talks, and we’re always spoiled for choice when it comes to deciding which ones should go ahead.
My personal favourite was this talk on Saturday by Stephen Dolan about asking a stuck program what it’s up to, which was simply brilliant, but frankly they’re all worth a watch.
On the Sunday, our own Simon Davy ran a workshop on OpenTelemetry, leading attendees through the process of instrumenting a Django app so that they could practice and learn the core concepts of observability.
Socialising with other Pythonistas
The talks, workshops and sponsors are a huge part of PyCon UK, but an enormous reason to attend is the chance to spend time with other Python enjoyers, and find friends across all the industries that use Python.
It was my first PyCon UK — I really liked being able to chat to the speakers informally, before and after their talks. I really enjoyed talking to Felienne Hermans, author of The Programmer’s Brain, about diversity in computer science education.
We all had a lovely time meeting friends old and new, and getting to see each other in person!
The PyCon UK keynotes and talks are all recorded and promptly uploaded to YouTube.
The official photos taken by the photographer Mark Hawkins are available on Flickr.