On Pycon: Tech conferences and Academia conference (RATP #9)#
June 26, 2023 Plus a digression on hosting big events in Florence I have been to Pycon Italia last week (actually, end of May. You never know when drafts will be put online). My company brought me there (thanks) and it was a blast. Quite demanding on the physical and logistical side (this parenthesis exploded on first writings. You’ll find it as a dedicated section).
There are different nuances and experiences I need to try to write down.
I’ll jot them in no precise order.
Settings and Ambience#
We start with setup and settings, right?
The conference was huge. Parallel sessions in around 10 rooms were something I had seen before, but this time the number of attendees was a discovery. On the first days of the conference, there were more people than all the rooms could accommodate.
Let’s say it was a 1K conferences. I’ve never been to such an event.
Also, I’ve never been to an event held completely in a hotel.
Breaks and lunch were awesome too, despite the huge attendance.
This was the occasion to discover more about Florence as a city. I have connections there but I lived in the city most as “holidays”. I am there, no deadline or strong commitments. Just enjoy my time there with my relatives. Pycon was an occasion to do something different in the city. Skip the next section if you are not interested in “How can people live and work there?”
Subsection on Florence and events#
(As promised above, it starts with a parenthesis. Florence as a city does not look so suited to accommodate meetings of hundreds of people going there with a common goal. I mean, Florence suffers from issues of accommodating small groups of tourists and of being a small Venice – i.e. a city museum, at least in the center. Or, a “toy city” for tourists, i.e. a place not suited for residential living. You either go there as a tourist or work there in the tourist-centric economy.
How can you get 1K people interested in a shared topic and accommodate them all in a way that makes sense from the logistical point of view? (Florence has a good train station connection, but planes are more complex. My relatives take planes from Pisa. Not the Florence airport of Peretola.)
The conference was organized in a huge hotel, mostly dedicated to the conference. But, of course, you can have hundreds of people congregate in a single place. But you can not have these hundreds of people stay in the same hotel. Even assuming infinite money from all the attendants.
But I understand organizing a conference in Florence may make it easier to catch super cool non-Italian speakers – which I was grateful to see there. And it may also be “more attractive” for Italian attendees. Plus, as I got that – but I may be wrong – there is a tradition of Pycon being in Florence with the communities of Python Florence being involved. Organizing stuff is hard. Organizing stuff for hundreds of people is even harder. The organization did quite a lot of great things and I guess that they leveraged on previous experiences.
Besides that, I have connections in Florence. So I was happy the conference was held there. Nonetheless, organizing conference needs with family-related needs allowed me to get a better picture of how Florence is not a city that is very friendly to “you have to work with deadlines and make plans”.)
Sessions and Themes#
Of course, memories go back to university and conferences, etc. That was my base point to compare the Pycon “tech” conference experience with my previous 10 years (approx) of experiences in the EU, UK, and US in academia (philosophy, logic, legal philosophy).
(Yes, a logo!)
Scattered thoughts as bullets:#
you can feel the weight of the economic difference of, mh, education vs. software (at least, Python software)
the appeal of the conference looked more diverse to me. There were “attendees”, “curious”, “family members of keynotes or other entries in this list (also going forward)”, “student”, “developers and people from the software industry”, “people working in the SW industry”, “people willing to work there or getting more skills in some aspects (Kudos to the beginners day, the workshops and the Django girls event. I haven’t seen many graduate days at academic conferences – except for the subgenre of “graduate conferences”)”, “people there for work”, “people there because of work”, “companies sponsoring the event and presenting their products (and also, recruiting)”.
Ok, the list above looks like a way more famous list about animals. But I’d say it speaks in favor of the quality and variety of the event. I mean, it was a Python conference, but we have Rust, JavaScript, and a lot of DevOps and tooling at the conference. Inspirational talks and sociological talks were also part of the deal: how do you manage a remote team? Can you take a break before the breakdown hits too hard?
I missed not having a printed program to make crosses over. The conference website was a cool substitute for that. You could select the talks you wanted to attend and see your day from your phone… but I wanted a program. It would have made for a nice poster.
The conference website did way more than host the program. It offered badge customization, and I think the choices of the talks also helped to sort out the talks into rooms of different capacities.
Asking questions online was cool and helpful. You typed your questions on the website using Slido. Then the chair asked the questions directly to the speaker. It helps to strip questions to their bare essentials and give a chance to interact also to those that for N reasons did not want to stand up and talk. (That was quite demanding for the chairs, as well as it was demanding for them to stop people flooding into the rooms of the most participated talks once the room was at full capacity)
The quality of the questions was impressive. Maybe it was Slido but there was a lot less fighting and competition in the questions (compared to academia)
FDR (yes, Roosevelt) was quoted in the first keynote.
Burnout was openly mentioned in the slides (yep, another keynote).
Share Random Access Thoughts Patterns
You could meet people creating the tools you work with on a daily bases or that are involved in maintaining these tools (FastAPI, Django). That was impressive in a variety of ways. It felt different to get close connections to these people compared to meeting (or being a discussant, or whatever academia-similar way) the person/professor writing the book or articles you are working on. It was also positive to know these people exist and are reachable and part of the community, at least for me. Things like “CPython implementation” or “Python core developers” may feel like distant or “cult” figures. Well, maybe they are. But they are there and you may get closer to them than you think. I take this as something positive and an incentive to dig deeper into the details of how the tools we use are made.
There is still a lot to unpack from this experience. For example, this made me want to go back to working on talks and presenting papers. Hopefully, I’ll have something ready for the next Pycon!