My PyCon US 2026
Published May 25, 2026
This past Tuesday night I arrived home exhausted. I was completely worn out. But for good reason. I had just arrived home from PyCon US 2026 where I had an amazing time. Because telling you about everything I did would take longer than I care to write (and, let's be honest, you probably wouldn't want to read it either) I'm just going to give some highlights and thoughts.
Highlights
As always, a big highlight of my PyCon US experience is the PSF booth and the amazing people
I work with to organize it every year! This group starts working in January to figure out all of the fun things we are
going to have in the booth.
An abbreviated list of this year's fun was:
- The Photo Booth with slightly smaller than life cutout of Guido.
- A pair of word searches (and I apologize to everyone for Set A missing "Long Beach". My bad.)
- Stickers and badge decorating.
- Meet & greets
- NES emulator
- Community art work
- So much more!
Beyond what I did at the booth I also:
- Was a TA for Trey Hunner's tutorial on lazy looping.
- Went to see the Dodgers vs. Giants at Dodger Stadium with Elaine and Mike.
- Was a session runner for a talk (this was my first time volunteering to do this. Highly recommend!)
- Made my first CPython contribution!
And all of this is beyond the amazing conversations I had with old friends and new.
Thoughts
So here are my thoughts and takeaways from this year in no particular order.
I am sad that so many of our friends from abroad were unable to attend. I understand - and agree with - their reasoning. I think the entire community missed out on some things that would have been great because these people could not come.
I did not attend the first keynote. I saw who the speaker was and walked out of the room during the introduction. I did not want to be in the room. This keynote went off the rails and the speaker went rogue. I am saddened by this as, even while I did not want to hear what they had to say, I was hopeful that it would be correct for some of my colleagues who were in the room. Alas, this was not to be. My hope is that this will force the PyCon US to develop procedures for handling a case like this in the future.
One of the things that scared me heading into PyCon this year was the announcement of a special, "AI" track. (As you may know I have thoughts on LLMs and generative models. I am not going to go into those here.) So a dedicated "AI" track seemed like a bad idea. I am happy to say I was wrong. The dedicated track contained almost all of the "AI" content. That's not to say there weren't lightning talks about it - there were - but I don't think there was a single LLM-centric talk ooutside of the scope of that track.
I understand just enough Spanish (not even enough to have a conversation, but enough words here and there) that my brain always attempts to process it. For me seeing Spanish media it takes an act of will to read the subtitles, not because I don't want to or shouldn't but because my brain thinks it should understand what it's hearing and doesn't need it. At 9AM on day 2 of PyCon I do not have the willpower to be able to properly process that, so I missed Pablo's keynote. As soon as it is online I will watch it.
For me this was an amazing PyCon. I had some of my first real life interactions with friends who live in my phone. I added a bunch of new friends who live in my phone (Hello unofficial Signal group chat!) For me PyCon is about the people and the people were very much awesome. Thank you all.