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|The views and thoughts below are purely my own.|
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This post was written 2025-05-23

The Badge & Stickers

A PyCon experiential review

In 2025, I attended PyCon US for the first time. I cannot overstate how good of an experience it was.

I participated in and listened to some extremely difficult technical and non-technical discussions.

All the while, I took text notes in an unstructured text doc on my phone.

I primarily appended new notes, and rarely edited prior ones.

These notes may not be usable for anyone else. They probably are not.

They are included here, only minimally edited, as an experiential review of what PyCon was like.


PyCon Notes
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Self certify PSF membership

Maybe put together a lightning talk

Talk to PyPI people about org accounts for educational nonprofits and how
clarity can help people not misqualify as community projects

#high-fives channel idea
Culture of recognition, e.g. shout-out at retros

"Neuro-spicy", great term to adopt

Make sure to setup Security.md, code of conduct

Planetary.org advocacy action center

Opensourcedesign.net

Do more woodworking play!

Look for a scriptable pomodoro timer
https://github.com/glyph/Pomodouroboros/

Tool scikitbuild-core dynamic metadata

Pyspy, pyperf, codspeed
qcachegrind, pyprof2tree

Blockbuster for async test confirmation

Get a bluesky account

Use Ned's "you get to feel good" sponsor levels
Think about what a redistribution pledge would look like? Power of promises?

When doing self invoking script, set and then *unset* env var at top of script
Actually tried this and it works in r53-tool

Wheel next: users expect to be able to control index priorities

Inject dependencies into build environments in order to influence the build

sphinx coverage builder

Use LLMs to get implementation plans / project overviews
Try using hugging face

Inviting designers and other non code contributions with docs
List things as ways to get involved
Opensourcedesign.net

zed editor

bors-ng
Gating.dev

Color algorithms; wcag and apca
Select only two (or N) background colors to use and then compute contrast
Do a linear regression to optimize the linear function steps

Prairie Up
Look for coastline in MI, in the UP

Map strings so that they are equidistant under a hash function and then use that
to position the strings in color space
Pick the two most common forms of color blindness to focus on
Make the application interactive so that users can select an element and it can
be made the most prominent

Pod Save America & Pod Save the World

Send Bryce the Glyph talk

Think about marker application for sources

Confusing.technology

Add Mastodon verification meta tag to personal website

Look into making PyPI org into community

Write a post about being a good friend
War in Ukraine, and personal feeling of not having been supportive enough
Retro: maybe don't, not particularly well qualified and may actually be harmful
Instead, write about active remembering and  Holocaust remembrance, where I have
more right to a public voice (aside: who has the right to speak on any topic?
All that is required is to be informed?)

Write a post about LLM usage and adopting a hacker mindset
Hack the LLM itself to make it do what you want
Treat the system adversarially, extract useful information from it

codereading.club , send to Sviat

Run a session next year on how to choose your first CPython issue
Check if core devs disagree
Being a manager for a day; tell my good manager friends that their work is so
hard and I'm glad I don't have to do it

Open source has no budget

Remember remember to join chipy
Maybe join WhatsApp to be part of the overflow communication from cons -- eg,
Django Con 2025

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Try the Sombre+ Dark theme, compare against gruvbox

Scunthorpe Sans -- ligature curse words

SmartBear code collaborator; old app for patch reviews; issues around invisible
Unicode space chars

Larry Hastings; appeal CLI tool

Implement matmul on types to learn how this might work
Look at "An alternative to Annotated" thread
Also using rmatmul to do this in a library
Very lolzy % chance using rmod

Read Ned's blog, especially regarding UKR support
Plan where to put UKR banners

Retrospective
Maybe turn the conversation with Blaise about emacs and vim into a post about
vim as a file editor and vscode as an operating environment

Prioritize note drop, then write about adversarial LLM usage

After the development sprints:

The Room, The End

(In the moment, it felt like a tornado had ripped through. In retrospect, not so bad.)