+-----------------------------------------------+ |The views and thoughts below are purely my own.| +-----------------------------------------------+
This post was written 2025-05-23
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
-----------
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:
(In the moment, it felt like a tornado had ripped through. In retrospect, not so bad.)