Py Con AU 2026 Day 1

What did I learn? Well, that it’s a learning journey to be a session chair for a start!

Apologies to the AV staff for not sequencing the very simple instructions and bigger apologies to Erin from Atlassian for botching her name. I got over confident. But I had fun and it helped me stay alert through the courses after the all-nighter on the flight.

Sorry Jetstar you gave me precisely what I expected, as is the hotel in the you get what you pay for.

The highlight, outside of the conference, was the Jubilee Hotel in Fortitude Valley. It’s pretty and the meal was cheap. It was filling and nice but could have been cooked through better and the service I’d consider average…

Back to PyCon AU 2026 I did redeem myself by loaning my Pebble watch charger and I met up with the BeeWare crew and will do so again.

I learned from every session which is the point:

• Respect to Kattni for her perseverance on the massive overhaul of the docs in BeeWare that I am enjoying. I an reminded about the Markdown syntax quirks I take for granted.
• Props to Alyssa to her long standing commitment to Python core - thank you for runpy, and the tipoffs to more debugging. I really am going to have to build in more of these module CLIs if I wanted my stub to be serious. I do really torture Python’s loader in my code.
• Thank you to Erin for her attention ti making things accessible. It’s often hidden but never wasted and the Star Trek theming was appreciated too.
• Great Scott from Chainguard walked us through concrete demos to drive home the point that convenience containers are no longer tenable in a pipeline to be deployed from. Sorry Debian you did not come out of the talk well but I will defend your volunteer status.

Those were the sessions I was directly “responsible” for.

Outside of those I made some good contacts with students and a teacher from Canberra and some regulars from New Zealand who strongly suggests I do visit Greece. I chatted with some others and I listened to a mix of basic and advanced talks. A big focus on AI augmentation and agentic engineering. I still don’t feel ready to approach that - maybe over the big break. I was entertained by talks that taught me about Pydantic in relation to dataclasses, TypedDict, and FastAPI though live demo issues derailed that talk.

I was too busy to sign up for a lightning talk and frankly I’m thankful because I didn’t meet the standard and I had done the session chair contribution.

Challenges with Brisbane trains means I won’t stick around for the second session on Saturday evening.

I am considering following the lead of others in other regards though…
🥞