PyCon AU 2026 Day 2

Friday was an excellent if naturally locally oriented day with the education track.

A day where I learned Toowoomba is “not Brisbane”, apparently “cold” (but perhaps simply “colder”) and some students are amazing.

And that Discord really isn’t doing me any favours economising on push notifications. Sigh.

Met up with more people but not really making any lasting connections however finding more gravity of the Perth community than expected with people with ties to Curtin and again the Square Kilometre Array, and we did see some hints of public service (hello BoM!).

I had no formal role today except to be in the Wear It Purple photo which given I was allocated a Purple tee I was contractually obliged to participate in 😀.

I liked hearing the real awkwardness of no-filter Cam Wilson. I felt for the challenges of high school security (but is “let them have admin” really the only answer? unfortunately that’s an “if you know only about the hammer everything is a nail” problem), the laser focus on gender minority boosting was natural given the sponsorship of the track and I did take some signals from that, but I’m so late stage in that pipeline that the advice of “appear multiple times to reinforce - don’t be just one workshop or guest speaker” contradicted with the problem of scale (we had to shut down that chapter). There aren’t enough volunteers and the natural elective whittling, exposed in numbers (for Queensland but unlikely to be better in WA) was a harsh reminder of our enrolment challenge.

I did switch over to the cyber track to support a local, where the moral of the tale was unlimited tokens doesn’t disavow you from testing your slides. I also enjoyed the fresh approach of a double-act to bounce off each other. The software supply chain is both a huge benefit (all those libraries) and our biggest downfall (all those vulnerabilities, and again gives me food for thought for anything that I release (the strength of the sandbox is really all that’s protecting me from my code).

I didn’t get as much from the end of the day except that research software engineering remains very academic, conservative and a high quality space (look at his documentation - wonderful), I was just hoping to learn more about the detail of actually doing the Python packaging part (but as he’d actually been in Python since 2008, I think the skills in that area was actually in a blind spot as being hard), and the final talk was “merely” the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy saying “Don’t Panic” on its cover - there will always be coders simply that the problems are shifting a bit.

I’m actually squeezing two days into one day which is frankly crazy and I will pay for it later. Today (though I am writing this tomorrow) I went on buses, busways, Metro (yes it’s just a triple length bus not approved on regular roads) and many more trains. Thanks to regular strikes (hey Queensland you have a super system support the workers, but do something about the inner city links and level crossings on heritage lines) I was not able to go on a ferry again. I was able to go on a scooter but not a bike, so I made it on the bikeway too but the less said about that the better (and since they did the right thing and issued an immediate refund, it never happened right?).
🐘