PyCon AU 2026 Day 3
The last day, for me, came with a very odd sense of familiarity. Not just feeling comfortable but feeling like I’d been there before. I don’t quite know what to put it down to, because PyCon is its own unique beast, linux.conf.au 2014 was something somilar but different. So as I said, odd.
As the week went on I was getting far too comfortable with Brisbane’s public transport to the point that I optimised my morning down to four minutes to spare. Thank you Google Maps and translink!
No thankyou to 7-11 for not living up to their name and being open from at least 7am. I thought that was the origin of the name?
The last day ethical keynote felt like a tip of the hat toward Everything Open (the linux.conf.au successor) than PyCon, but we are definitely a mature ecosystem that cares deeply about community, impact and maintenance.
So I started with the Developer Relations track today as a nod to the internal role I used to have and the role as a participant I am starting to take on.
Talk one was a reminder that with great power comes great responsibility. The power of AI in teaching new concepts is imbalanced between its confidence that it generates versus the complexity of the topic. We demonstrated that a cutting edge (Gemini Flash “3.7” medium local?) needed skills to ingest lengthy datasets properly. The AI could itself (sometimes!) generate the skill but you have to go through a process. The message is straightforward - look for the determinism (eg, parsing) and first get that generated, then use those to condense the context required to summarise (a better use of AI). A side message abandoned at the start of the talk was that “Code Labs” were useful as a human-curated set but perhaps not because theres a Claude Learn skill for creating just that in a fully personalised manner.
Skipping a talk for now, we got a competing argument for code lab style workshops bemoaning their attractiveness. Here the message was find their strengths: adopt a platform that shifts all of the environment variations to a browser-based solution, and have the AI make a draft scaffold because it knows the topic, but it doesn’t know how to break things enough to encourage human learning - we have to do that, and (as I can speak from experience) we have to ensure we can control the breakages otherwise you lose the learner.
The talk in between was energetic and based upon the two sides of the coin - running and participating in a developer community or as a vendor/project advocate, and the various engagement opportunities. Food for thought that resonated for me in “complaining” about the recommendation engine of Meetup.com but also embracing the many tiers of membership/patronage from simple attendee.
I then got schooled, heavily, as expected, by Russell of BeeWare on the things I do not know but should about as I feared on day one how I was butchering the shoehorning of script executions. There are many PEPs of history I have been missing. His advice, unfortunately for my future interest of time, was to read most - even rejected ones for how they teach us what they are like (I do kind of wonder if he sees anything in me, oh dear did I write that out loud).
The second batch of talks spanned how to solve crosswords and do code golf - I had more of the code golf techniques than the cryptic ones. The exceptional talk was the one that talked more other languages than Python for error handling, but I liked it, because it talked about C and Rust that I actually recognised.
I did miss at least one talk due to the hallway track running over, to the point that I may have gotten myself in trouble there. Never mind. I had an excellent chat to an aspiring lecturer from UK and NZ. That is absolutely the point of being present in person.
I regrettably in the interests of anxiety reduction skipped the final lightning talks and close out, but eventually (in as short as days) there should be polished videos of most of the conference. I know there were talks I missed, relying on those.
Special thank you to everyone I met and pacmanned into, and very special thanks to George for the buddying up from Perth and back.
I would come back again, but I don’t know if it will be annually yet, it has been quite the burden on home to which I now return.
📅