I had a blast at this year’s PyCon AU.

Last year I struggled a bit with the conference, especially meeting new people. The most rewarding part of last year’s conference for me was being a Session Chair for one of the blocks. I decided to lean into that and I was picked as a volunteer for the weekend. I had so much fun!

Being a volunteer means that you spend a large part of the conference doing various jobs like working the registration desk, letting people know when t-shirt swaps will be available, wrangling speakers, and being a room monitor for the talks. I spent the majority of my time either on the registration desk or looking after speakers. I got to meet so many of the other volunteers, but also met so many attendees! A big shoutout to the Core Team, especially Izy Hogan, for making it an excellent and well-organized experience. I highly recommend anyone seeking to get more involved in the conference to apply to be a volunteer.

This year’s conference was at the Pullman on the Park, and the venue was much better this year. The space suited the conference very well and had a well-organized linear flow to the space from the entrance to the registration desk, to the ballrooms and sponsors. It was also well-positioned within the city, right next to Jolimont station and walking distance from Richmond station.

The main event, of course, is the talks. On Friday, I split my time between the Data & AI track and the Scientific Python tracks. There were many interesting talks, but I particularly enjoyed Melanie Hampel’s “On the fly and on the flight: Scientific data analysis beyond the beamline”. It was also interesting hearing about the progress that’s being made on streaming & chunking large datasets using tools like DuckDB to allow data analysis of huge datasets on modest laptop hardware.

Saturday & Sunday I split my time between all the ballrooms & the volunteer desk. Talks I particularly enjoyed were:

• The brain-bending tour of what happens when you print(“Hello World!”) – from the Python interpreter down to the linux kernel to the processor, and all the way back up! I definitely didn’t understand most of it but I was engaged the entire time. Thanks Noah Kantrowitz!
• I gave a lightning talk on Saturday! You can find the slides on the Talks & Presentations page.
• Zain Afzal’s “Found Font Family” was a funny & charming deep-dive into their quest to get a cat into their terminal. The video can be found here.

Next year’s conference will be in Brisbane in August, and I already know that will be a chaotic time in 2026 for me! We’ll see whether I can attend, I hope I can!