This year was my second Pycon, and it was somehow even better than last year?! Read on for my notes about why it was so good 😀

The things I enjoyed

The people

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The Rainbow Curlyboi 🐍

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The talks

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The things that I learnt

✨ The magic of dunder

Python often uses underscores in it. It also often uses double underscores to denote certain properties as “special”. If you want to talk about these you often need to say “double underscore” out loud which is kinda annoying. There is an abbreviation of double underscore that I just discovered. It is “dunder”. It is good. That is all.

🤔 Metaclasses are weird and I’m still not sure I will ever use them in my career but now I know how they work and why you would need them so I guess that’s cool

Yeah. There was a neat talk on metaclasses. They’re classes that do blueprint-y things but for classes. You might use them for writing an ORM model class that has fields that under the hood do fancy magic but allow it to behave like a plain object.

🥡 Python packaging is really quite easy

I’ve never written my own Python package. It seemed easy, if not quite as easy as it is in Javascript land, which is where I spend most of my time these days. But now if I want to, I know exactly what to do. Plus, PyPI even have a test environment you can do integration testing of your package publishing against, which is one up on the NPM registry 😀

Hypothesis is good and getting better and I really should take a look at it

It’s quite neat. If I used Python in my day job more I might try it out 😅

Change is hard and we might need to talk less tech and more about what others care about?

This one is enough said. Just watch the talk.

Things to read and take a look at

A bit about goal setting

This year I tried to set an intention about my PyCon experience. I wanted to do the following:

  • Learn something more heavily comp-sci or science-y
  • Learn something about testing
  • Learn something about humanistic things

I did all of these things!

I also intended on meeting at least ONE new person, which I succeeded in doing! Yay!

I would like to do this more going forward, as it’s surprisingly effective.

The raw notes

I’ve attached screenshots since OCR is not quite there yet. Good luck reading my handwriting, sorry 🤷‍♂️

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Onto 2020 and PyCon AU in Adelaide! 🏙️