Day 3 of PyCon 2018 began with a keynote from one of the longtime core developers of Python, Brett Cannon. He spoke on the struggles of working in open source and how we should treat each other with kindness throughout the process. I completely agreed with all his points as the negativity I see sometimes is quite discouraging. I try hard when I review books to not be too negative, for example.
After the keynote, they had a poster session and job fair. The poster session is reserved for people who weren’t chosen to give a talk, but their proposal was still good enough for a poster. Or at least, that’s how it was explained to me when the first poster session occurred. I did notice that one of the talk speakers had a poster with the same name as her talk from the previous day, so maybe the rules have changed? I don’t know. I think my favorite was one about a Python keyboard where the keys were remapped to make it easier to program in Python. She had certainly done her research at any rate.
The first talk I attended was Type-checked Python in the real world by Carl Meyer from Instagram. He was pretty persuasive in his talk about how powerful the typing module is and its usefulness.
I had planned to go to Ned Batchelder’s talk, Big-O: How Code Slows as Data Grows, but I got distracted by another writing open space and one on education with Python. The latter was one I probably should have skipped as it was a continuation of a previous open space.
There was a photo booth for people who wanted to take Mother’s Day photos for their loved ones and they had also set aside a room for people to call home in.
I met a ton of people this time around, which was really neat. I met a number of core developers and a couple of people who have backed my projects on Kickstarter. I even got a photo with Guido! Overall, I think I learned a lot of interesting things and look forward to interacting with the Python community for many years to come.