Reflections from PyCon 2025

PyCon 2025 in Pittsburgh was my first ever PyCon and it was a blast. My three big personal takeaways were the following:

1. The only constant is change
2. Let it be fun to build stuff
3. Knowing something and teaching it are different skills

The only constant is change
This year, some of the sexiest topics of the day seemed to be:

1. uv – the all-in-one python package manager
2. marimo notebooks (as a rising alternative to Jupyter notebooks)
3. Free threading / removing the global interpreter lock (and improving performance)
4. Lots of stuff about GPUs and Machine Learning

Of course, many, many, other themes were covered. But to me, the interesting part about this is that if you only went to PyCon before the last couple of years, you may not have heard nearly as much about any of these topics. My brother-in-law for example is a software engineer who uses Python at a super global tech company famous for cutting edge engineering teams – but since he’s moved into more of a management role, he hasn’t had the time to keep up with most of these latest developments. Every couple of months there is some new library, or API, or framework that seems to change the game, and it can be dizzying to try to keep up, so you have to remember to…

Let it be Fun To Build Stuff
The most fascinating and exhilarating two sessions that I went to were two self-organized sessions:

1. On Vim, the coding text editor known for speed.   
2. About dotfile configurations. Dotfiles are system configuration files that you can use to personalize, automate, and otherwise soup up the way you use your computer.  

I saw things in these sessions that made me feel like I had arrived at the promised land of programming. These folks made the simple act of writing code look like playing a beautiful piano concerto. Not one wasted movement. Pure passion for making the thoughts in your head result in behavior on the screen, like a ice skater doing a perfect 10 triple lutz. It was poetry. I’m not joking. It was so beautiful, I may never recover. After this, I made a determination to learn Vim. 
 
Knowing Something and Teaching It Are Different Skills
Given that two different Python programmers can be in radically different areas of the Python universe, it can be as hard for them to communicate with each other as it could be for two different aliens from different planets.

I went to many sessions that were completely over my head technically. And, looking around, I could see that I wasn’t alone. It makes sense that for many people, PyCon is the one chance that they have a year to talk with the 7 other people who are experts at their thing - it’s no surprise that they use their time to address that audience instead of a newbie.
This was one of the big reasons why I especially loved Al Sweigart’s, talk on “Making Python Talk, Making Python Listen.” The talk was super fun and accessible. Al is a Python educator, so he thinks a lot about how to communicate technical ideas and is very good at it.

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