Day 7 — How PyCon Changed My Life
Hi there, I am Iskandar from Cloud Product team in HENNGE. Welcome to the 7th day of HENNGE Advent Calendar!
In this occasion, I want to share something related to a conference that has made a great impact in my life. PyCon, or also known as Python Conference (we are talking about the programming language, not the real snake 🐍 of course), is hosted internationally all around the world by local Python communities. In that way, PyCon is unique since everyone can become part of the organizing team and if your country doesn’t have any PyCon conference so far, you can be the one to initiate it.
My first PyCon experience was as a speaker in PyCon JP 2017 and now, I have given various talks at 8 PyCons in 5 countries: Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Italy. Of course, all of these opportunities were fully supported by my company, HENNGE! (Note: our name used to be HDE)
PyCon x Knowledge
“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” — Once I joined the working society, I realized that my knowledge became more specialized. In a sense, I got better in doing my everyday job, but at the same time, I started to get disconnected with the latest technologies out there. If you are utilizing Python in your daily coding life, PyCon offers all the best opportunities to learn something new. For example, when type hints and data classes are introduced, there’s a guy from Dropbox who gives a full 30-minute talk related to Dropbox migration from Python 2 to 3 with these additional new features. From the other talks, I also learned a lot of interesting development tools such as Black, Poetry, and so on.
New knowledge is not always limited to the current expertise. PyCon offers talks in various tracks, ranging from machine learning, data science, web development, and so forth. For example, by attending a machine learning related talk, I learned how interpretable machine learning works. Or when I attended a data science related talk, I learned how we can utilize Folium for visualizing geospatial data. Furthermore, I also learned something that is completely new to me; there was a talk which explained how machine learning with Python was being utilized in oil & gas company (sea sediment mapping).
PyCon x Inspirations
PyCon is not all about learning technical contents. There are a lot of inspiring stories from PyCon speakers. In PyCon JP 2018, the keynote speaker told a story of teaching Python in South America. Starting from Argentina, he has travelled more than 60000 km by car! He visited various smaller cities and organized various PyCon events there. It’s definitely not an easy journey, considering that some of those places are still live below the average living standards. If you’re interested, check out the keynote video!
In PyCon X Italy 2019, one of the speaker shared his story about living in Antarctica with 12 other people for 9 months! Each of them had their own expertise: astronomer, glaciologist, doctor, and so on. They utilized Python for various research projects over there.
These kinds of stories are definitely not your daily life experience. It might not have any technical lessons that can be applied directly, but it sure inspires us to keep chasing our dreams. Python is just a programming tool, nevertheless, depending on how we utilize it, the impact can be unimaginable!
PyCon x Cultural Experiences
PyCon is a place where we can enjoy various cultural experiences. PyCon is an event where people from all parts of the world gather together under a single object of interest, “Python”. We talked to each other and exchanged a lot of unique stories that we brought from our home country.
Have you ever had a karaoke in a conference bus? If you haven’t, then you should visit PyCon Indonesia.
Have you ever had infinite flow of wine during conference lunch? If you haven’t, then you should visit PyCon Italy. Just make sure that you don’t get wasted since there are a lot of interesting sessions after lunch time!
Have you ever seen someone bringing number of Tupperwares to conference dinner (for leftover food)? If you haven’t, then you should visit PyCon HK.
PyCon x New Connections
Last but not least, PyCon is a social event by nature; you will meet a lot of fellow developers or even non-technical people who are working in IT industry. In addition, we can meet various amazing people that we probably wouldn’t meet on daily basis. For example, I talked with the CEO of Anaconda in PyCon JP and he told a story about the philosophy behind Anaconda: Simplicity which allows non-IT people such as data scientist to utilize Python in their life. Or at the other time, I talked with one of the top open source contributor and he talked about his experience contributing to various open source projects.
PyCon also helped me in building a connection with people from my home country, Indonesia. As I’m currently living in Japan for 4 years and counting, I started to get disconnected from the current state of the IT industry back in Indonesia. By joining PyCon ID, I could talk with a lot of great developers and we shared stories about technology stack that we utilize in our workplace. We gained insight and brought this knowledge back to our own city / country. We remain connected in various online media: Github, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and so on, where we can learn from each other posts about state-of-the-art technologies in the IT industry.
One of the unique point of PyCon is that anyone can become a conference speaker. CfP, also known as “Call for Proposal”, allows Pythonistas to submit their ideas and if your submission is chosen, then you can present your talk to the community. Most PyCons allow attendees to vote for talks they are interested in, while small number of PyCons have a special committee for screening those ideas. PyCon community is very welcoming, so you should try proposing a talk regardless of your PyCon skill!
So, here are the main concerns that I heard from people who have never given a talk but they want to:
- I don’t have any good ideas! Most people think that becoming a speaker in a conference is outside their realm. But please remember that PyCon has a broad range of talks, from beginner to advanced ones. Since Python is a versatile tool, PyCon has one of the most diverse community: web developers, data scientists, analysts, mobile developers, and so on. If you’re one of the web devs who know how to utilize Python with AWS Lambda, then that can be considered as one of the topic idea. If you’re one of the data scientists who know how to visualize geographical data with Folium, then it’s also one of PyCon talk ideas. Or, if you have compared some Python frameworks / tools in your spare time, you can publish your research results here!
- I can’t talk in front of a large audience, I will mess things up! I assure you, it’s not only you who has this kind of concern. Story to be told, my first PyCon talk went horribly wrong. I wrote my presentation on 1920 x 1080 screen (web-based), but the projector could only support 1024 x 768 resolution. As a result, a lot of contents were cropped on the display. Fortunately, the community is kind and forgiving; they helped me by asking several questions to show they were actually interested in my presentation. Even better, several people talked directly to me afterwards and I made new friends there. In short, we all know that public speaking is not a developer’s forte, so there’s nothing to be afraid of!
Several tips on how you can start writing a CfP:
- You should try listing down all the ideas that you have first. After several days have passed, you should try placing yourself in the audiences’ shoes and choose 2–3 talks that you’re interested to attend if those talks are presented by other people
- Each conferences might have different CfP format, but they mostly have the following required fields to fill in: Title, Abstract (100 to 200 words), and Description. From those 2–3 talks that you have shortlisted above, you should try writing down these required fields and try outlining your talk into several parts with time allocation on each sections
- After you have finished writing down details for your ideas, it’s time to think why your ideas are better than other Pythonistas with similar CfP submissions. This step is especially important for tracks with high popularity, such as machine learning tracks. Organizers will try to keep a certain balance in the accepted talks so that we can enjoy more diversity in talks
If you are interested, here are the presentation materials that I wrote for each year PyCons:
- 2017: Building a Customized Personal Assistant with Python
- 2018: Anime Character Image Recognition with Transfer Learning
- 2019: Python Website Is Slow? Think Again!
Thank you for reading this far and see you next time! 🎄
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This article is part of the HENNGE Advent Calendar 2019. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. HENNGE Advent Calendar 2019 presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2019.
