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“That some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them – and at the risk of making fools of ourselves” (Erwin Schrödinger)

PyCon US '24

Pycon logo

I attended PyCon US '24 with several of my colleagues. This was my second tech conference, following FOSDEM '24 back in February.

I had a great time at the conference. I was fairly overwhelmed, but thankfully the conference was well organized: the schedule was clear, rooms easy to find, and meals unexpectedly tasty.

Attending a conference just for the talks misses out on the unique opportunities of meeting in person. After all, the talks will be available online a few weeks later. I tried to put this into action by making the most of the non-talk opportunities.

Takeaway: done is better than perfect

This was delivered during a lightning talk by a Korean mother who returned to the workforce - an impressive feat in the West, let alone in a culture with stricter gender roles. She described how she started posting videos to youtube to rebuild her tech skills and reach an audience: she would record a video during downtime with her children, and upload without editing.

This lesson hits me at the core: writing this blog is a challenge, uploading without rounds of revision sounds terrifying! And that's with a readership that I could count on my fingers: me, myself and I 🫠

Takeaway: LLM keynote

Simon Willison gave an excellent keynote on LLMs. His passion is infectious. He is also a great educator, explaining various topics that I had felt I wouldn't be able to understand.

For example, he explained Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as just providing extra context for a given query into the LLM input. The extra context may come from a full text search over a given dataset.

For another example, he explained the security issues with LLMs. Why can't we have autonomous agents that operate on real world input? Because LLMs are susceptible to prompt injection attacks: LLMs can't reliably distinguish between instructions and content, the data and command channels are combined.

Takeaway: open spaces

I attended a couple open spaces on security. The first, run by OWASP, was a group card game that helped teach about security. The second, run by PyPI and Github, was a discussion about security in the supply chain.

I also attended an open space on solo dev work - this took the form of a discussion about managing clients, working through timelines, and general entrepreneurship.

I found the open spaces to be more engaging than talks, due to the small groups and open discussion.

Takeaway: talks

I enjoyed the talks on:

Check them out when the videos are published online.

Takeaway: time with colleagues

My favorite part of the trip was spending so much time with my colleagues. Meals, talks, and even just hanging out - working on a remote team, the face to face time nurtures relationship development that's just not possible via a computer.

Wrap up

I look forward to my next conference trip, solo or with team mates. I walk away each time with excitement and energy for my field of work.