A small collection of thoughts
We’re coming up on six years of Conference Chats. It’s a slowly-growing community of conference (and other community!) organizers. That growth has be primarily organic. If you’re not familiar with it, this post will be a part introduction, part future plans, and almost entirely a brain dump (with some attempt to keep it scannable).
I’ve just returned home from attending DjangoCon US 2025, and it was everything I’d hoped it’d be. I’ve been hoping to attend for years, but this was the first time the timing worked out, so this was my first in-person DjangoCon. (I’ve attended online before, and I highly encourage you to attend whichever way works for you.)
The Conference Scrapbook: one of those things I always intend to find time for during a conference and rarely follow through on. I’ve been doing a better job at that for PyCon US 2025. I’m already enjoying the process, and I expect to appreciate the ability to look back on it in the future. If you’re an event organizer and have never kept a “scrapbook”, perhaps this post will encourage you to do…
I think a lot about conference organizing, so it’s unsurprising that I see parallels to conference organizing from other fields. After all, at its core, organizing a conference rhymes with plenty of other endeavors that boil down to providing a stage for presentations and seats for their audience.
A while back, I bought an Olympus WS-853 digital audio recorder. I bought this for a specific functional use case (the details of which are irrelevant here) rather than the absolute best audio quality. Having used it a few times now, I’ve come to appreciate a couple of its “secondary” features and wish that more products included this type of focus on usability.
I frequently use the phrase “stacking chairs” as a metaphor for all sorts of community volunteering actions. Someone recently asked me to explain what I meant by it, and I thought it would be a good topic to share more broadly as a blog post.
The Python Software Foundation and the Django Software Foundation both have notions of “memberships” that allow people to vote in their organizations’ respective board elections (and may include other benefits). I regularly reference my own Mastodon posts and browser history (and have even committed a link or two to memory) to share these links with folks, so this post exists to allow me to link…
Do you know someone whose work meets the criteria for Python Software Foundation Fellowship Membership? You now have less than three weeks to get their nomination in for Q4 of 2024. More details at https://www.python.org/psf/fellows/, and I will happily help you craft that nomination and get it out the door contact me if you want to chat.
I’ve had a 3D printer for a few years now, but 3D printing has not become a hobby for me. Instead, I treat it as an appliance, which is to say that I tend to use it to print something utilitarian and not really think about it otherwise. Aside from the occasional demo print like a calibration cube or a benchy, my prints are usually things like a knob to replace a broken one on some appliance,…
I once again find myself nostalgic for video (rental) stores, and I’m trying to figure out what I would actually want from that experience today aside from the nostalgia itself (hard to live up to those expectations and rarely a recipe for a viable business or community space).
Every now and then, an oft-repeated joke rubs me the wrong way, and I feel the need to play joke police. This post isn’t targeted at any one individual (no, not even you, the reader). I’ve made these jokes before, and I’ve heard them from all sorts of people. Let’s be a little more mindful about how we portray conference organizing.
I am excited to announce that I’ve recently stepped up as the new maintainer for PyVideo. PyVideo is a wonderful resource for the Python community, cataloging videos of conference and meetup talks from around the world for over thirteen years now. As a conference organizer and frequent conference attendee myself, I get a lot of value from PyVideo, and I’m glad to be able to contribute back to it…
In October 2019, I put out a call for conference organizers to join a discussion group.
I’ve heard this question a lot this past year with regard to community tech conferences. I think most people who’ve asked me this question expected or hoped for a response of “yes”. My short answer is “it’s not our call to make”. Read below for my longer answer.
My old Thinkpad X260 had some graphics issues, so it was time for a new laptop. I’ve had my Lemur Pro for a few months now, and I like it so far. Read on for my likes and dislikes.
What’s a homelab?
Overall Review
Sponsoring a conference can be really beneficial to an organization. Nonprofits (especially volunteer-run groups) can rarely justify the cost. We’re trying a little experiment to fix that, and so far, it’s going well.
With conference season upon us, I want to share some tips for conference sponsors. I’ve gotten some questions about this lately, so I’d like to share some of the approaches I’ve seen over the years.
I wrote this in response to a tweet. The tweet was (I’m quite sure) a joke, but I’m responding to it on face value, anyway. I started replying on Twitter, but this grew to be way too long, so it’s posted here instead.
The history of fire companies1 dates back millennia, but their current form is relatively new, just a few hundred years old. The evolution of these companies happens in parallel in different nations, but I’d like to tell the story of how London’s fire brigades became the public service we know today. I’m a technologist, not a historian, and I’ve taken some liberties and omitted some
Flake8 is a linter for Python source code. Out of the box, it will (mostly) enforce the style guidelines defined in PEP 8, but its real power comes from its rich list of plugins. Below is a list of plugins I use when developing Python projects.
What is requirements.txt?
A few months back, I gave a talk on the good and bad parts of Google App Engine. I’ve meant to open source the supporting materials for a while now, and I finally got around to it. You can find a very bare bones application on my github page. Feel free to contact me with any questions.
Check out my post over at the Fancy Hands blog about how we get around payment provider outages.