Carol Willing is a three-time Python Steering Council member, a Python Core Developer, PSF Fellow, Project Jupyter core contributor, and Napari core developer. In 2019, she was awarded the Frank Willison Award for technical and community contributions to Python. As part of the Jupyter core team, Carol was awarded the 2017 ACM Software System Award for Project Jupyter's lasting influence. She's also a leader in open science and open-source governance serving on Quansight Labs Advisory Board and the CZI Open Science Advisory Board. She's driven to make open science accessible through open tools and learning materials. She recently served as Noteable's VP of Engineering.
Brett Slatkin is the author of the book Effective Python and has been writing Python code professionally for the past 20 years. He works as a principal software engineer in the Office of the CTO at Google, developing technology strategies and rapid prototypes. His experience includes: founding Google Surveys (a platform for collecting machine learning and market research datasets), launching Google App Engine (the company's first cloud computing product), scaling Google's A/B experimentation products to billions of users, and co-creating PubSubHubbub (the W3C standard for real-time RSS feeds). He earned his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Columbia University in the City of New York.
Have you used Python's match statement? How do you decide when to use match instead of a typical if/elif/else statement? Although structural pattern matching functionality has been available in Python for years, many Python developers still aren't sure about the best way to employ match in their own programs.
This talk will explore effective patterns that work well with the new match statement, and common pitfalls to avoid. It will highlight when if/elif/else constructs are a better fit, and how to judge when it's time to consider moving from one style to another. The talk will also cover other approaches to matching patterns, including look-up tables for performance and unpacking for sequences.
After attending this talk, you'll be able to confidently use the match statement to enhance your programs and discern when match will harm the readability of your code.
Christopher Ariza (www.flexatone.net) is Partner and Chief Technology Officer at Research Affiliates, a global leader in investment strategies and research. He is the creator and lead developer of StaticFrame, an alternative DataFrame library that offers immutable and statically-typeable DataFrames with runtime type and data validation.
Having worked in Python for over 25 years, he has developed tools in a variety of domains, including algorithmic music composition and computer-aided musicology, and has spoken at numerous conferences, including PyCon USA, SciPy, PyData Global, PyData Los Angeles, and numerous other venues.
Prior to joining Research Affiliates, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at MIT, Assistant Editor at the Computer Music Journal, and Assistant Professor of Recording Arts and Music Technology at Towson University. He has a PhD and MA in music theory and composition from New York University, and a BA in music from Harvard University.
Python implements dynamic type behavior using a statically typed language (C), only to then offer static type annotations on top of a dynamically typed language (Python). This paradox is the focus of this talk. We will look at the basics of type annotations, how polymorphism is implemented in C with PyObject and PyObject_HEAD, and how CPython API functions like PyObject_TypeCheck() work. Despite the chasm between type annotations and runtime reality, their benefits will be demonstrated.
Esther is a co-founder of PyLadies, and is currently a co-organizer of SoCal Python. She has been a professional software developer since 2011 and currently works as a data engineer supporting a large team of data scientists.
More software is being produced today than ever before. Good software developers want to maintain high standards for quality, but may find it challenging to do so in the face of day-to-day pressures, deadlines, and distractions. Non-developers may feel it's acceptable to stop short of full engineering practice. In this talk we'll explore what engineering rigor looks like and discuss ways to uphold standards, even in the face of resistance. Attendees should come away with an understanding that engineering quality is more than just an ideal worth striving for, but a pragmatic way to keep our users happy, and to stay productive without burning out.
Trey Hunner specializes in Python education and corporate training. Trey is a former Python Software Foundation Board Director, a San Diego Python meetup regular. You can learn from Trey through his Python Morsels platform and his weekly Python tips newsletter.
If your Python code works with file paths, you should be using pathlib. This standard library module may seem a bit cumbersome at first, but pathlib-using code is often more readable the alternative.
Python's many path-oriented utilities used to expect a string representation for all file paths. That's not the case anymore. Now, every important path-consuming library will accept pathlib.Path objects.
During this talk, we'll see why pathlib.Path objects make for more maintainable code. We'll visit a number of useful pathlib examples and recipes along the way.
By the end of this talk, you'll be tempted to convert all your path-handling code to use pathlib.
Laura Langdon is the Community Manager for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) network of the University of California. With a focus on the humans in tech communities, Laura is passionate about documentation, diversity and inclusion across all axes, and social responsibility. Working to connect people within the UC open source community to one another and to the greater world of open source, her responsibilities include planning meetups, helping to connect aspiring contributors with projects and vice versa, and creating educational materials about OSS workflows.
Laura has previous experience as a developer advocate at Suborbital Software Systems (acquired by F5), and previously as a math lecturer at CSU East Bay. This breadth of background in both academia and industry provides her with unique insights into making technical concepts accessible and fostering inclusive community growth. In her free time, Laura enjoys recreational research, knitting, and optimizing all the things.
New contributors and maintainers new to accepting contributions face surprisingly similar challenges: anxiety about "getting it right", unclear expectations, and unwritten cultural norms. This talk presents a practical model for real-time collaborative sessions that address both groups' needs simultaneously, creating stronger, more welcoming open source communities from day one.
Parul is a senior engineer in Python Foundation at Meta. Her technical expertise lies in developing scalable Python infrastructure to accelerate research-to-production velocity of AI models sustainably. She is also an early contributor to FairLearn, an open-source Python library to help assess and mitigate bias in AI systems. Parul constantly promotes bridging the gender gap in technology and is an experienced speaker on advanced technical topics, including Python and AI. She leverages her own experience to mentor aspiring technologists to their career goals and desires to make a positive difference in this fast-growing world of AI and technology.
Python's popularity comes from its vast ecosystem of open-source packages, especially for the development for AI modeling and support. However, many Python programmers struggle to share their scripts and packages with others due to a lack of understanding about Python packaging. Join me on a journey to demystify modern Python packaging and learn the end-to-end mechanism of creating, publishing, and managing Python packages. Whether you are new to Python packaging or want to sharpen your skills around modern Python packaging techniques or are a curious Pythonista, I hope for everyone to learn something new here or just have fun with packaging!
Moshe has been a DevOps/SRE since before those terms existed, caring deeply about software reliability, build reproducibility, and other such things. They have worked in companies as small as three people and as big as tens of thousands—usually someplace around where software meets system administration.
In distributed systems, how we handle failure is often more important than how we handle success. This talk challenges the "never give up" mentality by demonstrating why intelligent retreat strategies consistently outperform blind persistence when systems are under stress.
We'll explore the powerful combination of exponential back-off with jitter for managing retries, and explain why quickly "giving up" through strategic load shedding often leads to better overall system health than dogged persistence. We'll show how these complementary approaches can prevent cascading failures, improve user experience during degraded conditions, and help systems recover faster.