(See my PyCon AU 2015 Wrapup Post))

PyCon AU is wonderful. I don’t think there’s any other conference that lets me learn such a wide spectrum of different topics. Not only Python specific, but implementations of things using Python, and othogonal topics that are still important that aren’t Python.

First of all, I absolutely adore conferences that use the fact that you have a whole lot of developers in a room to give talks about mental health. OSDC have done this a few times, and it’s awesome that PyCon was able to organise a plenary session from Jasckon Fairchild about burnout.

As mentioned by Richard Jones in the opening address, there was a recent IEEE report that details that while Python is one of the top 5 most popular programming languages, it only has a story on the web and the server. Mobile and embedded usage were mysteriously absent from the chart.

It’s serendipitous that the two keynotes from PyCon AU happened to address both this missing pieces.

Yes, I am a core developer on BeeWare, so I am slighly biased, but the Sunday Keynote by Russell Keith-Magee was about more than just his push to Python All The Things. It’s about continuing the conversation from many of his other enthusiatic rants; the sustainability of open source projects, burn out, community.

Also, Damien George gave a keynote on MicroPython, which was awesome. They have units running in space! REPL via Satellite!

We also had a lovely dinner with a keynote by Solange Cunin, who was infectiously excited about the work Quberider is doing getting student experiments into space. Because space!

There were plenty of extremely interesting talks apart from the keynotes.

Samuel Spencer’s talk on the digitizing the Parliamentary Library was a hidden gem, full of interesting facts and information about how Django is being run in one of the most secure and stringent places: the government.

I also cannot recommend Noah Kantrowitz’s talk about managing passwords in a dangerous world highly enough. Also another standout security related talk was Tom Eastman giving a talk not unlike his world famous Serialisation Formats are Not Toys talk, but this time on user uploads

With four tracks over three days, there’s some talks I missed, sadly, including Thursday Bram’s Technical Blogging tutorial (within which this blog is mentioned! I’m honoured!). I also sadly missed VM Brasseur’s maximising drive-thru contributions

Another milestone from PyCon AU: the BeeWare Challenge Coins were all given out! That means that since the first BeeWare sprint in April 2016, 100 people have earned a Challenge Coin. That that’s fantastic

All the vidoes from PyConAU are already on YouTube!

My entire tweet stream from #pyconau