If you don’t know a conference named PyconAU, you have no idea what you are missing. And I now finally had the energy to gather my thoughts about it.

I absolutely do not care what are your thoughts about Python (the language), but Python has hands down the best community of all. There’s no other community as inclusive and fun. It doesn’t matter if your day job involves writing python code or not, everyone is more than welcome.

Be warned we are a tad unusual, but we are proud of it. Grassroots conferences are the best.

Curlyboi ^^^^ Paranoid curlyboi!!!!!111!!!! Yes, that’s a tinfoil hat^^^^


Pycon AU was scheduled to happen in Adelaide this year (it’s on the same city for two consecutive years, and then moves to a new city). But 2020 had different ideas, and so we ended up with an extremely online conference. In case you are missing safety airline videos, pyconlineau covers your needs.


The event was hosted in Venueless, and the development team was exceptionally responsive. So many new features deployed during the conference. AV was taken care by amazing Next Day Video, and they were as impressive as always. True to their name, the very next day we had all talks available in youtube.

Let me explain to you how an extremely online event works. You type a lot, make terrible jokes. You join a lot of video hallways to talk about artificial blood, or where to dye your hair like curlyboi. You complain about the lack of snacks and post pictures of your cats. Conference rooms are named like ‘Curlyboi Theater’ and ‘Python 2 Memorial Concert Hall’. favourite name?. You use a lot of ‘heart’ emojis.

Note that conference time was originally in ACST time, but we quickly agreed that it did not mean Australian Central Standard Time, but rather Australian Curlyboi Standard Time, which will change every 2 years. Note that this is still one of the saner timezones. … Time talk? We had one

Spherical planets were a premature optimisation. We ended up with Timezones tech debt that cannot be fixed.


Curlyboi

On Friday, we had the miniconfs. Really good talks, but I have to give the trophy to the Security&Privacy miniconf, which managed to register what’s one of the best domains known to industry. https://snakeoil.academy/

Some talks I’d say everyone should watch.


Technosolutionism and human rights - Lucie Krahulcova

Our technical solutions are political, and we need to own it.


Biometric Unsecurity - Carina C. Zona

(Do not watch this one if you aren’t on a good day, it’s quite a kick)

The (lack-of) science on biometrics, and how are we’ve been abusing them.


What We Do in the Shadows - Lilly Ryan

Shadow IT, and what we can learn from the Prohibition Era.


Curlyboi

The main conference started on Saturday, and oh boy, the organisers did an amazing job.


Opening Keynote: MirrorWorld - Heidi Waterhouse

Maybe you need a little bit of literature, maybe you are feeling alone. Maybe you are in 2020. This is your talk.


Text files full of punctuation? There must be a better way to code - Katie Bell

Maybe the way we think about what is code is completely wrong. Food for thoughts.


Drop Your Tools – Does Expertise have a Dark Side? - Dr Sean Brady If you haven’t yet seen this talk, it’s just an amazing gem.


Curlyboi

Main conference closing was very on-brand. As AV was acting up a little bit, clearly we all decided the best way to get it to work was to throw ridiculous amounts of hearts until it worked.

Everyone knows that adding more load to the servers is exactly what’s needed.

In a very 2020 fashion, this is how we closed it. Yeet it now.

Screaming


Curlyboi

The conference was far from over. Clearly we were way way too excited to let it go. Sunday Funday it is!

As always, one of the highlights of weirdness were our lightning talks. We had our Lightning talks Czar, @chrisjrn, organising them yet again - this time online. There’s a little bit of everything: very important, very weird, unusual, thought provoking, ‘one minute’ announcements and yeets. Weird and wonderful.

There was Mario Kart tournaments, Lightning talks in Animal Crossing, Curlybois, video calls.


Curlyboi

Have you ever asked yourself ‘what’s the most complicated Hello World I could come up with?’. Ask no more. Rube Codeberg competition is exactly what I needed.

Check it yourself, it’s delightfully terrible.

Spoiler: I won as the most object oriented hello world! Check the beauty I created in github. I won ultimate bragging rights!


Curlyboi

And it was the end. See you all dorks next year! Hopefully in Adelaide to have that Pub Parmie (apparently that’s the Adelaide name) we already scheduled.


Ending