PyCon Colombia 2023: A Dream Come True

A couple of months ago, I had the privilege of attending PyCon Colombia 2023, an event that gathers Python enthusiasts to learn more about the language’s latest trends. This year's talks covered a wide range of topics, such as recent features, tools, Artificial Intelligence, Web and Mobile development, Testing, and even robotics!

It was my first time traveling to another country for a conference, and I enjoyed it. While I had attended online conferences in the past, it’s a much more enriching experience to connect with people from all over the world on-site, getting to know their cultures and sharing their passion for the industry.

On the first day of the conference, I presented my talk about Scalene, a Python profiler that provides information on how much memory, CPU, and GPU your program consumes. Understanding these metrics is important since it can help you identify performance bottlenecks and write more efficient code, regardless of the programming language you use.

One of my favorite presentations was Lukasz Langa’s keynote, an interesting talk about the duality of friction and how it has both a positive and negative impact. On one hand, it can help us to avoid mistakes and write more robust code. On the other hand, it can also discourage us from doing certain things (for example, testing) and embracing change. He mentioned that some features of Python are meant to reduce this friction or purposely increase it to facilitate writing code.

A valuable takeaway from this presentation for anyone who wants to improve their coding skills is that understanding the characteristics of the language at a deeper level is key to writing efficient and elegant programs.

Another highlight was the PyLadies Colombia luncheon, which allowed women in the Python community to connect and support each other. They gave an inspiring talk about why diversity matters, the challenges we face in the industry, and what we can do to include minorities in our teams. This is a cause that is very close to my heart and Stack Builders’s values since we believe that having a diverse team with different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives allows us to see a broader picture and deliver more impactful work.

Overall, it was interesting to learn more about type hints, testing, and dependency management as I use them in my day-to-day work to make the code more maintainable, readable, and less error-prone. Also, the ideas presented on data processing more effectively widened my perspective. They allowed me to think of possible betterments for upcoming features in my current project that could improve the user experience.

The picture from above was a neon sign that I saw in the restaurant where we had dinner with all the speakers. It roughly translates to “Dreaming leads us to success,” words that perfectly encapsulate my experience of being a speaker at PyCon Colombia. It was a dream come true to present my work at such a prestigious conference, and I am grateful for the opportunity. I hope to see this community again next year!

Bonus: Some of my coworkers also were speakers at this conference! Check out their talks.