Last week was PyCon UK, which took place in Manchester for the first time. I've attended the conference every year it's run since 2014, and each year I've given a talk. This year I decided not to submit a talk, instead trying my hand at running a workshop on "Data modelling with Pydantic". Luckily, my proposal was accepted and over the last few weeks I've been preparing for it. It ended up being a lot more effort preparing a 90 minute workshop than a 25 minute talk!
PyCon UK is a unique conference in many ways. One of the many inclusive initiatives it runs is a "young coders" track on the Saturday, giving local kids and often the children of attendees the chance to have a go at some programming activities. Workshops are operated on a proposal basis like the main conference, so they're run by attendees.
The day before the conference started, Claire Wicher asked me to see if I could step in to run a workshop on the kids track. I'm not very good at saying no - so I said I'd find something. I asked around and my good friend Nicholas Tollervey was able to provide me with a brilliant worksheet using Dan Pope's pygame-zero and the Mu editor (unfortunately, now a retired project).
The evening before the first day, as attendees started arriving in town, a bunch of people ended up in the Temple of Convenience, an old public toilet on Oxford Street, converted into a bar. We proceeded to move to Society to get food, and I remembered that Eric Idle of Monty Python was playing a show over the road from there at Bridgewater Hall. I asked one of my new friends if he fancied seeing if there were walk-in tickets available, and we ended up seeing the show, which was great fun.
The conference opened with the usual introduction, which included Becky Smith unveiling the new PyCon UK logo, based on the Manchester worker bee representing the hard work done by volunteers to make the conference happen:
The opening keynote was a brilliant commentary on the history, growth and development of Python's rich and complex ecosystem since the launch of Python 3:
The second day included the young coders day in the workshop space. Here's a photo of me running the workshop:
The pygame-zero workshop went really well. It was an ideal activity as there wasn't too much typing, people could go at their own pace as it didn't rely on following what was on screen, and it was fun to make a silly splat-a-cat game.
After the day's talks are over, there's a slot before the lightning talks where the kids get to present on the main stage, such as projects they've worked on, and anything they want to share. It's amazing how confident they can be on stage in front of so many people - showing the game they've made with Python or telling everyone what they enjoyed or found difficult. They always manage to make the audience smile, laugh and applaud like mad.
Day three, Sunday, was the day of my workshop. I've run countless workshops before, but mostly for kids, teachers or complete beginners. This one was more targeted at peers. It was intended to be suitable for less experienced Python users but relied on some basics, and dove deeper than a standard beginner workshop would.
The workshop room was packed out, with all desk spaces filled and a couple of people joining from the floor! The wifi provided by the venue was poor so I'd asked people intending to attend to clone the repo ahead of time, and turn up early if they needed help getting set up. Some people didn't see the message but we managed to get everyone sorted and started just about on time. There were a few people with Windows laptops so I had to look up the virtualenv activation instructions for them. One guy even turned up with an Android tablet. He seemed to know what he was doing, and had vscode and Python running on there somehow, although it was a bit awkward tabbing between the editor and instructions.
Rather than use slides, I'd written up the steps and code examples in a series of markdown documents on a GitHub repo, so people could follow along, copy-pasting code with me as I talked through it. This also meant that they could take it home to continue if we didn't get through it all. David Seddon had to head home early so he missed the workshop, but told me he completed it on the train home!
The workshop went well, and people seemed to get a lot out of it. I probably tried to squeeze in too much, but that's not so bad as they were able to take it home and carry on. I covered Pydantic, built a little FastAPI app and touched on Typer for making CLIs. The workshop materials are available on GitHub if you want to have a go yourself: https://github.com/bennuttall/pydantic-workshop
This was the first PyCon UK since we lost our dear friend Michael Foord. We raised a glass to him in the pub on the last day of the conference and shared fond memories of him.
The keynotes and talks are all recorded and promptly uploaded to YouTube and can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@PyconUKSoc/videos
The official photos taken by the photographer Mark Hawkins are available on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/203482025@N06/albums
See you there next year, I hope!