Day 3 of PyCon 2023

I got to today's session early enough for breakfast and the lightning talks. A nice bonus to PyCon is that breakfast and lunch are included as part of the conference, which means attendees don't have to leave the building to forage for food and leaves more time talk about Python. Plus, having the food right next to the exhibit hall allowed for a many more opportunities to talk to other attendees as you ate. Plus, PyCon provides lots of snacks - like PyCon themed cupcakes!

The keynote for today was by James Powell from his company "Don't Use this Code" - which is a great name for a consulting company (http://www.dontusethiscode.com/). James went through writing Python code for Newton's method, a subject in anyone else's hands might be very dull, but he made it extremely entertaining.

The sessions I went to today were:

• Python Linters at Scale
• How Pydantic V2 leverages Rust's Superpowers
• Quicksort, Timsort, Powersort - Algorithmic ideas, engineering tricks, and trivia behind CPython's new sorting algorithm
• The Lost Art of Diagrams: Making Complex Ideas Easy to See with Python Approaches to Fairness and Bias Mitigation in Natural Language Processing

I really wanted to go to the "Biohacking con Python" session, but since it was in Spanish and even though I thought I could probably understand enoughbased on my poor high school Spanish knowledge combined with myunderstanding of Python I would be able to piece it together, but ultimatelyI decided I would wait for a translated version. There's a whole track each day called Chalas in Spanish, which is cool.

One of the interesting features of PyCon are the "Open Spaces." These are ad hoc meetings put on everyday by people for whatever they are passionate about - everything from typical Python topics like pytest, Django, or DevOps to something non-Python such as juggling. I did spend some time meeting some great people in some of these open space meetings talking about biotech and healthcare.