PyCon Portugal 2024 🇵🇹
Highlights from presenting and volunteering at this year's event in Braga.
This year's PyCon Portugal took place in the city of Braga, which I had never been to. There were no Marriott properties in Braga, and I needed to work for the first couple of days with reliable WiFi, so I opted to fly into and spend the night in Porto. Since this was my third time there, I didn't have much of a plan and wound up just wondering around upon arrival to keep the jet lag at bay. I ended up checking out Palácio da Bolsa and Igreja e Museu de São Francisco do Porto (both UNESCO sites and right next door to each other). Afterward, I grabbed some dinner along the Douro River before heading back to my hotel for the night. When I entered the room, I was greeted with some pastel de nata – always a good surprise 😋
The next day was a work day, and I had opted to work NYC hours so I could make a quick visit to Aveiro (another Portuguese city I had yet to visit) – an idea I came up with the night before. It was a very early morning, and upon arrival, the guide asked me in French where I was from (this happens a lot because of my last name looking like the French last name Moulin). Despite being so tired, my brain processed the French without missing a beat, and I responded in English "not France" 😂 The guide laughed and mentioned that the tour would be in French and English (lots of French Canadians it turned out). It has been seven years(!) since I actively practiced/studied French (self-taught), and I didn't think I would understand much of it, but to my surprise, whenever the guide started the explanation in French, I hardly needed to listen to the English explanation that followed. With PyCon France in a few weeks, I was optimistic that I could understand some of the French talks.
Our first stop was a visit to the colorfully-painted houses in Costa Nova. From there, we went to Aveiro and took a canal tour in a traditional moliceiro. Afterwards, we had some free time to walk around, and try Aveiro's famous dessert, ovos moles, which, in my opinion, must be eaten with an espresso, as they are extremely sweet (one is definitely enough).
Clockwise from top right: colorfully-painted fishermen's houses in Costa Nova, traditional moliceiros of Aveiro, three views from inside Palácio da Bolsa, and night view of the Luís I bridge in Porto from the bank of the Douro River. Source: Stefanie Molin
When I got back to Porto, I grabbed lunch and a coffee before starting the work day. I needed to stay close since dinner time was going to be in the middle of the work day, so I went to the hotel's restaurant, L'Égoïste, which was more on the fancy side than I had anticipated. For reasons I couldn't discern, the menu for this place was in the shape of a tombstone 🪦, which I found to be a very odd choice (and I hoped it wasn't an omen for how I would be feeling after eating there). The dinner was fantastic, as were the sommelier recommendations, including one made with grapes that had nearly gone extinct.
The next morning I woke up to see that someone had gotten a hold of some of my banking information, and that really put a damper on things. Unfortunately, as I was five hours ahead and banking hours back home had yet to begin, I couldn't do anything about it for the moment, so I packed up and headed to Braga.
Braga is known for two things – churches and rain – and I saw lots of both. While I waited to be able to call the bank, I explored the Old Town following a suggested walking tour in the free guide book they had at the hotel and grabbed lunch (a bacalhau bao with Porto tónico really hit the spot 😋). After going multiple times to the Braga Cathedral to get the tour to see everything, I was finally able to snag a spot. There are several parts that can only be seen with the full ticket, including the mummy of one of the bishops from centuries ago (this was not my goal). This poor guy was on display, and the guide even told us we could take selfies with him – so much for resting in peace. I realized in this moment that I want to be cremated (just in case future generations decide to put us on display).
Clockwise from top right: Braga city sign, Braga Cathedral's High Choir, the intricate organ in Braga Cathedral, looking up the stairs at Bom Jesus do Monte, and view of Bom Jesus do Monte after getting off the funicular. Source: Stefanie Molin
It was raining on and off for much of this time, and then the sky really opened up, and I just headed back to the hotel. I called the bank from a very tenuous connection, and then my stomach started bothering me, so I spent the rest of the day in bed.
The following morning I made an early trip out to Bom Jesus do Monte, which I had bagged the day before once the downpour began. Pro tip: take the funicular up, and then walk down the stairs on your way back. Afterward, I once again had to call the bank 😞 I grabbed some bacalhau à Braga for lunch and then headed over to the conference venue. I had volunteered as part of the program team to review proposals and select the content for this year's event, so in addition to picking up my conference badge, I also received my first volunteer shirt. The breakfast at my hotel had been horrible, so I repurposed some of the extra Portuguese baked goods1 at the conference as the next morning's breakfast. Later that evening, I went out for a group dinner with some friends and some others from the conference.
The next day I headed to the conference early to help out, if needed. I was a little concerned that the keynote would turn into a sales pitch, and unfortunately, near the end it did. The rest of the talks that day were good (I did a good job picking them out with the team 😂). In general, some of my favorite talks from the conference were 503 days working full-time on FOSS: lessons learned by Rodrigo Girão Serrão, Self hosting your side projects with Django and duct tape by Anže, Paying Attention with Python by Nicholas Tollervey, and Are We Typed Yet? The Evolution of Gradual Typing and Mypy by Caio Salgado. During the conference closing, I got up on stage with the rest of the volunteers and celebrated a successful event.
With the main conference done, all that remained was the workshop day. I was going back to Porto that evening, so I had to pack up quickly in the morning before heading to the venue. While doing so, I ended up getting stabbed with a mystery item in one of my suitcase pockets right under my nail, and it started bleeding and throbbing for hours. Of course, the first aid kit I had packed didn't actually have band-aids, but, thankfully, I found one in my cable organizer.
Source: PyCon PT via X
My session had been converted into a double session (four hours) in the afternoon. I was presenting my pandas workshop, and I spent the morning reviewing slides on site at the venue. An hour or so into my review, my friend Rodrigo came over to rant about the workshop he was in, and shared a post he had written earlier in the year on his thoughts: A tutorial is not a long talk. He said he was going to be attending my workshop and wanted to make sure that my workshop was not a long talk, which I assured him it wasn't going to be. A couple of other new friends I had made at the event mentioned they would also be coming to my workshop – I wasn't used to knowing people in the audience, so I wondered how that would change things (if at all).
After lunch, it was go time (although the WiFi wasn't feeling it, and several people had trouble with the installation).2 I had presented this workshop several times this year, and I had been making it more and more interactive, focusing not just on learning pandas, but also how you conduct data analysis and develop intuition for reasoning about data. I asked lots of questions, and the audience was not shy to respond (not just my friends). I also got many questions throughout, which makes for a better experience on my end as well. At one point, my clicker died and in the second half, I lost many people to trains and buses back home, but that couldn't stop this from being one of my best sessions to date.
Many of those who had to leave told me beforehand that they were bummed to miss the rest, or they messaged me afterward saying they really enjoyed what they could attend ❤️ One attendee described the workshop as the "perfect balance between theory and practice." Another posted on LinkedIn, "I had the pleasure of attending this workshop at PyCon Portugal, and it was an excellent presentation! The hands-on approach and clear explanations made it easy to follow, even for those new to data analysis. Highly recommended to anyone looking to get started with Pandas! 👏" I also got some really nice feedback from my friends on the quality of the materials and level of preparation.
At the end of the session, I gave out a copy of my book to an engineer from Porto who had inherited some pandas code. I was quite tired at this point, and it was getting dark and rainy (surprise, surprise), so I ordered Uber Eats (Bao's Taiwanese Burger Braga) to meet me at the hotel, as I needed to pick up my luggage. I scarfed that down and then headed back to Porto, where I cautiously inspected my suitcase to see what had stabbed me earlier.
One of the first things that came out of that suitcase pocket was a rusty screw, which had me very concerned that I would need to get a Tetanus booster when I got home, but then I remembered seeing a loose screw in the safe of the Braga hotel and figured that it must have been magnetically-attracted to my electronics. I kept looking and found the true culprit: a fine-toothed comb with the tines pointing directly up (ouch!). With that mystery solved, I went to sleep as I had an early flight home the following morning.
While it was raining in the morning, my flight was on schedule, and I made it home without issue. Another successful conference in the books!
- Every last one of these items was the same color – many use egg yolks because the whites were used by the nuns in the old days for laundry and the realized they could mix the yolks with sugar to make a variety of different foods. ↩
- During this time, Nicholas Tollervey asked me if I would be interested in getting my workshop set up with PyScript. This has been on my list since I was in the audience for original PyScript release announcement at PyCon US 2022, but I have never gotten around to this. Hopefully, we can make this happen soon. ↩
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