The One with a Speaker Impact Award and a Tutorial that Almost Didn't Happen

📍 Boston, USA 🇺🇸

A little over a week after getting back from the Baltics, I was on the road again.¹ My first stop was ODSC East in Boston for their tenth-anniversary event. I arrived on Sunday to a gorgeous day ☀️ and after heading to the event location to get my bearings (ODSC was in a different part of Boston this year), I savored a delicious 😋 shakshuka² from Tatte's Bakery & Cafe and soaked up the sun along the waterfront in the Seaport area.

The following day again had impeccable weather. I went to work out of my employer's Boston office, which was within walking distance of my hotel. After lunch at Clover, I picked up a flat white to enjoy outdoors – pure bliss. In the evening, I had a "business dinner" at Row 34 for a personal project with a contact I had met at ODSC East a few years ago – hopefully, I will have more to share on this later in the year 👀

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Tuesday was an intense day. To start off, I got back later than I had planned from the dinner, so I didn't get as much sleep as I would have liked, and I was presenting my talk "Getting Started with Open Source Contributions" in the morning with a short book signing just beforehand. Towards the end of my presentation, I could tell I was a little behind time (we started late, which didn't help), so when I reached the last few slides and saw the founder of ODSC, Sheamus McGovern, come into the room, I got a little concerned (I didn't know what was going on). He took a seat in the front row, and I continued speaking trying not to let it show that I was startled. As I reached my thank you slide and wrapped up the talk to a round of applause, Sheamus jumped up on stage and announced to everyone that, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the event, ODSC was recognizing speakers that have made an impact on the event. He then handed me the ODSC Speaker Impact Award with my name on it and everything ❤️

This had kind of rendered me speechless – I had no idea that was coming! It was a very proud moment, and the award is prominently displayed at home now 😊 However, there wasn't much time to soak it up there because I had to head to the airport to catch my flight to Pittsburgh for PyCon US, where I was also presenting. But first, I needed to pack 😬

The hotel I was staying in had apartments, which was great from the standpoint of comfort, but it was too easy to spread out, and, when the time came to pack up, it complicated things. I also needed to make sure the award would make it in one piece (it's glass).

📍 Pittsburgh, USA 🇺🇸

I arrived at the Pittsburgh Westin hotel in the late afternoon and bumped into some fellow PyCon presenters that I had met at various events throughout the years in the lobby. We chatted for a while before I headed to reception to check into my room. When I had originally booked the hotel, I had put the check-in date as the day after because I wasn't sure if my tutorial would be accepted, or if I would go to the tutorials (they started the day after I arrived). When I saw the schedule (and figured out the status of my proposal), I couldn't modify the booking, so I had to make an additional one for the first night. This turned out to be a good thing because for the first night, they upgraded me to a workout suite. I didn't even know this type of room existed: basically, in addition to the standard bedroom, I had an entire room at the entrance that had a giant TV, a Peloton bike, adjustable free weights, an exercise mat, a stability ball, and some TRX cables.

Once I set my stuff down in the room and took stock of what made it a workout suite, I couldn't ignore my hunger any longer. I hadn't eaten much all day, and now, as a consequence, I was starving. I headed to the nearest location of Primanti Bros. and tried one of their humongous sandwiches, which was served on wax paper, directly on the table 😅 It featured both corned beef and pastrami, which I had never tried before, and it was delicious and satiating 😋 After eating that, I definitely needed the workout suite, so I took advantage of the equipment when I returned to the room.

The next day was the start of PyCon US, and I had signed up for one tutorial in the afternoon run by Nicholas Tollervey, a friend from multiple past Python events (I think we first met at PyCon MEA 2023 in Dubai, UAE). I had arranged for late checkout to ensure that I could just transfer from the workout suite to the new room – my plan was to prepare for my tutorial (the following afternoon) in the morning and then grab lunch and attend the tutorial, switching rooms during the 3 PM break. It ended up being an exhausting day, as you can imagine.

Since I wasn't able to finish with my preparations in the morning, I opted to have some food delivered and continued working on that in the evening. This was to ensure that I could go to bed earlier and be well-rested for presenting. At this year's PyCon US, I was presenting my "(Pre-)Commit to Better Code" workshop, but this almost didn't happen. For the 2024 event, this proposal was waitlisted and ultimately rejected,³ so, for this year, I figured I would try again (this was the only proposal I submitted this year). When the final announcements were sent out, I received a rejection email. So how was it that I was presenting it? Well, I happened to have the proposal submission platform open in a tab on my phone, and after seeing the rejection email, I went to close out that tab. The tab reloaded as I accessed it, and in there it said that my proposal was accepted 😕 At this point, I was extremely confused: which one was it? It was late, so I confirmed my slot in the platform and went to bed, expecting it to be resolved the next day, only it wasn't...

Regardless of whether the proposal was actually accepted, I was going to be at PyCon US with my team, but I needed to know whether I needed to work on updating the content and incorporating the feedback from the previous run through at EuroPython 2024 that I hadn't gotten around to addressing. The time the rejection email was sent and the proposal in the platform was updated to the accepted status was identical, further muddying this mystery. It dawned on me that the organizers are probably only looking at the platform since that is where people confirm their attendance (and I imagined it was the source of truth), so I sent them an email asking them whether my proposal was actually accepted. They quickly confirmed that my proposal had indeed been accepted, but they didn't have an explanation for what happened (or whether it happened to others). I didn't press for more information either – I was just happy that it turned out to be an acceptance 😊

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My tutorial was in the afternoon, so I used the morning to make sure everything was ready. There are a lot of demos/live coding in this workshop, and I have to run through my setup checklist to prepare my computer ahead of time (things like adjusting the settings in my code editor so that it is easy to see in the audience). When I arrived to set up in the tutorial room, I met with the session volunteer who turned out to be someone I knew from the ODSC circuit – it felt like a collision of my conference worlds.

The tutorial itself was very interactive, and I ended up staying nearly an hour afterward to help a few people get their custom hooks working. Over the next few days, I received a lot of positive feedback from the tutorial, both about my teaching ("Amazing teacher!") and the materials ("Clear informative and with step by step slides"). One attendee said, "Great explanation of pre[-]commit hooks and how to create your own. Really enjoyed how hands-on everything was." Another wrote, "Just wanted to say a big thank you for the workshop! It was super practical and full of helpful takeaways. I especially enjoyed learning about the different options for pre-commit with Python and how to create a customized one. I'm definitely planning to add it to my workflow!"

That's not to say there weren't a few things to improve upon. For one, a few attendees were using uv and ran into a couple of issues. Some others decided to use company laptops, which is almost always an issue to due to how locked down they are – I always recommend using a personal laptop for tutorials for that reason. I took note of these issues and will work on addressing what I can for the next run through at SciPy in Tacoma, Washington (USA) on July 8, 2025.

Afterward, I went to briefly check out the conference opening event, where I bumped into a few people I knew, but I didn't stay for long because it had gotten late (remember, I stayed nearly an hour after the scheduled end time), and I was exhausted. I dropped my stuff off in my room and met up with the team members that had arrived for dinner, where I celebrated another successful presentation 🥳

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The next day the talks and open spaces⁴ started, and in the evenings (and in between talks), I started working on some book proposals. Yes, book proposals. During my tutorial, Bill Pollock, founder of No Starch Press, approached me about writing a book with them. This wasn't the first time either, and it has been something for which I've been trying to find the right subject. For the last few PyCon US events, I've ended up chatting with Bill about this (a recurring theme if you think about the dinner I had in Boston). While I have previously written about pandas (two editions of Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas), there are other topics I've become interested in exploring, and this year, I had a much clearer picture of what they were. One of these topics is something I have been working on for a while now, although I have been away from it for a bit, and the others were things I hadn't even tried outlining yet. I took a day to gather my initial thoughts on these ideas I had swimming around my brain and scheduled a chat with Bill onsite for the final day of talks, which gave me another day to flesh things out further (and see if there was indeed enough for a book in some cases).

When the time for the meeting came, I first pitched one of the new ideas I had come up with while at the event (the quick turnaround was reminding me of the whirlwind podcast scheduling and recording in a single day at PyCon Lithuania last month). Bill was interested, but gave me some homework to refine the proposal further to help him look into the prospects for something like that. Next, I showed him the idea I had been working on since last year, which to my delightful surprise, he loved (I was fully prepared to self-publish this after shopping it around). There was still homework on this one, although less.

The plan had been to chat for thirty minutes, but we quickly reached the hour mark, and he had to head to another informal chat. We arranged to meet again later that day to discuss more details: about the homework (if I got to it), next steps, and how we could work together. I headed to lunch buzzing with excitement – my passion project had legs! Unfortunately, the loud lunch area in the sponsor hall made it hard to concentrate, and I wasn't too enticed by the food, so I opted to forgo lunch and take a beat to work on the homework in a quieter location. One of the tasks was to write up a value proposition for the new idea I had (I had this already for the older idea), and workshop some titles (this proved to be even harder). With the help of my manager to bounce ideas off of, I cobbled together the value proposition, but wasn't able to come up with a short, informative title for the next meeting with Bill.

We met up once more after the final keynote to touch base on next steps for how to continue these discussions after the conference – I still have work to do. Hopefully, this is also something I can share more about soon. After Bill left to take some of his hungry authors out to dinner, I chatted with some conference friends I have known for years now before meeting my team for dinner.

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For the next three days, I attended the development sprints. While I ended up sitting with pyOpenSci and making a PR to fix an issue there I had noticed while trying to publish my personal project, Data Morph, to conda-forge a while back, I worked on my new project, Docstringify, which was born out of my keynote at PyCon Lithuania last month on abstract syntax trees (ASTs), entitled "Build Your Own (Simple) Static Code Analyzer."

Docstringify is a tool for detecting missing docstrings and injecting templates into the code based on the code itself, following the docstring format of your choice. I was very productive and came up with an algorithm to make it possible to overwrite the original file with the docstring additions, without losing any existing formatting or comments. It took two days to go from the problem to the initial algorithm to implementing it to refining the implementation, but with that in place, I was able to publish a new version to PyPI.

While all this was happening, I was introduced to Carol Willing, a CPython core developer, and prominent Pythonista. We chatted for a very long time, and I showed her several of the personal projects I have been tinkering with in my spare time, including Docstringify, Data Morph, the slide generation library I have been building for myself (not public yet, but I did use it to generate my slides for my keynote at PyCon Lithuania), and this website. She ended up testing out Docstringify that night (without the overwriting logic I was working on), and she shared with me the next day that she would like to be able to inject stubs instead of full docstring templates, so I made a new option for that – despite not thinking about it originally, it has already come in handy for me 😊

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The third day of the sprints was noticeably quieter, as many people had left. I decided to work on Data Morph, partly because I was going to be presenting it at PyCon Italia in a week (yes, another short turnaround), but mainly because I didn't feel like writing tests, which was next on my list for Docstringify 😬 In the afternoon, a conference friend, Mike Müller, who I met while doing a walking tour of Basel, Switzerland at EuroSciPy 2023 (he founded the conference), came over to catch up; I made sure to tell him that I'm helping review proposals for this year's event 😊

After three days of intense coding and nearly two weeks on the road with less than ideal sleep quantities, I was at the point where no amount of caffeine could keep me awake, so I went back to my hotel and ordered room service for an early dinner. My flight home the next morning had been moved up, so I needed to leave the hotel at 6 AM (have I mentioned I'm not a morning person?). On the way to the gate, I grabbed a hot coffee and an açai bowl – they balanced each other out and regulated my temperature. Once there, I spotted a fellow conference speaker from Australia, so I said hello, but told him I would sit elsewhere, so he could rest for his long trip back (I also needed the rest, but my journey home would be much shorter than his). As luck would have it, my seat on the plane was right behind him.

Once I got home, I excitedly took out the ODSC Speaker Impact Award to marvel at it and my accomplishments once more – going from being terrified of public speaking to being presented with this award fills me with extreme joy 😁 I cleared a spot for the award on my bookshelf and added my latest conference speaker badges to the box I have all of them in (it's nearly time to get a bigger one). Then, I unpacked my suitcase to start on the laundry because in just three days 😅 I would be heading to Bologna, Italy for another PyCon 🛫

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1. Readers of my past travel blog posts may remember that I mentioned during my Asia trip in 2024 that I was hoping to have more time between trips... It's not as easy as it sounds. ↩
2. I'm very partial to my shakshuka recipe, and thankfully, this, although different, was a great one. ↩
3. It was accepted later that year at EuroPython, where I debuted it. ↩
4. I went to one where we watched some of Eurovision huddled around an iPad 😂 ↩
5. The title of this post is a nod to episode titles on the show Friends, which if you haven't seen, you must. Last year, during ODSC East 2024 I visited a modern-day version of the Central Perk coffee shop from Friends. ↩