Speaking at PyCon — All you need to know

Padmaja Bhagwat
Glance
Published in
4 min readJan 4, 2023

Have an exciting project that you’d like to share with the community? PyCon provides the perfect platform for you to showcase your work along with helping you network with some of the brilliant minds across the world. The only prerequisite is that your work must demonstrate the usage of Python language.

What is PyCon?

PyCon (Python Conference) is the largest annual convention for the discussion and promotion of the Python programming language.

How did I start?

I was never a fan of giving public talks, but in 2016, as an intern, I worked on a project called Algorithmic music generation. At that point, it was simply mind-boggling to see an ML model generate plausible music on its own. For the first time ever, I felt like sharing my work with the community and getting more folks interested in the field. I was able to do so with the help of my amazing mentors who guided me through the entire process of applying to PyCon.

How did it eventually turn out?

The initial milestone of presenting at PyCon India 2016 helped me further to go ahead and present the work at PyCon US 2017. As a student, it was an absolutely euphoric moment to learn and share my work with such an incredible and diverse set of audience. This was followed by presenting my work on the application of Natural Language Understanding at PyCon US 2018, churn predictor at PyCon India 2020 and the most recent presentation on the Visual Question Answering system at PyCon US 2022 along with Manisha R.

Over the years of attending PyCon, I’ve met and learnt from a bunch of incredible people, and have had some interesting collaborations with kite.com, etc.

How can you get started?

Here are key things that I have learnt over the years when it comes to applying to such conferences:

Writing a good proposal:

  1. Pick a precise topic to present rather than giving a generic presentation on a concept/field
  2. Clearly mention what, why and how
  3. Provide the breakdown of the talk and how you intended to cover the topic within the allocated time limit
  4. Highlight the major takeaways for your audience
  5. Be inclusive (cannot stress this enough!)

Preparing for the presentation:

  1. Build a concise PPT with a good storyline — avoid making it verbose!
  2. Keep your audience involved by asking a few yes/no questions
  3. It’s best to have the demo-able code/application handy while presenting
  4. Demonstrate how your audience can reproduce your work by pointing them to your GitHub repository
  5. THE most important — practice, take feedback and practice more! It’s the only thing that guarantees a kickass presentation
  6. Sign up for the speaker coaching session — This is an exclusive 1:1 session for about an hour where you get to learn a lot about the soft skills that one needs to work on, viz. how to maintain the right pace of delivery, body language while talking, ways to avoid fillers, and much more!

Other than talks, there are multiple other events that you could be part of viz. tutorials, lightning talks, poster presentations, dev sprint, open spaces, etc. Being part of PyCon feels nothing less than a carnival!

Perks!

Now if you’re still looking for motivation to start writing your proposal, here are the top 3 perks of speaking at PyCon

  1. Your learning curve shoots off exponentially! You do not just uncover what’s new in the industry, but you also get to meet people from such diverse walks of life where you end up learning their point of view of looking at technology, their stories, their culture and whatnot!
  2. It opens up a door for a lot of interesting collaborations
  3. The major portion of your expense associated with travel and stay gets funded (yay!)

My previous PyCon talk links:

  1. PyCon US 2022: VigNET: A Visual Question Answering spp for visually impaired
  2. PyCon India 2020: Let’s build a no-code tool for small businesses to reduce churn
  3. PyCon US 2018: Listen, Attend, and Walk: Interpreting natural language navigational instructions
  4. PyCon US 2017: Algorithmic Music Generation

My favourite talks from PyCon 2022

  1. Testing Machine Learning Models by Carlos Kidman
  2. Keynote by Peter Wang
  3. Pyodide: A Python distribution for the browser by Roman Yurchak, Hood Chatham
  4. Write faster Python! Common performance anti-patterns by Anthony Shaw

References:

  1. General guidelines for speaking at PyCon — PyCon US 2022
  2. How to Get Your Talk Into PyCon — from Ned Jackson Lovely, chair of the talk selection committee for 2016 and 2017!
  3. Pro Tips for Conference Talks — Craig Kerstiens (2012)

Hit me up if you need any help with the proposals!

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