Come for the Code, Stay for the People.

Speaker 1 [00:15]

Hi guys and welcome to the room Helium to the talk come for the code stay for the people by my wonderful friend Valerio Maggio. If you don't know already you can ask your questions after the talk in the Q&A by talks.pycon.de and Valerio I think you're good to go.

Speaker 2 [00:34]

Thank you, guys. Thank you very much for the introduction. All right. Thank you very much for coming to this session. For those of you not knowing me, I'm Valerio. Very happy to be doing this talk today, actually. And I want to start with a confession. I have several years of experience in public speaking, countless technical talks. If you know me, you know me from someone who talks quite a lot. in general, not specifically technical talks. But this is the first time I decided I wanted to do a talk about community. And while I was working on this talk, I really enjoyed where I was going, and I really hope to have an open conversation with you about our community, status of community, and where we're going. So if I have to say who is this talk for, I'd say there are always newcomers. So I had in mind, you know, people coming to Python conferences for the first time, like experiencing Python for the first time, unsure what to expect to a Python conference, and wondering, more importantly, if they belong to this conference in this community. So this talk is for them. So with a quick show of hands in this room, how many people are attending PyCon for the first time? Oh, my God, that's amazing. Thank you. So, you people, fabulous people, are my perfect audience, but I will also have in mind people working with communities, maintaining open source projects, or care about the space they inhabit. Almost 17 years ago, it started the way it mainly did for me, and I'm sharing this story story, not because I think it's a special story. It's just my story. And I'm quite sure that many people in the Python community for many years can relate to my story. Like, everybody has their story, but people normally start from one way or another. But there's always common ground. And the common ground, I think, is always the case is volunteering. I started volunteering, I started stuffing badge holders, directing people to the rooms, answering questions like what is the password for the Wi-Fi, and then we realized that having QR code around is actually a better idea. So, you know, this sort of thing is what was my early days into my first PyCon. And I know many people can relate to that. And just a few excerpts I I picked for the beginning of my journey in the Python community. My first ever conference was PyCon 3, actually, PyCon 3, it was PyCon Italia 3, 2009. My first ever PyCon conference. At the time, we used to have numbers on the conference, so 3 is actually 3 in Italian. Then we had Python 4, which is 4, 5, and so on and so forth. This was the crew people. And this is probably the people I need to give a big thanks, most of all. Because they made possible for me to be there. Not just because accepting me as a volunteer, but more like making the environment welcoming for me to join. I was, like, the conference was in Florence. I was living in a completely different part of Italy, completely unaware of what Python community was at the time. And I just love Python as a language, and I wanted to feel the vibe of a Python community and being part of the community as well. I was really curious. I was more moved by curiosity than anything else. I wasn't aware of anything. And at the time, Python wasn't really hyped as it is today. So you have to also imagine that It was a very niche kind of setting. And so, big thank you to these people publicly out loud. Just to give you a few shots, it's still like the kind of feeling, vibes you may get. It was in an old palace in Florence. So, you may probably guess this was not what you would expect probably nowadays to a technical conference. But this is where we had Pike in Italy 3. And, of course, it was in Italy, so food was a big deal for us. Blah, blah, blah. So, of course, I was looking at pictures, and there are plenty of pictures about food. And over the years, I have to say, we've been becoming famous in the European side of the Python community for being the European conference with the good food. So, here it is. And, of course, I came for the code. At PyCon Italy, at that time, I met Guido for the first time. We had Guido as a keynote speaker. He was speaking about Google App Engine, if you can remember that. We also had Raymond Hettinger talking about the new Eta tools. So yes, I came for the code, but I had no idea whatsoever I stayed for the people. Just to give you reference, the conference was in Florence. A few years later, Florence was also hosting Europython. And actually, it hosted Europython for three years. It was kind of unprecedented at the time, because Europython used to switch location every two years, and the community at the time was so happy with what we had in Florence for EuroPython 2011 and 12 that they asked the Italian community if they felt up to organizing another third year, and this is what happened. So this location that we used for EuroPython has become home for Pyke in Italy over the next following years, to the point that actually the people in the community, in the organizing committee have become family to me because I joined them, and we're still organising PyCon Italy. And Florence became home, a second home for me. We've been there for many years until last year in which we decided to move to Bologna, and PyCon Italia this year is actually a couple of months away if you want to check it out, pycon.it. At the time, it was not just a Python conference. It was the beginning of, you know, different other communities gathering around Django, PyData, Scientific Python. Each of these events had their own personality, their own traditions, their own way of making you to feel at home. Because they were actually talking to different sub-communities within the bigger community. And then you had other kind of events. I just have a few pictures. 2013 Django Circus, that was amazing. Also known as DjangoCon these days. And talking about the German community, this was 2014, PyData Berlin. That was actually the first PyData Berlin ever in 2014 in Berlin in the BCC conference. And this was also the host of EuroPython 2014. It's a conference that has a special place in my heart, personally speaking. specifically for this particular talk I had. It was called Traversing Mazes the Pythonic Way and Other Algorithmic Adventures. That was the title of the talk I proposed. So we're talking 2014, many years ago. Actually, I have a few excerpts from that talk. The videos are still online. So, yeah, internet is unforgiving. Audio doesn't work, apparently. Can we try that again? Oops. Okay. Thanks a lot for coming. I'm very excited to be here today. Okay. So look at that face. I was like, I'm very excited to be here today. I was dying, right? I was really excited to the point that I was really happy to be in that place of speaking to EuroPython Berlin for the first time. I wasn't really feeling excited because this was the room. And I was there. So I was dying inside. Because it was very dark. And for some reason they decided my talk was deserving the keynote room. It was a huge room. Anyway, it was definitely an experience. And actually the talk was talking about, was doing connections of Graf Traversals and Dungeons and Dragons, and apparently this has become like a recurring theme for me. If you like move forward 10 years later, EuroPython 2013, I did like, 2023, sorry, I did Each Hiker's Guide to Dungeons and Dragons. This is definitely a better talk. It's actually quite a nice talk. Very happy about that. So check that out if you're interested. But moving forward to the end of that talk. Let's see. And that's it. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Okay. Thank you very much, Valero. Any questions? You may recognize this question, lunch break. So please feel free to ask questions. Okay. So I think it was a very compact introduction. Thank you very much. I could say... That's it. So a few notes. I'm wearing the same T-shirt. Not incidentally. You might have recognised that person. That was Alexander, the one organising Pike&Tea today, the main organiser of the conference and also a good friend. Alex and I met in that specific moment. Alex was not yet part of the community organising event. He was volunteering. He volunteered as a session chair. This is how Alex and I met, and we've been friends since. That's one of the reasons why that conference is so close to my heart. When new friendships are being forged. This is not just EuroPython 2014. There's been many other occasions as well. I just want to mention this, especially for those of you new to this kind of talk. There's a wonderful keynote from Naomi Seder in EuroPython 2016 which is named similarly to my talk, come from the language, stay for the community. This is ten years ago. My talk starts from here and then tries to understand what happened to the Python community 10 years later. Both our titles are actually based on one sentence from Brett Cannon, one of the Python core devs. He said this during a PyCon US opening remarks in 2014. He said, I don't know about the rest of you. I came from the language, but I stayed for the community. This has been a recurring theme in our Python community because it has a strong foundation of what it means for us Pythonistas, the values of the community. So of course I came for the code because Python is awesome as a language, but not necessarily as a language per se from a technical perspective. But of course, yes, Python and data science has become the language from data science with many, many packaging supporting. But the reality behind this sentence is that Python has become this way, not because it was the fastest thought necessarily the best technology to do the job, just because it was the most welcoming. Reliability counts, simple is better than complex. And welcoming means it's open to people not having necessarily a computer science background. Even people without that background can start programming with Python rather than going into other technologies at the time. And then the language evolved into, you know, from a scripting language to a powerhouse, So we had Python 2 at the time. I've been saying readable, teachable, powerful, elegant. This was just Python 2. Then we had transition from Python 2 to Python 3. There's been lots of debates about whether it was the right choice. We should ever migrate at all over the years. And then now nobody knows anything about that. Any newcomers doesn't use Python 2 at all. We start with Python 3. And the language has evolved in many ways over the years. We have F-strings, type-ins, async-await, pattern-matching, a beautiful, expressive, modern language. And Python 3.14 and beyond, we have free-threaded Python, no-guile, JIT compiler, deferred evaluation of annotation. The reason why I'm mentioning this is the language kept evolving over the years, and this is mostly because the community pushed to it. So, what is it that makes this community so special? First off, it's inclusive. It's safe, it's respectful, and it's open. It's a community where contributions are very welcome. New people contributing in a meaningful way. Everybody in this community is contributing in a meaningful way. And diverse and globally distributed. Over the years, it's not just about Python conferences but meetups by ladies, Jaguars, and many, many things. More importantly, it's organised by us. But where the community actually sit today, so ten years after Naomi's keynote, what has changed, really? Well, a lot has changed. The Python community in 2026 is bigger, more diverse and more global. And because of this, we're facing new challenges. We have new ways to gather. For example, during the pandemic, something was not right about conferences because we couldn't have conferences at the time, and so it was the start of online conferences. We had events like Pyjamas, PyData Global, events happening solely online with worldwide coverage. We had hybrid formats now, meaning conferences happening in real life of also attendees from remote attendees. So that's in-person or remote attendance. So you can reach out to people who can't travel for whatever reason. And as I said, it's not just big cities anymore. We have local Python groups, PyCon in Africa, PyCon APAC, Colombia, Pakistan, also local meetup. And I highlighted there university Python groups because I wanted to highlight that. The change is actually happening from the bottom of the community, from students, because nowadays, Python is taught at universities. It wasn't the case ten years ago. I also want to make a shout out to this project, which is Python deadline.es. I think it's Python deadline.es. That's a typo there. Otherwise, I ruined the joke. Sorry, Jesper. But it's a place where all the deadlines of Python conferences are actually collected. So if you're really looking for a venue to go to for a Python event, that's the tool you want to check out. And the reason why I think this is a perfect example of what I talk about is because community tools are built by community members. It's all sustained by the community itself in a very healthy way. And so how we communicate has changed as well. So in 2016, we'll be talking mailing lists, blogs, in-person events. In 2026, we talk about Discord, Mastodon, YouTube, Twitch, short-form videos, live coding, podcasts. Many, many things have changed. And there's also like the elephant in the room, like the AI question. AI changed who writes Python and how Python is written. This means like new voices, new rules, new users, new questions, and people who never thought they would code now they can code and so the question for us is how do we welcome them in our community and how we maintain depth with this new event and the takeaway here really is that sustainability matters open source maintainers burnout is real conference organizer fatigue is real and this is perhaps the most important question i dare to say for the next 10 years because everything isn't sustained and maintained by the community itself we need to understand if this model is actually scalable for the next 10 years um in the past you know uh people working and organizing conferences mentoring newcomers writing tutorials giving talks they were just like people working with the community later on this has become like a job to the point that now we talk about developer relations develop advocacy develop better experience i'm the one for example transitioning my career into developer advocacy because i was like liking what i was doing in in the community and so i decided to to make this like my my job title and so developer advocates are the voice of the developer within the company and the other way around and of course this means that you know the toolkit to outreach people for devrel perspective has changed as as the community is evolving. So the channel DevRel is normally used to reach out to people, not just conferences anymore. We're talking content creation, live coding streams, and so on and so forth. And just to wrap up on this, DevRel can bridge corporate resources and community needs, meaning that even if it's not still very explicit, many of us doing the talks during events big like this are actually into DevRel because like people transitioning their career and making like a job title. And so DevRel could be a way to improve the sustainability models of our community. However, DevRel needs sustainability as well. But the main takeaway message I want to get across here is whether this is your job title or your Saturday morning, like something you do completely volunteering. The thing is that actually holding a community together are not in playbook. It's something that's really founded on strong values. And so more than code, what 17 years taught me, the value of patience and kindness. I think this is really important because we're all beginners once. And keeping these values up in the community is paramount importance. The second value I think is very important is explicit inclusion. Everyone is welcome means nothing without deliberate action. You have to make them welcomed in your community and you have them to feel it's real. And most of all, the power of menship. This is something that probably was the thing I cared about the most. uh you when you have the mentorship um in value in place you have people receiving but also people giving so you have someone believed in you before you did and this is receiving and at the same time these people are willing to give away what they know to new people and probably the last one is active maintenance. So community health require active maintenance, not passive hope, meaning that it's a lot of work. And this is probably why, you know, community work, quote, unquote, has become actually a job title, because it is a job, keeping up with the community, if you believe in the value of the community, of course. And all of this, to me, is Python community and this is what stay for the people means actually to me so at this point i like to look forward and but before that uh take what uh think about one person in this community who made a difference for you that is the value of the community so to wrap up looking forward and have questions to you, not conclusions, which I hope we can talk about later, is how do we engage with the generation that communicates differently? And how do we preserve depth in an age of fragmented attention? And finally, what can newcomers teach us about building communities? How can we learn from them and over to you what to stay for the people could mean to you thanks very much

Speaker 1 [22:28]

And thank you for your talk, Valerio.

Speaker 2 [22:30]

I was on time this time? Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, this is how Ioannis and I met. He was my session chair of Pico on 2023 in Berlin. I keep having friends session chairing me.

Speaker 1 [22:46]

You were the first person I had to chair and he was late several minutes.

Speaker 2 [22:50]

minutes.

Speaker 1 [22:50]

Yes.

Speaker 2 [22:50]

Yes.

Speaker 1 [22:51]

And this is how I became best friends with Valerio, to be his session chair all the time. But right now we don't have any questions in the queue, so I would ask you to ask a few more questions in talks, please. While Valerio could...

Speaker 2 [23:11]

Or I can repeat the questions if we do it live, so we keep the discussion and we don't lose the vibe.

Speaker 1 [23:11]

Or... We shouldn't do this.

Speaker 2 [23:18]

I know, right? We're just like, I don't know, day and night. Yes. Yeah, you will see later. There's a question there.

Speaker 1 [23:30]

Can you write it down in the talks app, please?

Speaker 2 [23:34]

He's unforgiving So, okay. Yeah just for this one. Thank you this one. Just I'm gonna repeat the questions. I can do this Thank you. Thank you

Speaker 3 [23:45]

yeah so you will say stay for the community so community means people right yes you and indeed in particular means that you are connected with particular people within this community right so what you mentioned I think through volunteering you connected with the volunteers of the community and those Maybe for you, those people are the community for you, right? And then how do you think other people could connect with people within the community?

Speaker 2 [24:22]

Okay. So I repeat the question first, and then I try to tell you if I understand correctly the question. So you said, I was saying I'm connected to the people in the community. In particular, I'm being exposed to organizing conferences. My clique of people are conference organizers. If you're a volunteer, you're connected only to volunteers. And how you sort of mix the two communities, is that the question?

Speaker 3 [24:49]

Then, for example, for other people who are not volunteers, who are here just participating, how do you think they should stay for the community and connect with other people?

Speaker 2 [25:01]

with other people. Fabulous, fabulous. OK, so how you encourage other people to reach out to volunteers or conference organizers by participating to a conference.

Speaker 3 [25:12]

Maybe not just volunteers, but other...

Speaker 2 [25:15]

of the other yeah other people exactly exactly so how you make connections to how you reach out to the people organizing conferences is that what you're asking i guess right so in a way what i'm trying to say is every python conference has a call for volunteers which is open to everybody and this is something i was discussing earlier being a volunteer doesn't mean you you need to have specific skills or expertise or like you need to know python for for example, right? You can, because running big events like this, sustained by volunteering, requires lots of preparation, lots of work, and you can tell. This conference is very well organized. There are so many things you have to keep in mind, many sessions at the same time. You might expect that you need help, and on what you need help exactly? Everything, I promise you. Every help is incredibly valuable. How you reach out to them, is just show up. The Python community is very welcoming, also, into including new people. If you just go and say, hey, I want to help. What should I do? There will be absolutely at least one people, one person, coming to you and say, look, join this Slack group, join this Discord, whatever we're using to communicate. You're now part of the team. And once you're here, physically, as a member of the conference, you will feel it. Well, if you're particularly in the German community, you will have Johannes managing your work. He's the manager of volunteers in particular. But jokes aside, the whole thing is you will feel part of a bigger group. And this is the main value you take back with you. And how you do that? You just offer your help. Easy as that. I know. It's the hardest task. Because sometimes you feel like, am I right enough? Am I the right person? Can I really do something? The answer is always yes. And that's the most important value we need to keep up with the community. Do we have questions on your fancy app?

Speaker 1 [27:26]

Iolina had a question.

Speaker 2 [27:30]

Thank you for your talk. Now we're using microphone. I love it. They break it. So you shared your experience. So I wanted to ask, so how can we benefit from a community? And in particular, from this conference, we in this room, what can we do? That's a wonderful question. Thank you. So how can we experience, how can we benefit from the experience of this conference? I think, like, there are many ways in which you can do. And I think that this conference in particular offers you ways. Of course, like, interacting with people is always the case. And you will be surprised of finding people with your similar background, your similar fears, your similar concerns, your similar experience. So sharing your background and experience with other people always helps to make connections. Second is, if you want to share something you'll be working with that you're particularly excited about, we have lighting talks. So lighting talks are, jokes aside, they're specifically meant to be, well, newcomers-friendly. So you just come up on stage and you talk for five minutes about anything you think is worth deserving attention, right? So that's another bit. And you don't find lighting talks in every conference. You find in every Python conference, probably. I would say 99% of the time they're there. because at the end of the day lightning talks are very fun depending on whatever is your background and experience but that's another way in which I learned plenty of things during lightning talks and finally it's just like you can benefit by just like well attending sessions is the most obvious ones because there's always like very informative sessions nowadays but I think that the real value lives behind the sessions. So, for example, now we are basically at time, but if I essentially ask you to keep up talking about these discussions, I would love that. So, my offer to you is please find me around, talk to me if you want to about anything, community in particular, what this event is meaning to you, and also, very importantly, also reminding the previous question, if you have any feedback or something you like, but more importantly, you don't like, we're always very, very open to get any feedback because we're trying to...