Today was my second day at PyCon LT 2025: Data Day, focusing on Dataframes, Databases, and Orchestration.
The full schedule can be viewed here: PyCon LT 2025
This is definitely an area I’m not very familiar with, but I still wanted to listen and see if I could gain anything, after all, the ticket included this day’s program. Unexpectedly, what truly moved me today were the female speakers among the technical speakers—not only were their talks informative, but they also had passion, style, and even led me to follow several blogs…
Just a Running Log of Today’s Feelings#
I arrived at the venue a little after 9 am, just in time for the first talk to begin. I grabbed a cup of coffee and went in.
The topic was “Build Your Own (Simple) Static Code Analyzer”. This speaker was from New York, a core developer of numpydoc, and the author of the book “Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas”. It was truly insightful; she talked about how to build your own static code analyzer using AST (Abstract Syntax Tree). This was my first time learning about the working principles of these Linter tools, and it was very enlightening.
I also felt that she not only had technical prowess but also enjoyed public speaking and building her personal influence. Her blog, https://stefaniemolin.com/, is also worth checking out.
Next, I listened to a talk titled “Data Warehouses Meet Data Lakes,” presented by an Italian with a strong Italian accent. She discussed the challenges faced by data warehouses and the technologies they use to build data architectures. I’m not very familiar with this area, but I learned that, like DevOps, it ultimately requires building a pipeline to complete data collection and analysis.
Then I listened to “Cutting the price of Scraping Cloud Costs,” which discussed the technologies they used to build pipelines for calculating cloud pricing.
The last talk of the morning was “cluster-experiments: A Python library for end-to-end A/B testing workflows,” primarily introducing his Python library for A/B testing. I suspect this talk was partly a promotion of his open-source project.
By the time I finished the talks, it was after 12:30 pm. Seeing many people lining up for lunch on the first floor, I went to the third floor to catch up on work.
After finishing my work, a colleague messaged me to take a group photo, so I went downstairs to get lunch.
The lunch line was long again. After finishing lunch, it was almost 2 pm, and the afternoon talks were about to begin.
The first talk in the afternoon was “Accelerating privacy-enhancing data processing,” concerning the challenges of data processing for cancer research in the real world. The speaker also introduced their technology stack and thoughtfully prepared a Lego brick at the beginning because they used Lego elements in their PPT to illustrate points. In the Q&A session, they offered the Lego to whoever answered correctly, and my colleague got it.
The second talk I attended was “Working for a Faster World: Accelerating Data Science with Less Resources,” which introduced a tool called Panel for data exploration and building web applications. I didn’t gain much else from this talk.
Next, I attended “Organize your data stack using Dagster,” introducing the open-source data orchestration tool Dagster. It was an excellent presentation. I think the Dagster developers should thank her. I bet many who hadn’t heard of this tool before now want to try it out and see what benefits it brings and how to use it in practice. It’s worth mentioning that this speaker is also a passionate female technologist who gave two talks at this PyCon—impressive!
The last talk I attended was “Top 5 Lessons from a Senior Data Scientist.” This one was more enlightening. The speaker was also a woman, currently a freelance data scientist. I found that there are indeed many women in the data field. Her talk didn’t involve technology, focusing purely on experience—the top five lessons from a senior data scientist. The points were applicable to those of us in the workplace. Her personal website is also well-maintained and worth learning from.
Inspiration#
I noticed that the female speakers I heard today generally had better personal websites than the male speakers.
But, all the speakers were great; at least they were passionate, had ideas, and were willing to share their knowledge and thoughts with the audience on stage. This alone is worth learning from.
Especially those female speakers who are technically skilled, confident in their expression, and willing to share—they really impressed me and inspired me.
This is my “running log” of the second day of PyCon.
I hope tomorrow’s AI and ML Day will bring more inspiration. See you tomorrow!
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