We conclude PyCon AU 2026 together for closing remarks as we reflect on what was, and look forward to what will be (sprints!)

Welcome to PyCon AU 2026! Join us for a short welcome address by Conference Director Jack Skinner followed by the daily keynote on the plenary stage.

Every ML team knows the pain: the majority of practitioner time goes into data wrangling, pipeline plumbing, and environment configuration — not solving business problems. Getting a pandas prototype into production still takes months, and that’s before you factor in monitoring, drift, and retraining. Agentic ML offers a fundamentally different approach: AI agents that understand your data

Like regular talks, but shorter! Anything could happen!

Like regular talks, but shorter! Anything could happen!

Welcome to PyCon AU 2026! Join us for a short welcome address by Conference Co-Director Sophie Quinn-Graham, followed by the daily keynote on the plenary stage

What does caring for software look like in a world where people hate what it has become? Let us re-examine what software is and can be, and look at the possible futures we might construct with it.

Authentication continues to fail not because users ignore security advice, but because our systems rely on humans managing reusable secrets. Despite password managers and multi-factor authentication, phishing and credential theft remain the most common causes of account compromise. This talk examines why password-based authentication fails at a structural level. We will explore the assumptions

Do you ever go to a talk and find that the speaker doesn't talk about quite what you expected? Do you ever wish you could tell them, mid-talk, to talk about something else? Well, this is your opportunity to guide me through my own talk! I'm going to tell you all about FastAPI. Why it's my web framework of choice, what makes it easy to use, develop and test. How it empowers you to focus on

Welcome to PyCon AU 2026! Join us for a short welcome address followed by our second keynote (to be announced).

Developer communities are more than just places to ask questions or share code. They are platforms where careers grow, ideas spark, and real impact happens. In this talk, I’ll draw on my experience building and contributing to global developer programs, including initiatives like GitHub Stars, Twilio Champions, and more to explore what makes a community truly thrive. We’ll dive into how

Join us for the Friday morning keynote presented by Cam Wilson: "Slop, jobs and Elon Musk: why Australians don't trust AI and what that means for all of us".

RAG applications come in many shapes. Some start as simple keyword searches over historical records. Others layer on semantic embeddings, hybrid retrieval (semantic + keyword/lexical searches), reranking, and increasingly sophisticated prompting. But regardless of where your system sits on that spectrum, the question is the same: how do you know it actually works? This talk presents a

If Australia's electoral districts were drawn just a bit differently (or by a lot), how much would that change election results?

GenAI, aka LLMs, have thrown a monkey wrench into the role of DevRel. What does it mean to create educational materials when someone can just ask their favourite LLM to create a personalised educational adventure for them? This talk will investigate options for creating interactive coding environments that are useful for developers aiming to learn a new technique, technology, or library.

Dictionaries are one of the first tools Python developers reach for: fast, flexible, and easy to use when building something new. But when do they stop being enough? And when it's easy to generate dataclasses and classes, how do you know if that structure is actually useful?

What does it mean to be productive? If you work in software development that generally means shipping code, or at least changes to code. There’s always been a tension in how to measure the output of a software developer though, and that’s partly due to the at least partially creative nature of the work we do. So when a tool comes along and promises to make you more productive, how do you

Python 3.13 was the first Python version released with a free-threaded mode. Although the default interpreter still utilizes the GIL, it provides provisions that enable us to run a free-threaded version of the interpreter with the GIL disabled. Through this talk, we’ll set up and run the free-threaded interpreter, benchmarking it against the GIL-enabled version for various tasks. We'll assess

Python has become a standard for many (although not all) secondary schools teaching Digital Technologies in Queensland and Australia more broadly. Yet challenges remain in bridging the gap between technical skills that schools are expected to teach and the expertise that industry requires.

Training people (and ponies <3) to problem solve under pressure. A discussion on neurorigidity vs neuroflexibility during emergency response. It will expand on how different kinds of incidents, working styles, experience levels, team structures etc create different needs. The speaker has spent 8 years as an SRE, DBRE and Support Engineer working with major New Zealand and international

AI agents are changing how we build software. They have augmented our software engineering workflow and challenged us to practice a new discipline, Agentic Engineering. Central to this emerging discipline is the skill, a natural language markdown file that bundles workflows, tools, and domain knowledge into a new unit of work for defining what an agent can do. Adopted as an open standard across

25,000+ resources, 65,000+ lines of Python, two engineers. Five years ago we made a commitment to automating (almost) everything we could about our platform. Deployments, Guardrails, Observability, Identity, and everything between. So far we have been seeing that through with extensive use of Infrastructure as Software. Five years later, I have regrets. Solving complex problems with

Pull request reviews are often the single biggest bottleneck in software delivery. What takes minutes to write can sit for days waiting for review, killing velocity and frustrating teams. This talk explores why PR queues stall, what we can learn from massive open source projects that have solved this at scale, and the practical techniques, from automation with Python tooling to team process

Privacy regulations around the world impose strict requirements on how organisations handle personal data (such as Australia's Privacy Act, the EU's GDPR, US's HIPAA & CCPA, etc). Among the hardest to implement in a data pipeline are protecting sensitive data from breaches, and erasing an individual's personal data on request.Finding and deleting every copy of sensitive data is cumbersome,

Every few years somebody swears the newest tool to magically avoid needing developers will boot developers out of a job. Yet here we are, still coding, still shipping. Come along for a quick tour from COBOL’s “English you can compile” to today’s LLM powered vibe coding agents and see why each wave of “code without coders” crashed on the same rocks. You’ll leave with a pocketful of history, a nose

Most of us learn testing by writing examples. Put some input in, check the output, move on. That works… until it doesn’t. Edge cases slip through, assumptions hide in plain sight, and the tests that felt thorough turn out to only cover the obvious cases. This talk is an introduction to property based testing in Python using Hypothesis. Instead of hand writing endless individual test cases, we

When students can use AI to generate code, explain syntax, and accelerate routine development tasks, the challenge for teachers is no longer just how to assess coding. It is how to keep students genuinely engaged, how to value the design, judgment, communication, and reflection that sit around a software project, and how to structure complex project work so that students can succeed rather than

Between early 2025 and April 2026, peak weekday PR merges to Honeycomb's monorepo went from about 30 to about 74. Most of the delta came in the form of PRs that we could prove AI touched. This talk is the honest report-out from eighteen months of AI-assisted engineering: the calibration behind that headline number, the overlapping factors we can name but can't cleanly isolate, and the practices

Breathing is something we all do, tens of thousands of times a day, without even thinking. Should be pretty straightforward to animate, right? To answer that question, I made an interactive breathing simulator - a blob that 'breathes' like a human - using the Python Arcade library and techniques for modeling human breathing dynamics based on the scientific research. Turns out there's a lot more

We're thrilled to announce that PyConAU's Education Track will once again feature a dedicated Student Showcase, giving Australian high school students the chance to present their Python projects on the conference stage.

Sam built a great gateway. Users are authenticated, requests are validated, the front door is solid. Inside the cluster, services trust each other — because they're inside the cluster. Then Omen shows up. This talk follows Sam the SRE through a nightly battle against Omen the Evil Hacker — and how SPIFFE and SPIRE finally give every Python service a cryptographic identity it can prove, not

Python powers the world’s most critical research, yet the software behind the science often remains hidden and under supported. This talk distils four years of insights from Research Software Engineering Stories to explore the real world motivators of the people building Australia’s most impactful research tools. Attendees will be motivated to transition from fragile scripts to sustainable and

_The virtue of being a lazy programmer, understanding lazy evaluation, and understanding lazy imports (3.15)_ Your boss wants your program to "run faster". But performance can be a tricky thing. Sometimes we can make a choice of _when_ the program will be slow. This talk will explore the "virtue" of laziness with regards to programmer approach, and lazy evaluation (with generators and

Application security is not getting easier. Despite better tools, more CVEs, and widespread “shift-left” adoption, vulnerabilities continue to scale with system complexity. This talk distils 60 years of application security history—from early networked systems to modern cloud-native and AI-driven stacks—and connects it to what Python developers are facing today. Using real incidents, ecosystem

Tech demos can make or break a presentation, and sometimes even a company. When they're on a large stage and compressed into a handful of minutes, getting them right is harder than it looks. Especially when the features are coming in hot. In this talk, I'll share what I've learned building dozens of demos for Microsoft and GitHub keynotes, large product launches, and even a TED talk. We’ll

When dealing with a misbehaving Python program, classic strategies like adding piles of print statements can be unsatisfying. Fortunately, Python gives us many ways of "looking inside" a running Python process, getting very rich information instantly. We will look at how we can introspect live Python processes, uncovering what a program is doing, and why it’s doing it. We will also cover

How do you get teenagers to care about what data they share online? How do you teach them how to make a safe password? How do you keep them engaged and maybe even teach them some python along the way? These were the questions I was asking myself when I created the latest cyber security project for our high-school level workshops and it turns out, after a decade of running python workshops, I

AI assistants can answer most technical questions in seconds now. So why would a developer sit through a guided workshop? Because reading an answer and building muscle memory are fundamentally different things. This talk looks at how to design interactive, hands-on developer education that stays relevant and engaging in a world where "just ask the AI" is the default. Drawing on experience

Geoscientists love Python and Jupyter Notebooks for prototyping their ideas. What they often don't like is dealing with containers, CI/CD, version control and long-term support. Whether you are just into volcano photos from New Zealand or received a notebook called final_model_v3_ACTUAL_FINAL.ipynb and were asked to "just put it on the server" come along to see how Earth Sciences New Zealand

Have you ever wondered what it actually takes to deploy your Python/Django or any application to Kubernetes - and build a platform around it? Or if you already have one, whether you'd build it the same way in 2026? This talk introduces Kubernetes as LEGO: building a real platform one block at a time, starting from raw primitives, layering Helm and Kustomize where they genuinely earn their place,

Girls don’t leave STEM once; they leave three times. First, in primary school when “I’m bad at maths” becomes a personality. Second, in high school when they drop senior tech for “something more cool.” Third, in first‑year engineering when the boyish culture and difficulty finally wear them down. I’m a mechatronics engineer who is terrified of coding and still somehow convinces girls to give it a

With IDEs like VS Code wanting to autocomplete your entire file based on the first line, how on earth do we write assessment that actually tests the skill of our students, rather than the skills of Claude? This talk will explore what is being done in schools and universities across QLD, and offer suggestions for what you can try in your classroom.

I regularly enjoy performance that I absolutely did not earn. That's because NumPy quietly handles an alarming number of hard problems on my behalf. In this talk, we'll pop the hood on NumPy and look at what it's actually doing to make Python fast. We'll even glance at the source code, gently, and without expecting anyone to be an expert in C. This isn't a talk about becoming a NumPy wizard or

For most of Python's history, the predominant option for documentation has been Sphinx and reStructuredText. However, a majority of other ecosystems have adopted Markdown. There are historical reasons for reStructuredText being a better choice, however, Markdown is now up to the task. In this talk, you'll learn why Markdown is a better option for your project's documentation. You'll be

In the good ol' days, we worried about individual maintainers becoming overburdened, or ripple effects from surprise deletions in dependency graphs. Now, with the power of AI, we get to worry about these things on a much bigger scale: on repeat, across entire ecosystems! As AI agents outpace humans in code output, we’re entering a delightful time where vibe-coded pull requests are checked in

At the start of 2026 I decided I wanted to build my own Coding Agent. The goal was to build the tool that would let me do the work of a Software Engineer, but without reading the code. It's a Python codebase that I've never read, and I never intend to read. By building it I've learned some things about doing serious engineering, without reading code. With AI we're writing more code than ever,

Balancing short-term and long-term objectives during software development forms an underpinning tension which often exhibits during code reviews, sprint planning and prioritisation. Audiences should attend to see how concepts like modularity, consistent design language and the use of software patterns can be seen as an expression of managing cost and complexity over time, and how this

Software is widely used and produced in the course of research. Yet, published works (e.g. journal papers and conference posters) do not always cite the software that was essential for the research. Citing software has numerous benefits, including facilitating the reproducibility and transparency of research, as well as providing attribution and credit for the developers. This talk will discuss