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My experience at PyCon US 2026
I'm writing this post on the flight back from PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach, California. It was my second time attending PyCon, and it was a fantastic conference - a cornocopia of Python knowledge, but more importantly, a coming-together of developers across the Python ecosystem.
I'll recap my PyCon US 2026 experience in this post, both what I contributed and what thousands of others contributed. First, a big old disclaimer: part of my job as a developer advocate at Microsoft is to attend conferences like PyCon, so I was able to expense my travel and spend my work days on my PyCon contributions. But that's also why I picked my job, as it gives me the excuse to do things that I'd want to do anyway, like attending the largest gathering of Python devs in the world.
## My tutorial
Since I've been spending so much time on Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the past year, I submitted an idea to the PyCon CFP to run a tutorial walking developers through the process of building their first MCP server. I was thrilled that the tutorial was accepted, but nervous since I'd never delivered a tutorial at a PyCon before. Fortunately, I was able to test it out with the SF Python meetup group a few days before, and their feedback helped me streamline the tutorial experience immensely.
I delivered the tutorial at PyCon to a packed room: 84 people, all seats filled, bright and early at 9AM on Wednesday morning, the first slot of the week-long conference.
We started off the tutorial with an icebreaker, which included attendees inventing their own meaning for "MCP". Of course, my not-so-secret goal was for them to get to know their neighbor, to encourage pair debugging during the exercises.
I alternated between slides and exercises in the 3.5 hours tutorial, trying to give attendees enough background knowledge while also giving them the time to get hands-on. We started off with attendees **using** MCP servers, via both coding agents (Copilot/Claude Code) and agent frameworks (Pydantic AI, Langchain, Agent-framework). Then attendees moved on to **building** MCP servers, using FastMCP and the open-source KeyCloak identity server.
Overall, the tutorial went really well with minimal technical issues - and hey, the WiFi even worked, which is my #1 need in a conference venue. Thank you to my colleagues Gwen and Sarah for TAing, and for all the attendees for being so eager to learn! I'll definitely submit a tutorial proposal for next year's PyCon.
## Education Summit
Kelly Paredes, from the Teaching Python podcast, organizes a day-long Education Summit each year before the main PyCon begins. The mini conference brings together educators, researchers, students, and EdTech software developers, to talk about the intersection of Python and education.
This year, I gave two sessions, starting with a talk called "Your slides but faster: Building an AI-powered presentation workflow". I walked through my process of using Reveal.JS alongside GitHub Copilot to make presentations, and shared the prompts and skills I use to collaborate with the coding agent.
At the end of the day, I led a mini tutorial on the same topic, so that attendees could experience the process themselves.
My colleague Gwen gave a talk called "Big Lessons from Small Models: Teaching Python AI with SLMs", based on our attempts to add SLM support to every code sample we use in livestream series. Gwen showed Ollama setup code, gave recommendations for which SLMs to use, and highlighted a teaching angle of SLMs: students have to get creative to work around the constraints of SLMs, and it forces them to understand SLMs more deeply.
EduSummit was filled with many other great talks. My favorite was from the always entertaining Reuven Lerner on "Vibe teaching: Python training in the age of AI" , where he shared his realization that he couldn't ignore agentic coding in his Python training courses anymore, as his customers are insisting on its inclusion. He showed ways he changed his existing courses and shared prototypes for new courses. To make sure he really understands the benefits and pitfalls of agentic coding, he is vibe-coding an app that helps students practice what they've learnt and receive LLM-based feedback.
## Booth
As a sponsor of PyCon, Microsoft had a booth from Thursday evening through Saturday of the event. I was at the booth for most of the hours it was open, both because we were understaffed and hey, I just like boothing! It's a great opportunity to chat with developers, and many of the folks who stopped by were attendees of my earlier sessions. We talked about things like MCP, agents, models, GitHub Copilot, and agents skills - anything that was on their mind or projecting from my laptop. It was also a chance to connect with Microsoft colleagues that I rarely see IRL, since we mostly work remotely.
## Talks
I managed to see a good number of talks this year, especially from my colleagues and folks I know from the community. They were all fantastic. A few highlights
* "Cómo pasé de perdida a enseñar Python + IA a miles, en un año" by my colleague Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza. A talk in the PyCharlas track (in spanish) reflecting on her experience teaching our Python+AI livestream series over the past year.
* "AI-Assisted Contributions and Maintainer Load" by Paolo Melchiorre, a prominent Django maintainer. He discussed the negative impacts of AI on OSS maintainers, highlighted different approaches that projects are taking, and encouraged every project to discuss what their own approach should be.
* "A bridge over (not) troubled waters: Collecting marine data from your couch", by my colleague Sarah Kaiser. She shared her homegrown system that combines Python and OSS software and hardware for observability of her sailboat (i.e. making sure it doesn't sink!).
* "Pydantic Monty: Wild LLMs, from tool calling to computer use" by Pydantic founder Samuel Colvin. He showed off the Monty sandbox for Python execution and explained how the Python rewrite works.
## Open Spaces
PyCon lets attendees propose "open spaces" based on topics we suggest, so that we can come together on topics that aren't on the schedule, typically for a group discussion. Occasionally open spaces are used for not-so-technical topics, like ice cream selfies and juggling. At his great suggestion, Evan Kohilas and I organized an open space for improv! We gathered together in the lobby and played newbie-friendly improv games with whoever wanted to come. It was super fun - so fun that we did it again that night in the hotel lobby.
## Hallway Track
We often say that the best part of the conference is the "hallway track": the spontaneous interactions that happen between the sessions in the halls. I talked with developers I've met at previous conferences, developers I'd only ever met online, and developers that I've never talked with before. As a whole, the Python community is a very welcoming bunch, and everyone seemed eager to make new connections. And take new selfies!
## PyLadies Auction
Every year, the Pyladies organization organizes a charity auction to help raise funds for Pyladies chapters and their annual conference. The PyCon community donates all sorts of fun items for the auction, like life-size cut-outs of Guido, Python-themed art, autographed books, 3-d printed snakes. Last year, I won an amazing pair of homemade earrings, and I kept up the earrings tradition this year with a pair of snake earrings. The auction is quite fun, and a good excuse to donate to PyLadies while getting new jewelry out of the deal. By the end of the night, we'd collectively raised $60,000 for PyLadies!
## Sprints
The last two days of the PyCon conference are dedicated to OSS sprints. This is when maintainers of Python packages sit at a table, welcome new contributors, and guide them towards their first contributions to the project. This was my first year staying for sprints, and to keep my trip shorter, I only stayed for a half day. I sat down at the Pallets table, since I've contributed to Flask-SQLAlchemy and Flask-Admin in the past, and tried to both help the newer folks and make a few fixes myself (to the click and website repos). My changes were only documentation improvements, but that's often a good place to start, as it still introduces you to the fork-PR-merge flow used by each project.
## Overall impression
PyCon US 2026 was an **experience**. It offers so many ways to contribute and participate, and I feel like I only talked about half of it here - I left out the hotel board games, the happy hours in funny venues, the bonding over yummy noms, the random encounters on boardwalks. Thank you so much to the Python community for being so welcoming and to the PyCon organizers for a job well done!
