PyCon 2024 just happened, and as always it was a whirlwind of re-connecting with old friends, meeting new friends, talking about anything and everything, juggling, and getting simultaneously energized and exhausted. I won’t write about everything that happened, but one thread sticks with me: the continuing echos of my talk from last year.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I spoke at PyCon 2023 about the ways engineers can use their engineering skills to interact better with people, something engineers stereotypically need help with. I called it People: The API User’s Guide.

A number of people mentioned the talk to me this year, which was very gratifying. It’s good to hear that it stuck with people. A few said they had passed it on to others, which is a real sign that it landed well with them.

On the other hand, at lunch one day, someone asked me if I had done a talk last year, and I sheepishly answered, “um, yeah, I did the opening keynote...” It’s hard to answer that question without it becoming a humble brag!

The most unexpected echo of the talk was at the coverage.py sprint table. Ludovico Bianchi was working away when he turned to me and said, “oh, I forgot to send you this last year!” He showed me this picture he drew during the talk a year ago:

I’ve only ever stayed for one day of sprints. It can be hard to get people started on meaty issues in that short time. We have a good time anyway, and merge a few pull requests. This year, three people came back who sprinted with me in 2023, another sign that something is going right.

Once the sprint was over, Ludovico also sketched Sleepy into the group photo of the sprint gang:

Half the fun of preparing last year’s talk was art-directing the illustrations by my son Ben, similar to how we had worked to make Sleepy Snake. As much as I like hearing that people like my words, as a dad it’s just as good to hear that people like Ben’s art. Seeing other people play with Sleepy in clever ways is extra fun.