DRMacIver's Notebook

Some of my favourite PyCon UK talks

Some of my favourite PyCon UK talks

The PyCon UK team are amazingly fast at uploading their videos, which means the entire conference is now online on youtube (There was some problem with one video but I’m not sure whether that’s been resolved, so maybe the entire conference bar one talk).

If I’m being honest, I don’t go to PyCon UK for the talks - I go because it’s an amazing community. In general I don’t get a huge amount out of talks in most conferences I go to. However I thought there were some especially high quality talks this year, including some that I not just watched but am going to rewatch.

So, here are some of my favourite talks that I would actively recommend.

The two talks that were so good that I intend to rewatch them (mostly to mine for citations and talking points) are:

Sue Sentance’s keynote basically made me go “Welp, I need to redesign all my workshops”. Hannah’s talk had a lot of interesting material on reading code, and I want to follow the references to read more about it - I don’t currently need most of the specific advice on legacy code, but reading code is still a very useful skill, especially given Sue’s emphasis on its importance for education!

Daniele also gave an impromptu talk about documentation that is going to significantly impact how I write documentation in future. It was not recorded, but I believe it was a variation on this talk at PyCon Australia (or possibly this one at PyCon US).

Talks I would recommend but was already too much of a member of the choir to get that much out of (all of these are by people I’d consider friends or at least friendly acquaintances. This probably isn’t coincidental but wasn’t deliberate in my selection except in the sense that I always go to friends’ talks if they don’t clash with anything else that grabs me):

Misc talks I enjoyed and got something out of but that don’t have any particularly insightful categorisation of

I also thought the lightning talks this year were excellent:

If you have a burning urge to see me speak (which I’m mostly not doing this year), I gave a talk about voting system. I’m mostly pretty happy with how this turned out.