Trip Report PyCon & PyData DE 2025
After the easter break in April, PyCon & PyData DE 2025 took place in Darmstadt. This was my first PyCon and also my first tech conference in quite a while. So, why not present something?
Usually, PyCon & PyData DE is in Berlin but for this year (spoiler: and next year at least) it will be held in Darmstadt. I guess it makes sense since most of the organizers are from the southwest region of Germany. Also, Frankfurt airport is quite close, too which makes it easier for international guests to come.
The conference location was the Darmstadtium, a relatively new conference and event space. Let me tell you, it was very confusing to navigate, even after three days.
This year roughly 1500 people were on-site and another 500 people had remote tickets. Great turnout for sure and 2/3 of the attendees where first-timers (just like me). There were sessions in parallel, carefully optimized by an algorithm, which I learnt during the speakers-only pub quiz. While I like the idea of putting talks that gathered a lot of interest during community-voting into bigger rooms this lead to lots of room changes which was certainly not ideal because the hallways were tiny for such a big event space. Also 9 sessions in parallel made it a bit hard to choose.
For me personally, the program was to GenAI/LLM-heavy but I should have expected that. What I felt was missing a bit where talks about regular Python development and software engineering topics. In hindsight I should have gone to EuroPython which I may still do, because it’s in July and not too far away from where I live.
Why did I decide to go?
I was pretty sure that I wanted to attend PyCon DE in 2025. After roughly one and a half years of freelancing I felt the need to engage with the community much more than I did. First, to meet new people but also to learn about new things that I hadn’t known before.
Eventually, I really decided to attend when I read the call for proposals at the end of 2024. I had just finished a big project and learnt quite a few things I wanted to share with a bigger audience. Giving a talk seems daring first but once you got accepted it feels great! Until you realize that you now have to prepare slides and material.
Working on my material took far more time than I anticicapted first, even though I knew what I wanted to present already. I just had to put it into a presentation. Well, at the end it worked out quite well even though I made the last-minute decision to switch from my pandoc-to-reveal.js to a reveal.js-only workflow which in hindsight was quite the hassle but also certainly worth it for me.
Even though this wasn’t much of a concern in the beginning, from a business perspective it’s also great to share knowledge with a bigger audience. Public speaking will make you more confident and people start to get to know you when you do this from time to time.
Interesting Talks
There were many interesting talks of which I have certainly missed a few, too. The following ones I saw live and can highly recommend to watch when the recording will be available on YouTube:
- Open Table Formats in the Wild: From Parquet to Delta Lake and Back by Franz Wöllert
- Distributed file-systems made easy with Python’s fsspec by Barak Amar
- From Algorithm to Action: Building a DIY Distributed Trading Platform with Open Source by Eugen Geist
- Data as (Python) Code by Francesco Calcavecchia
- Death by a Thousand API Versions by Stanislav Zmiev
I will update this post with links to recordings when they are available online.
Conclusion
To bring this to an end, I had a great time. I met a people I knew before, I met new people and I also met a few people I have only known through LinkedIn before and we finally got to meet in real life.
I attented a lot of interesting talks. Sadly, some not-so-interesting ones, too, but I guess they weren’t interesting to me, even though they were still great talks.
I also got some goodies from the sponsors. My favorite gimmick were these vibe-coding stickers and the tote-bag from JetBrains.
So, next year will be in Darmstadt again, from 13/April to 17/April. I will likely attent agan although I am not 100% sure yet about that.
