https://lwn.net/Articles/930169/
'Longtime Pythonista Ned Batchelder gave the first of four keynotes at PyCon's
20th-anniversary edition, PyCon 2023, which was held April 19-27 in Salt Lake
City, Utah. In fact, it is still being held at the time of this writing; the
sprints continue for four days after the three days of main-conference talks.
Batchelder presented his thoughts on communication, how it can often go awry
for technical people, and how to make it work better.
PyCon chair Mariatta Wijaya introduced Batchelder by suggesting that she would
not be in that role today if he had not encouraged her on the day before she
was to give her first Python talk. He simply told her that the talk she had put
together was good, which was enough to allow her to put aside thoughts of
canceling the talk. She chose him as a keynote speaker because she wanted
everyone else in the community to know more about a person who was so
influential for her when she was getting started on her Python journey.
Batchelder works for edX on Open edX, which is a large Python and Django
application. When he started to think about what he would talk about in his
keynote, he considered something from his work, say online education,
million-line monoliths, or building a large open-source project in a for-profit
company. He also maintains coverage.py and a few other projects, so he could
perhaps talk about maintainership topics. Or, since he is one of the organizers
of Boston Python, maybe a topic around organizing during the pandemic would be
interesting. Beyond that, he has been writing a blog for longer than PyCon has
been around; perhaps he could talk about "what it is like to put ill-formed
opinions out on the internet for abuse". Instead, he could talk about the
experience of helping beginners on IRC, Slack, and Discord—or on the
differences between those communication channels.
But he wanted to do something bigger than any of those; "it's a keynote, it
should be big". He deadpanned that he decided to talk about "high-uncertainty
components in complex systems", which was perhaps not met with the laughter he
expected. In any case, that was not the talk topic, though he did want to talk
about "things that are less certain to us and how we interact with them".
Rather than the "fancy high-tech jargon" he had used to hopefully grab
attendees' attention, "the simpler way to describe what I am going to talk
about is 'People'".'
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
