{"$schema": "https://c3voc.de/schedule/schema.json", "generator": {"name": "pretalx", "version": "2026.1.1"}, "schedule": {"url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/schedule/", "version": "20250913.1", "base_url": "https://pretalx.com", "conference": {"acronym": "pycon-au-2025", "title": "PyCon AU 2025", "start": "2025-09-12", "end": "2025-09-15", "daysCount": 4, "timeslot_duration": "00:05", "time_zone_name": "Australia/Melbourne", "colors": {"primary": "#00b159"}, "rooms": [{"name": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "4448-ballroom-3", "guid": "87fc72c5-b928-5758-a1f5-b09f83fb7e96", "description": null, "capacity": 320}, {"name": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "4449-ballroom-2", "guid": "5b41751c-3e04-53c0-b8bb-bddbbec2d9c3", "description": null, "capacity": 232}, {"name": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "4450-ballroom-1", "guid": "697971d7-0a26-54a1-a7f5-02c6e3da2b42", "description": null, "capacity": 232}, {"name": "Stradbroke Room", "slug": "4716-stradbroke-room", "guid": "b58df681-3d5e-57ba-9420-d1e7ca2b1390", "description": null, "capacity": null}, {"name": "Junior Ballroom", "slug": "4711-junior-ballroom", "guid": "b0312e6a-643e-51e5-a205-16e94f0b68c8", "description": "Workshops", "capacity": null}], "tracks": [{"name": "Main Conference", "slug": "5824-main-conference", "color": "#FC0101"}, {"name": "Main Conference (waitlist)", "slug": "5825-main-conference-waitlist", "color": "#ff6969"}, {"name": "Education", "slug": "5826-education", "color": "#FFBF00"}, {"name": "Education (waitlist)", "slug": "5827-education-waitlist", "color": "#ffe491"}, {"name": "Data & AI", "slug": "5828-data-ai", "color": "#00ba1e"}, {"name": "Data & AI (waitlist)", "slug": "5829-data-ai-waitlist", "color": "#60d773"}, {"name": "Scientific Python", "slug": "5830-scientific-python", "color": "#0078A4"}, {"name": "Scientific Python (waitlist)", "slug": "5831-scientific-python-waitlist", "color": "#4eaccf"}, {"name": "Development Sprints", "slug": "5832-development-sprints", "color": "#B910D0"}], "days": [{"index": 1, "date": "2025-09-12", "day_start": "2025-09-12T04:00:00+10:00", "day_end": "2025-09-13T03:59:00+10:00", "rooms": {"Ballroom 3": [{"guid": "12e76054-752a-514b-8a7d-ff51a651c9c9", "code": "VW99GU", "id": 75475, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T09:00:00+10:00", "start": "09:00", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75475-education-track-opening", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/VW99GU/", "title": "Education Track Opening", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Welcome to the Education track!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HYXK8D", "name": "Amanda J Hogan", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HYXK8D_ivE6BC7.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Amanda J Hogan", "guid": "6b17cc55-43a5-5def-bcbb-1382ffb82d84", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HYXK8D/"}, {"code": "X99XWA", "name": "Nicky Ringland", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/X99XWA_gWCnIFK.webp", "biography": "Nicky describes herself as a recovering academic with a background in Computational Linguistics, and a recovering startup edtech founder. She co-founded Tech Inclusion, a technology education not-for-profit, and Grok Learning: a startup teaching hundreds of thousands of students to solve problems with code, before joining Big Tech where she currently works as a Product Manager in open source security.\nNamed one of Australia's inaugural \u201cSuperstars of STEM\u201d and an AFR 'Women of Influence', Nicky is passionate about teaching the next generation to become the creators of tomorrow, while building a healthy, diverse community for them to thrive in.", "public_name": "Nicky Ringland", "guid": "530a7cd3-c894-58a8-9b3a-6d0617c65e6f", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/X99XWA/"}, {"code": "8NDWMQ", "name": "Alison Wong", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/8NDWMQ_Zi9B4lG.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Alison Wong", "guid": "5a764d2e-32c0-566d-a9d7-94ee354d90d4", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/8NDWMQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/VW99GU/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/VW99GU/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "3a1c22b7-1ec3-5644-adae-09773e18daf0", "code": "LFZUZM", "id": 72956, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T09:20:00+10:00", "start": "09:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72956-why-teach-the-why", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LFZUZM/", "title": "Why Teach the \"Why\"?", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "When teaching computer science, many students stuggle with the wide variety of concepts. One week you're learning programming, the next you're learning cybersecurity, then you're learning about image file formats. It can be hard to see how these topics are related, or if they even are related!\n\nWithout sufficient context, these are just abstract topics, disconnected from reality and from each other, with rote memorisation the only tool at hand to help you get things right on the exam. With context, however, things start to make sense. You understand how the topics relate, how these technologies developed and evolved, and can derive solutions rather than memorising them.\n\nThis context \u2013 \"why\" is the technology the way it is? \u2013 fundamentally changes how students connect with the subject, but with curriculums so jam packed it can be hard to justify the time to go into this level of detail. I found, however, that when I did cover the \"why\", I spent less time on revision, more time on discussion, and students had better results.\n\nI want to share with you a few examples of how I did this, what happened when I discussed those in class, and how I go about finding the \"why\" when I don't already know what it is. Hopefully, I can give you some new tools for your own teaching, and \u2013 critically \u2013 explain the \"why\" behind these tools too.", "description": "I came to teaching through an uncommon path, and had a very privleged teaching environment. These, and other, factors allowed me to really develop my own teaching style, inspired by those teachers who most impacted me.\n\nMy focus on the \"why\" grew from this, as I wanted to ensure that my students not only passed the class and did well, but felt inspired by learning, encouraged in curiosity, and that they knew that if they did enough research and asked enough questions they truly could understand anything and see how everything is interconnected. By ensuring I taught the context behind each topic, my students flourished, with their grades improving as they got more familiar with this method, and culminating in excellent exam results.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "8UFZNX", "name": "Jack Reichelt", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/8UFZNX_HAvVdXp.webp", "biography": "As CTO of Kumo Study \u2013 a study and productivity management tool for people with ADHD \u2013 and with plenty of varied consulting under my belt, I have a focus on how tech can help other fields progress. I firmly believe that every topic in the world has something interesting about it, and love to try and discover what that is. I love to learn what the problems are and how I can actually make an impact, ideally with as simple a program as possible.\n\nI\u2019ve been using Python for years, working in both the professional and education sectors, and have focused on bringing the power of Python to everyone.", "public_name": "Jack Reichelt", "guid": "7f90ba98-c12d-5905-b102-e866240c3ad5", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/8UFZNX/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LFZUZM/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LFZUZM/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "bd1e77dd-5172-592d-a5e5-a38a20c9b038", "code": "JAYENP", "id": 73449, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T10:00:00+10:00", "start": "10:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73449-the-lab-lessons-from-an-autism-inclusive-learning-space", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JAYENP/", "title": "The Lab - Lessons from an Autism-Inclusive Learning Space", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "I work for a local council as an educator and mentor at The Lab - a social group for autistic teenagers with an interest in technology. Operating out of a makerspace at a public library, we allow participants free use of tools so that they can tinker, experiment, and build their skills, both social and technical. I see these students gain confidence, discover and ignite new passions, and grow their independence. \n\nIt isn't all easy, however. Providing a safe space for neurodivergent teens has its challenges. We have had to support participants through emotional instability, interpersonal clashes driven by contradicting neurodivergent sensitivities like noise and light levels, communication barriers, and more. However, with a little patience, when given the right support, we have seen participants bloom, stepping out of their comfort zone and sometimes even developing their own projects. \n\nI'll share some reflections on what participants at The Lab do, how we structure the sessions, and the considerations we take to foster a neurodivergent-friendly learning environment - hopefully this provides you with some insights that can help you to improve your pedagogy too. \nI believe that by creating an inclusive environment for neurodivergent people, we make it easier to learn for everyone. After all, accessibility for one is accessibility for all.", "description": "I'll go through some of the techniques we have used to build trust, support our participants, maintain social inclusivity, and inspire the use of technology. These methods have been honed by the mentors of The Lab specifically to support autistic teenagers, so many of them may help if you have neurodivergent students or peers of your own. \n\nI will be highlighting some features of The Lab that differentiate it from school environments, and giving you an insight into some of the stories of growth we have seen in participants of our program. These heartwarming stories include socially anxious kids making friends, teaching via stealth to empower oppositional students with independence, how we flatten the hierarchy to build trust, and leaning into having fun to foster collaboration. \n\nBy giving our students independence, trust and support, we\u2019ve seen them not only become more confident, but - if we\u2019re lucky - sometimes they\u2019ll even work on their own projects too.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "LN3WQM", "name": "Maddie Mackey", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/LN3WQM_lkiZxGx.webp", "biography": "After changing gears from corporate technology to tech education 1 year ago, I have been inspired and delighted watching my students grow. I work for the Canada Bay Council libraries, predominantly running The Lab, but also assisting in the makerspace and other tech education activities. \nMy 7 years as a front-end engineer at Nine and then Atlassian provided me with a solid foundation of technical expertise, that I still use today in my work as a developer for Kumo Study, a startup that creates study tools for people with ADHD. This goes hand-in-hand with my work with neurodivergent teenagers.\nI love teaching technology, and am excited to further improve my skills and the programs I teach so that every student feels empowered to learn and use it.\nPython was the first programming language I learnt, and so I always use it as the first step when teaching programming to my students.", "public_name": "Maddie Mackey", "guid": "49d561cb-45cc-5a46-8a19-70563f6932df", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/LN3WQM/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JAYENP/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JAYENP/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "7e679626-9e7f-5217-99d1-06ee1e4cba4b", "code": "XXXRFG", "id": 72781, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T11:00:00+10:00", "start": "11:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72781-catching-them-all-teaching-fundamental-oop-concepts-with-pokemon", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XXXRFG/", "title": "Catching them all: teaching fundamental OOP concepts with Pokemon", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Object-oriented programming can feel impossibly abstract to students, and demoralising to the teacher facing a class of blank stares, until you bring in Pikachu. This presentation shows how Pokemon naturally demonstrates every OOP concept we might struggle to teach, from basic classes to inheritance.\n\nInstead of the standard \"Car\" and \"Animal\" examples, students work through boiler plate code to predict, debug and eventually create classes and objects, to design and build battle systems. \n\nYou'll see student work samples, and walk away with some different ideas on approaching teaching with OOP.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "7UBZ9U", "name": "Sujatha", "avatar": null, "biography": null, "public_name": "Sujatha", "guid": "7e1fe657-61e6-5e83-a2fe-a07fbc77ed54", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/7UBZ9U/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XXXRFG/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XXXRFG/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "0794a956-74c2-5cef-981d-784cf05a4c19", "code": "H7SEQT", "id": 73255, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T11:40:00+10:00", "start": "11:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73255-capturing-flags-with-microbits", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/H7SEQT/", "title": "Capturing Flags with Microbits", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "After a number of my Year 10 students entered a capture the flag cybersecurity competition they had a sudden burst of enthusiasm for the topic. Networking and cybersecurity, being parts of the national curriculum, are things that I should probably be teaching anyway so when it came to delivering this unit I figured I'd capture their enthusiasm by running my assessment as a capture the flag. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but as it turns out CTFs take quite a bit of effort - and getting a system like the micro:bit to reliably imitate a network a bit of work. Also creating a scenario where students don't just troll each other in the middle of an exam when... also figuring out how to stop them cheating when their communication is open... also figuring out a way to teach them everything they needed to know in order to even approach the task... also how do I learn all this stuff first?\n\nJoin me as I go through the five weeks I spent learning, delivering and then assessing cybersecurity things.\nI'll be overviewing what I had to teach to get them ready, what I had to code on the micro:bits to make any of this work, and ultimately ask: how effective is it to run a capture the flag using Micro:bits.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "ZCZAPX", "name": "Edwin Griffin", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/ZCZAPX_6f3kxLk.webp", "biography": "Edwin began teaching IT in the Senior Secondary Sector of the ACT in 2014. Since then he has used a variety of languages and platforms for delivery, from Basic, to C# and most recently Python. Starting at Gungahlin College in 2014 and overseeing the school's IT program when it had the highest number of IT enrolments of any secondary college in the ACT, he now works at Burgmann Anglican School and continues his emphasis on student led, project based learning.\n\nEdwin manages multiple workshops throughout the year to help support local schools' education of IT, provide students with industry connections, and allow local industries to see what the students are capable of. He believes that IT is an incredible tool that can be combined with a variety of passions to create unique and world changing projects. If all students are taught IT foundations, in addition to the problem solving skills and knowledge they\u2019ll acquire, it will open a range of possibilities that they may never have thought of.", "public_name": "Edwin Griffin", "guid": "bba96dfa-6e4c-5abb-aa9d-0f1a3788799a", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/ZCZAPX/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/H7SEQT/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/H7SEQT/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "7190a42c-4891-5689-b17f-118383cb426c", "code": "37HNHZ", "id": 73292, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T12:20:00+10:00", "start": "12:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73292-whodunnit-xlsx-teaching-python-through-data-investigation", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/37HNHZ/", "title": "Who_Dunnit.xlsx \u2013 Teaching Python through Data Investigation", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Shock horror! Banana, the beloved science class Python has been released! But how? And more importantly... who did it? The clues are hidden in a collection of spreadsheets, but we\u2019ll need something a little more powerful than VLOOKUP to solve this slippery case.\n\nUsing Python in Excel (or Jupyter notebooks if you prefer!) will help us close the book on the tale of the missing snake while sneaking in real-world coding, logic, and data wrangling. Learn about the mystery I\u2019ve crafted and how you can get your own students coding with this (or your own) data adventure!", "description": "For new coders jumping into an IDE might seem like a big step, but could the familiar sight of a spreadsheet help learners get on board?\n\nIn this session, I\u2019ll share a snake-themed who-dunnit puzzle I created to help learners become confident data detectives. You\u2019ll get a look at the dataset, the step-by-step activity, and the Python concepts it covers. Whether you\u2019re teaching teenagers, professionals, or coding-curious adults, this activity is all about making Python fun, relevant, and just a little bit dramatic.\n\nTake home my data set or get some tips to make up your own so you too can sneak a snake into the sheets for your own class.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "TQKR8P", "name": "Renee Noble", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/TQKR8P_rkZ4sJR.webp", "biography": "Renee Noble spends her time bringing together tech, teaching, and community in as many ways as possible.\n\nAs a Cloud Developer Advocate on the Python Advocacy team at Microsoft, she spends her time teaching the community through global events, creating Python learning resources, and local workshops for students and professionals. Renee is also the CEO and Co-Founder or Tech Inclusion, best known for Girls\u2019 Programming Network workshops that run around Australia. On top of this, Renee started her own Business, ConnectEd Code, bringing tech education opportunities to schools\n\nWell known for her work in tech education and the advancement of women, Renee was most recently awarded as Champion of Change 2025 by Women Leading Tech.", "public_name": "Renee Noble", "guid": "0abbf5e8-7d2a-5b2b-8ebb-173c7014bf05", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/TQKR8P/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/37HNHZ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/37HNHZ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a541b45b-1c47-565e-a44a-27b173040af5", "code": "YDLKXT", "id": 72121, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/YDLKXT/streamlit-python_VThnCRX.png", "date": "2025-09-12T13:50:00+10:00", "start": "13:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72121-the-streamlit-experiment-building-web-dashboards-with-yr-10-12", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YDLKXT/", "title": "The Streamlit Experiment: building web dashboards with Yr 10-12", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Frustrated at the inevitable paralysis of \"which GUI library will my students hate the least\", excited about the possibilities of a new toy in Streamlit and  drunk on the power of having recently learned about Github Codespaces, our intrepid educator ventured out on a journey of discovery and (mis)adventure. Would interactive data dashboards be the key to unlocking engagement? Would students ever learn to commit their work? Would the tiniest little technical snag derail entire lessons?", "description": "Streamlit is a rapid development environment designed primarily for data scientists to build quick, interactive web apps to showcase their wares. It is great at getting applications online with relatively little fuss - an approach that makes it a fun candidate for building students' coding skills in an environment that provides some quick reward for effort. \n\nI gave this a go with a group of Year 10 students in a digital technology elective with a group with wildly varying engagement and Python skills and think I learned enough for it to be worth sharing the results. Since trying this in 2024 with Year 10 I have used the same tool for a Year 12 VCE Data Analytics class with additional insights I'd love to share with you. \n\nThis presentation will discuss Streamlit and some benefits that might make it work well for the secondary classroom environment; some of the pedagogical and technical obstacles that popped up (and you might be able to avoid) as well as some broader discussion on just trying things out in the classroom. I'll also cover the use of Github Classroom and Codespaces as a way of getting Streamlit running for students.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "YCZ7MN", "name": "Geoff Matheson", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/YCZ7MN_pDSJ40l.webp", "biography": "Geoff is a passionate public school teacher who enjoys coding for work and pleasure. He currently works as the Head of Middle Years, STEM and Data leading teacher and he spends the rest of his energy as the father of three girls.", "public_name": "Geoff Matheson", "guid": "cf17ca9c-dfe9-5982-92e0-c4bb9de3a9e1", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/YCZ7MN/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YDLKXT/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YDLKXT/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "aa5060b8-818f-56ad-8b99-949b7e6e3190", "code": "USMRGN", "id": 72340, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T14:30:00+10:00", "start": "14:30", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72340-data-structures-a-learning-journey", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/USMRGN/", "title": "Data Structures: A learning journey", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Follow my journey from drowning in the world of data structures to understanding through implementation. Skip Lists... What are they? Why are they? And how do they work? These are all questions I sought to answer after I discovered them in the wild. Come and find out why I think writing your data structures from scratch might be the best way to understand them.", "description": "As an intern, I frequently come across things I don't really understand - one of these things was a Skip List. After my boss tried to explain what it was several times and I googled it, I was still super lost. Around the same time, I was in a class at my uni called Data Structures and Algorithms. The first assignment for this class was to recreate a hash set from scratch with all its capabilities in C++, and I found that it really deepened my understanding, so I planned to use this idea to understand how Skip Lists work and why they are useful. My first step was to make a linked list Class, as this was something I already deeply understood, and then I could use this object as the basis for other data structures. Next, I recreated my assignment, building off my linked list so that I could practice how this may work in Python. Then I felt ready to finally make a Skip List and understand why my boss wanted to use it in his code.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "PZJFV8", "name": "Izy Hogan", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/PZJFV8_2RLfeQ6.webp", "biography": "2nd year Software Engineering student. Long-time Pythonista and tech lover. Mild Caffeine addict.", "public_name": "Izy Hogan", "guid": "3174b42f-0eb2-526f-879c-c7a1e5e95da7", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/PZJFV8/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/USMRGN/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/USMRGN/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "6554e512-f531-5cdc-ac63-bcee1f77c028", "code": "FDPZSB", "id": 74109, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T15:10:00+10:00", "start": "15:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74109-takeaways-from-teaching-python-in-college", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FDPZSB/", "title": "Takeaways from teaching Python in college", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "After over a decade of teaching application development, I became a teacher in a local college a few years ago. Over 12 months, I taught open-source programming languages, including Python, alongside frameworks and content management systems, to various student cohorts. This session will share takeaways from that experience.\n\nThe goal of the presentation is to explore the current link between the open-source community and academia, examine certain educational institution stigmas, and improve how we, as a community, present Python to teachers and students.", "description": "Teaching Python and other open-source technologies in a college has provided interesting insights into the challenges and opportunities within academic programming education. This session delves into the practical realities of bridging the gap between industry best practices and traditional pedagogical approaches.\n\nI will cover the impact of AI (the good and the ugly) on student learning, address open-source indifference, discuss proprietary software vendor dominance, point out the importance of quality documentation, highlight the value of student reflection on real-life projects, and examine how different content and context can profoundly change student perception of technology.\n\nThis session is designed for educators, open-source contributors, curriculum developers, and anyone passionate about the next generation of Python developers. Join me to discuss how together we can refine our approach to teaching Python, ensuring students are not just learning a language, but embracing a powerful ecosystem and a collaborative mindset.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "WMYBPS", "name": "Vladimir Roudakov", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/WMYBPS_ltPDNxS.webp", "biography": "Hi, I'm Vladimir! I am an IT teacher and award winning open source advocate sharing my knowledge with the next generation of software engineers. \n\nI contribute to various open source projects and organise local meetups and conferences in Brisbane, Australia.", "public_name": "Vladimir Roudakov", "guid": "c4322c72-79db-59d7-8e58-f785e5f04e3c", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/WMYBPS/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FDPZSB/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FDPZSB/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "2f5865cb-7b77-567a-aad9-cb9e4a15fe86", "code": "D7UHXY", "id": 75482, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T16:10:00+10:00", "start": "16:10", "duration": "01:10", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75482-student-showcase", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/D7UHXY/", "title": "Student Showcase", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Education Showcase", "language": "en", "abstract": "Showcase of student projects", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HYXK8D", "name": "Amanda J Hogan", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HYXK8D_ivE6BC7.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Amanda J Hogan", "guid": "6b17cc55-43a5-5def-bcbb-1382ffb82d84", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HYXK8D/"}, {"code": "X99XWA", "name": "Nicky Ringland", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/X99XWA_gWCnIFK.webp", "biography": "Nicky describes herself as a recovering academic with a background in Computational Linguistics, and a recovering startup edtech founder. She co-founded Tech Inclusion, a technology education not-for-profit, and Grok Learning: a startup teaching hundreds of thousands of students to solve problems with code, before joining Big Tech where she currently works as a Product Manager in open source security.\nNamed one of Australia's inaugural \u201cSuperstars of STEM\u201d and an AFR 'Women of Influence', Nicky is passionate about teaching the next generation to become the creators of tomorrow, while building a healthy, diverse community for them to thrive in.", "public_name": "Nicky Ringland", "guid": "530a7cd3-c894-58a8-9b3a-6d0617c65e6f", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/X99XWA/"}, {"code": "8NDWMQ", "name": "Alison Wong", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/8NDWMQ_Zi9B4lG.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Alison Wong", "guid": "5a764d2e-32c0-566d-a9d7-94ee354d90d4", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/8NDWMQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/D7UHXY/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/D7UHXY/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "791aa2e1-3ba1-5417-a929-d94d732e0c9f", "code": "SZXMAS", "id": 75476, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T17:20:00+10:00", "start": "17:20", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75476-education-track-closing", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SZXMAS/", "title": "Education Track Closing", "subtitle": "", "track": "Education", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Thanks for coming to the Education track!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HYXK8D", "name": "Amanda J Hogan", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HYXK8D_ivE6BC7.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Amanda J Hogan", "guid": "6b17cc55-43a5-5def-bcbb-1382ffb82d84", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HYXK8D/"}, {"code": "X99XWA", "name": "Nicky Ringland", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/X99XWA_gWCnIFK.webp", "biography": "Nicky describes herself as a recovering academic with a background in Computational Linguistics, and a recovering startup edtech founder. She co-founded Tech Inclusion, a technology education not-for-profit, and Grok Learning: a startup teaching hundreds of thousands of students to solve problems with code, before joining Big Tech where she currently works as a Product Manager in open source security.\nNamed one of Australia's inaugural \u201cSuperstars of STEM\u201d and an AFR 'Women of Influence', Nicky is passionate about teaching the next generation to become the creators of tomorrow, while building a healthy, diverse community for them to thrive in.", "public_name": "Nicky Ringland", "guid": "530a7cd3-c894-58a8-9b3a-6d0617c65e6f", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/X99XWA/"}, {"code": "8NDWMQ", "name": "Alison Wong", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/8NDWMQ_Zi9B4lG.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Alison Wong", "guid": "5a764d2e-32c0-566d-a9d7-94ee354d90d4", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/8NDWMQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SZXMAS/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SZXMAS/", "attachments": []}], "Ballroom 2": [{"guid": "53af8e2c-c420-5d3e-81e9-7044632f1299", "code": "9HBBDK", "id": 75477, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T09:00:00+10:00", "start": "09:00", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75477-scientific-python-track-opening", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/9HBBDK/", "title": "Scientific Python Track Opening", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Python has become one of the cornerstone languages for developing scientific software, thanks to its flexibility, extensibility, ease of use and extensive ecosystem. Whether you\u2019re doing machine learning, processing & visualising data, or running a statistical analysis, there\u2019s a good chance there's a Python package that can help get you to a result quickly.\n\nThis track is for anyone using Python for scientific computing - be it data analysis, engineering, academic research, statistics, modelling systems, machine learning, or just generally hacking together new tools to extract insight.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HUN8CD", "name": "Genevieve Buckley", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HUN8CD_GHHMUg1.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Genevieve Buckley", "guid": "0a12f230-ee52-5dfa-b825-c2884d382536", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HUN8CD/"}, {"code": "EQJWS9", "name": "Kai Striega", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/EQJWS9_ypisb80.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Kai Striega", "guid": "f37116a1-3af9-5e16-a142-ef2934478d53", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/EQJWS9/"}, {"code": "GSGFY3", "name": "Charles Turner", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/GSGFY3_LGMwYG0.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Charles Turner", "guid": "328e760b-87ac-56ff-824e-b56b54bffa01", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/GSGFY3/"}, {"code": "TASC8P", "name": "Jo Basevi", "avatar": null, "biography": null, "public_name": "Jo Basevi", "guid": "89c52e7c-bfdc-5221-8371-7ac0d26cbbce", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/TASC8P/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/9HBBDK/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/9HBBDK/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "1a736b70-91d2-57ce-aaa6-fe588709fa90", "code": "JSAEAZ", "id": 74098, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T09:20:00+10:00", "start": "09:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74098-big-brains-small-targets-whole-brain-image-analysis-with-python", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JSAEAZ/", "title": "Big Brains, Small Targets: Whole-Brain Image Analysis with Python", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "How do you reproducibly identify and count individual neurons in a brain region that\u2019s tiny, diffuse, and surrounded by lookalike regions, especially when each 3D brain image is multiple terabytes in size?\n\nThis talk explores this very question by diving into the development of a Python-based, end-to-end pipeline for analysing whole mouse brains imaged using light-sheet fluorescence microscopy. The goal is to quantify the number of individual dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc), a small but clinically significant midbrain region implicated in Parkinson\u2019s disease.\n\nBuilt entirely with open-source Python tools, the workflow combines brainreg (from the BrainGlobe ecosystem) for atlas-based registration, dask for scalable image processing, and a custom-trained Cellpose model for 3D cell segmentation. To address the complexity of region extraction and alignment uncertainty, the pipeline includes parameter sweeps, pre-processing optimisation, and quantitative evaluation using expert-labelled ground truth masks.\n\nThis talk will also highlight how the integration of multiple Python open-source packages supports scalable, reproducible neuroimaging analysis, from parallel execution on HPC clusters to image registration and deep learning-based segmentation pipelines, as well as quantitative methods for assessing alignment fidelity.", "description": "Recent advancements in microscopy have revolutionised medical research by enabling imaging of whole organs at incredible resolution. In the world of neuroscience, this means that capturing entire mouse brains in 3D at cellular detail is now possible, and with this level of resolution, each dataset can easily reach multiple terabytes in size. While these rich images hold immense potential for understanding brain function and disease, extracting meaningful biological insights (such as counting specific neurons in tiny, diffuse regions like the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc)) poses significant computational and analytical challenges.\n\nOne of the toughest problems is accurately defining and extracting these small brain regions. The SNpc is surrounded by anatomically similar areas with overlapping cell types, making registration and segmentation highly sensitive to small errors. Misalignment or imprecise region extraction can lead to inaccurate cell counts, which risks compromising the biological conclusions drawn from the data.\n\nTo tackle these issues, an end-to-end Python pipeline combining atlas registration with the BrainGlobe ecosystem, scalable image processing using dask, and a custom-trained Cellpose deep learning model for 3D cell segmentation was developed. This workflow incorporates extensive parameter sweeps, preprocessing optimisations, and validation against expert-annotated ground truth masks using image similarity metrics to better understand and quantify the uncertainties in region extraction.\n\nDespite these advances, assessing and improving region accuracy remains an ongoing challenge. This talk will share insights into the complexities of large-scale neuroimaging analysis and highlight that while Python provides a powerful toolkit, the problem of reliable, reproducible extraction of tiny, complex brain regions is far from solved, representing an active area of research and development in the world of bioimage analysis.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HLLFLF", "name": "Ishrat Zaman", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HLLFLF_FsdEj19.webp", "biography": "Ishrat Zaman is a scientist working in the field of medical research as a bioimage analyst. She is passionate about the intersection of neuroscience, image analysis, and open-source software as well as developing analysis pipelines that can address complex scientific and biological questions. With a background in both wet lab-based biology and computational science, Ishrat is passionate about bridging domains, making complex analysis pipelines more accessible, and looking at as many pretty microscopy images as possible.", "public_name": "Ishrat Zaman", "guid": "3eb023e3-8759-5008-a1b3-148120314e62", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HLLFLF/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JSAEAZ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JSAEAZ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "73cadc6c-1da0-5b9e-87ae-55d3ea0c8c2d", "code": "3SBETY", "id": 73405, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T10:00:00+10:00", "start": "10:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73405-going-with-the-flow-apache-airflow-for-operational-quality-scientific-workflows", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3SBETY/", "title": "Going with the flow? Apache Airflow for operational-quality scientific workflows", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "In this session we will share our experience of using Apache Airflow to build production scientific modelling workflows. This will draw on our work at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on multiple projects which updated existing services to use Airflow \u2013 the eReefs water quantity and quality modelling and Seasonal Streamflow Forecasting services. \n\nWhy invest effort to learn and then apply the Airflow framework to manage your scientific workflows? In our years of experience, building workflows around apps for scientific analysis that are both operational-quality, and are also enjoyable and productive to work with for scientific developers, has been something of a persistent pain-point. \n\nAs scientific developers, if you roll your own workflow management system from the ground up then you retain control and can use all your favourite Python tools - but over time it can often result in a combination of scripts, cron and/or Jenkins jobs that is hard to maintain. You\u2019ll also be short of features you need in an operational-quality system like good logging, error handling, and a pleasant monitoring web UI for non-developers (e.g. application support teams) to use. All the above is exacerbated when effective task parallelisation is a goal. On the other hand, applying off-the-shelf general business IT workflow management apps to scientific modelling use-cases can result in cumbersome systems that are difficult to update and involve a lot of duplication.\n\nEnter Apache Airflow - an open-source workflow manager written in Python with workflow Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) defined directly in Python code. We\u2019ll give examples illustrated from our project work of updating existing systems to run in an Airflow framework with a goal to enable greater automation, scalability and quality control. These include: \n\n * Challenges faced getting started with Airflow for our small project teams \u2013 including tips for setting up development instances of Airflow\u2019s scheduler and workflow backends. \n * Summaries of how we used the different Airflow \u201cOperators\u201d to invoke program code \u2013 including trade-offs between tight and loose coupling, and how this interacts with the use of Conda for managing complex scientific software stacks. \n * Our experience of using Airflow\u2019s workflow parallelisation effectively for chunking up work. \n * Experience from different deployment options \u2013 both to AWS cloud containers, and locally-managed Virtual Machines. \n\nWe'll finish with reflecting on key lessons learnt, and ideas for further improvement in scientific software workflow management.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "VE9TZ7", "name": "Patrick Sunter", "avatar": null, "biography": "Patrick Sunter works as a scientific software engineer at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.\nHis career has been at the intersection of software development and scientific R&D for over two decades, in diverse fields including earth science, transportation analysis and now hydrology and meteorology.\nNow living in regional Victoria outside Ballarat, his hobbies include playing real/royal tennis, the world's oldest racquet sport.", "public_name": "Patrick Sunter", "guid": "195212a3-8df1-50f4-b8ba-155f51850db1", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/VE9TZ7/"}, {"code": "999PRP", "name": "Michael Pegios", "avatar": null, "biography": null, "public_name": "Michael Pegios", "guid": "cd537659-0db9-5c89-921e-f2a72dc7a712", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/999PRP/"}, {"code": "UFWMHG", "name": "Daehyok Shin", "avatar": null, "biography": null, "public_name": "Daehyok Shin", "guid": "72ac1338-a483-5c45-834c-7c2c885f62ac", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/UFWMHG/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3SBETY/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3SBETY/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "fc1d58c6-4458-545c-9e39-edda1d7cdd2c", "code": "8SKZRV", "id": 73388, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T11:00:00+10:00", "start": "11:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73388-modernizing-legacy-wrapping-a-25-year-computational-fluid-dynamics-codebase", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8SKZRV/", "title": "Modernizing Legacy: Wrapping a 25+ Year Computational Fluid Dynamics Codebase", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Water quality modeling plays a crucial role in managing aquatic ecosystems. Those models are based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the science of using numerical analysis and data structures to solve many processes influencing fluid behavior. CFD requires many complex mathematical representations through various ODE and PDE solvers, and has traditionally been written in Fortran or C++, mostly for their speed in doing massively parallel computations, such as handling array operations and object-oriented features. As such, those codebases have a long-standing legacy in scientific computing, and many established CFD codes are written in them. However, as time goes on, we witness the popularity of a new generation of codebases such as Python, which stems from its simplicity, versatility, and strong community. Extensive libraries and frameworks make Python a popular choice for many developers and scientists alike. It is, however, not a preferred language for core CFD code due to performance limitations and its difficulties with parallelization. \n\nThis talk explores modernizing a **25+ year-old C++ CFD model**, essential for **simulating lake conditions**, particularly for **predicting temperature variations** and **algal bloom dynamics**, by wrapping it with [C-interop](https://github.com/csiro-hydroinformatics/c-interop) for seamless Python interoperability.  \n\nBeyond integration, we leverage [Optuna](https://optuna.org/), a powerful hyperparameter optimization framework, to fine-tune models efficiently, transitioning from manual parameter tuning on a laptop to a **distributed, scalable workflow** powered by [Dask Distributed](https://distributed.dask.org/en/stable/) and [JupyterHub](https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/stable/). This transformation enables automated hyperparameter optimization across **many lakes in Australia**, helping researchers **investigate trends in tuning parameters** and derive deeper environmental insights.", "description": "### Attendees will gain insights into:\n- **Wrapping legacy C++ water quality models** with Moirai for Python-driven analysis.\n- **Automating and scaling hyperparameter tuning** using Optuna across multiple lake ecosystems.\n- **Utilizing Dask Distributed and JupyterHub** to accelerate environmental simulations.\n- **Extracting insights from hyperparameter trends** to refine large-scale water quality predictions.  \n\nFor researchers, engineers, and data scientists working in **environmental modeling**, this session provides practical strategies for **modernizing legacy systems**, **scaling model optimization**, and **enhancing predictive accuracy** without sacrificing scientific integrity.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "7RJAVY", "name": "Tishampati Dhar", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/7RJAVY_KeefzMC.webp", "biography": "Tisham is a Senior Engineer at CSIRO Space and Astronomy division. Previously he held similar roles in various government agencies, private sector companies and startups. He has been pushing pixels since 2004 when he got started using medical imaging devices in Singapore. Since then he has had the priviledge of working with various space agencies such as NASA, DLR, JAXA, CNES etc. and lived through the explosion of publicly available satellite imagery.", "public_name": "Tishampati Dhar", "guid": "30e5a538-d418-5d6d-83eb-d2a626185779", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/7RJAVY/"}, {"code": "QVAYK3", "name": "Duy Nguyen", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/QVAYK3_vvaBMfY.webp", "biography": "Dr Duy Nguyen is a computational modeller and currently an Environmental Scientist in the [CSIRO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO) [Environment Research Unit](https://www.csiro.au/en/about/people/business-units/environment), with expertise in fluid dynamics and turbulence modelling, particularly in rivers, lakes, estuaries, and air\u2013sea interactions. His research spans stratified flows, turbulence processes, physical oceanography, and marine atmospheric boundary layers. More recently, his work has focused on water quality modelling to support management of inland waters and provide early warning of harmful events, including fish kills, blackwater, algal blooms, and sediment transport, using a combination of process-based and data-driven approaches.\n\nAt CSIRO, Duy is the Lead of the Water Quality Modelling Package at the [CSIRO AquaWatch Program](https://research.csiro.au/aquawatch/about/) and the [Digital Water & Landscapes Program](https://research.csiro.au/dwl/), where the team integrates process-based, AI/ML, and large data streams from remote sensing to model and forecast water quality and quantity. His goal is to provide effective, science-informed solutions to address pressing water security challenges in Australia and beyond. Duy also leads the Vietnam AquaWatch pilot, where the team is building a monitoring and forecasting water quality system for the inland aquaculture. He has won several national and international awards from universities and governments in research, teaching, and education, as well as in services and social engagements.", "public_name": "Duy Nguyen", "guid": "c63fba1d-42f9-54f2-942e-40d2cc9b9cee", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/QVAYK3/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8SKZRV/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8SKZRV/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "33630df3-3ddc-5cd7-a02a-b009f9029eea", "code": "7BZ8PQ", "id": 74129, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T11:40:00+10:00", "start": "11:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74129-on-the-fly-and-on-the-flight-scientific-data-analysis-beyond-the-beamline", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/7BZ8PQ/", "title": "On the Fly and On the Flight: Scientific Data Analysis Beyond the Beamline", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "At synchrotron facilities, researchers use high-energy X-rays to uncover the structure and chemistry of materials \u2014 from batteries to biological systems. These experiments generate vast amounts of complex, high-dimensional data, and scientists need flexible tools, interactive exploration, and smart automation to make sense of it all. In this talk, we present a Python-based data processing suite designed to support X-ray spectroscopy workflows: from generating immediate data products to inform critical decisions during limited beamtime, to in-depth reprocessing off-site \u2014 or even offline.\n\nThe suite is built around a processing library that uses `xarray` for intuitive multi-dimensional data handling and provides reproducible, transparent analysis pipelines via command-line tools and Jupyter notebooks for coding-affine users. It also includes a `PyQt`-based desktop GUI that enables domain scientists to interactively explore their data and fine-tune processing steps without the need for prior programming experience.\n\nWe'll explore how Python libraries like `xarray`, `pyqtgraph`, and `typer` take the processing of raw experimental data from low-level wrangling in multiple dimensions to high-level exploration in intuitive interfaces. By providing different levels of balance between automation and user control we enable scientists with all levels of programming experience to create insightful datasets \u2014 whether they're at the beamline, back at their home institution, or already on the plane to the next conference.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "ZQWNFE", "name": "Melanie Hampel", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/ZQWNFE_OKLZJhk.webp", "biography": "Dr Melanie Hampel is a Senior Scientific Software Engineer at the Australian Synchrotron. She completed her PhD in nuclear astrophysics at Monash University in 2021. For the past 4 years she has been part of the Scientific Computing team at the Australian Synchrotron specialising in the development of analysis software for X-ray absorption spectroscopy with python.", "public_name": "Melanie Hampel", "guid": "a377a24e-46fd-5f2b-9ee0-04db6d7c25fc", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/ZQWNFE/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/7BZ8PQ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/7BZ8PQ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "ab43339c-a23b-585e-9104-56de77530ae4", "code": "8DZTCP", "id": 74019, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/8DZTCP/Screenshot_20250621_20_F9kDZ5R.png", "date": "2025-09-12T12:20:00+10:00", "start": "12:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74019-from-matlab-to-lambda-transforming-structural-engineering-research-tools", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8DZTCP/", "title": "From Matlab to Lambda: Transforming Structural Engineering Research Tools", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "When academic engineering tools remain trapped in Matlab while the industry relies on Excel, Python offers a unique opportunity to bridge this computational divide. While academic software packages for the efficient design of light-gauge steel have been available for several years, they effectively require highly specialised expertise to use and understand\u2014challenging the material\u2019s adoption beyond highly specialised buildings. This talk presents a case study of transforming CUFSM, a trusted but highly technical Matlab package for the finite strip analysis of light-gauge steel, into pyCUFSM\u2014a performant and open-source Python implementation deployable to AWS Lambda.\n\nThe migration revealed and addressed several key scientific Python challenges. Moving from Matlab\u2019s matrix-oriented syntax to idiomatic Python required not only converting every index from 1-based to 0-based, but also careful architectural decisions around NumPy array handling and SciPy linear algebra operations. Performance bottlenecks were addressed through strategic use of Cython compilation and aggressive pre-allocation and reuse of data structures, achieving a p90 duration of 3.9 seconds for real-world usage. \n\nHowever, technical performance alone wasn\u2019t sufficient. In regulated industries where engineers face personal liability for design failures, trust and transparency are paramount. Not only must the interpretation of inputs and outputs not leave any doubt, but the calculations themselves must be validatable by the user - without having to read or understand code. By coupling this Python analysis package with a React-based frontend, a calculator was developed which requires only 4 inputs, shows all intermediate steps with full rendered equations, and still allows access to advanced parameters for those who want it. Extensively validated, such an implementation is showing significant gains in adoption by the wider structural engineering community. The final system demonstrates how Python's strengths\u2014from scientific libraries to cloud deployment\u2014can bring academic innovation into wider use in regulated industries where reliability, ease of use, and user trust are essential.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "3J3L8B", "name": "Brooks Smith", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/3J3L8B_u9Ati7r.webp", "biography": "Brooks Smith is a Chartered structural engineer with a passion for both research and software development, and a vision to making structural design safer, easier, and more efficient. He is currently a Principal Engineer (by both definitions of the word \"Engineer\") at the Melbourne, Australia head office of ClearCalcs, a cloud-based platform providing structural design calculators around the world. In his free time, he is an active member of the open source software community, and is the lead maintainer of structural engineering software packages anaStruct and pyCUFSM. While he has lived in Australia for the last 7 years, he grew up in the United States, earning his Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his dual Bachelors degrees from Dartmouth College and its Thayer School of Engineering.", "public_name": "Brooks Smith", "guid": "c894e30f-23a6-5f73-a406-03a8b3525cde", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/3J3L8B/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8DZTCP/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8DZTCP/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "d6af8bbc-f8b9-5615-b1ff-e79add24a84e", "code": "PYVVKN", "id": 73389, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T13:50:00+10:00", "start": "13:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73389-time-series-analysis-in-python-easy-tools-for-scientific-insight", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/PYVVKN/", "title": "Time Series Analysis in Python: Easy Tools for Scientific Insight", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Time series data is everywhere. Across industries such as environmental monitoring, financial market analysis, power and energy systems, and scientific discovery, organisations rely on analysing large volumes of complex time series data to make smart and informed decisions that help keep the world running smoothly. Two of the most critical tasks in time series analysis are Time Series Classification and Time Series Forecasting. Python\u2019s data science ecosystem for time series analysis has grown significantly in recent years. In this talk, we will introduce the modern landscape of time series tools available in Python. We will demonstrate the usability, algorithmic diversity, and interface design of libraries such as Sktime, Aeon, and Nixtla (NeuralForecast, MLForecast). These libraries will serve as examples to show how easy they are to use, what kinds of algorithms they provide, and how their application programming interfaces are structured to support efficient and intuitive development. Whether your goal is to classify environmental patterns or forecast future trends, these tools can simplify and accelerate your time series analysis workflow.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "XKH7S8", "name": "Muhammad Sakib Khan Inan", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/XKH7S8_v9C3pHc.webp", "biography": "I am a 3rd year PhD candidate at Deakin University, specialising Artificial Intelligence (AI) for time series data analysis from heterogeneous IoT sensors. My research focuses on developing novel AI methods to classify time series measurements and recover the lost identity (metadata) of IoT sensors. I am passionate about building robust, intelligent systems that make sense of complex sensor data in real-world environments. I have been working with Python for over six years and regularly apply it to machine learning, data processing, and scientific research tasks.", "public_name": "Muhammad Sakib Khan Inan", "guid": "0de1962b-26a9-5c90-8f57-04317233807e", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/XKH7S8/"}, {"code": "MCGKUK", "name": "Rubaiath E Ulfath", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/MCGKUK_KNU2H2y.webp", "biography": "I am a second-year PhD candidate at RMIT University, specialising in Artificial Intelligence for optimising energy efficiency and operational costs in centralised chilled water plants. Passionate about using technology to drive positive change, I am dedicated to solving real-world challenges through Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and advanced time series forecasting. My research, part of the RACE for 2030 Research Programme, focuses on building predictive models that enhance cooling load forecasting and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for sustainable energy solutions.\n\nWith recent experience in AI-driven cybersecurity, Natural Language Processing, and predictive modelling, I am committed to expanding my technical expertise and translating research into actionable insights for industry. I thrive on collaboration with industry experts and the broader tech community, sharing ideas, learning, and exploring AI\u2019s transformative potential in energy, sustainability, and beyond.", "public_name": "Rubaiath E Ulfath", "guid": "061fe653-761e-5471-a3fc-221471cb50fc", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/MCGKUK/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/PYVVKN/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/PYVVKN/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "3742112b-fcf3-5a6a-acb1-8d04e25380a0", "code": "DQUCMW", "id": 73480, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T14:30:00+10:00", "start": "14:30", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73480-object-oriented-oncology-making-sense-of-complex-patient-journeys", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DQUCMW/", "title": "Object-Oriented Oncology: Making Sense of Complex Patient Journeys", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Clinical data harmonisation efforts are an extraordinarily powerful tool in the world of observational research. When your data model is designed to do everything, however, there is a necessary trade-off in design principles. The requirement to support every possible use-case across all clinical domains means that they can tend to favour flexibility over clarity, storing events, measurements, treatments, and outcomes in highly normalised, loosely typed schemas. For domain experts like oncology researchers or clinicians, this makes even basic questions (say, \u201cwhat happened to this patient, when, and why?\u201d) frustratingly opaque.\n\nUsing Python\u2019s ORM paradigm, we created a more intuitive, opinionated view of oncology data. By surfacing richly connected objects like CancerPatient, CancerDiagnosis, Regimen, or Cycle, we move away from brittle SQL scripts and toward a model that reflects how clinical experts already think. These ORM-backed tools not only support reproducible ETL and visualisation workflows, but also allow non-developers to explore complex patient journeys in a hands-on, object-based way. We\u2019re building out a library of reusable object maps that encode domain knowledge directly, letting researchers focus on clinical questions and not worry about the nuanced query logic.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "MXXP3Q", "name": "Georgie Kennedy", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/MXXP3Q_QzGnrMi.webp", "biography": "I am a senior research fellow at the Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research and Maridulu Budyari Gumal (SPHERE) fellow for unwarranted variation in clinical cancer care. I have a background in clinical research both in industry and acadaemia and develop full-stack python solutions to support oncology research.", "public_name": "Georgie Kennedy", "guid": "7aea4f4e-64c0-5710-8534-80340928883b", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/MXXP3Q/"}, {"code": "ESNB3X", "name": "Ghazaleh Niknam", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/ESNB3X_t38V6MO.webp", "biography": "Ghazaleh is a computational health researcher with expertise in machine learning, graph modelling, and clinical data analysis. She completed a PhD in dynamic graph representation learning and held a visiting fellowship at the Computational Health Informatics Lab at the University of Oxford. Now a Postdoctoral Fellow at UNSW and the Ingham Institute, she works with the SPHERE Cancer Group to study variation in cancer care using OMOP-harmonised data, federated analytics, and privacy-preserving tools.", "public_name": "Ghazaleh Niknam", "guid": "6be027ce-3989-5ce5-8e91-aac3c7962a06", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/ESNB3X/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DQUCMW/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DQUCMW/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "5ccf998f-9840-56cb-8117-ac20a29940fd", "code": "HT8KQC", "id": 73403, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T15:10:00+10:00", "start": "15:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73403-building-an-electricity-market-model-from-scratch", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/HT8KQC/", "title": "Building an electricity market model from scratch", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "This presentation will introduce the audience to the fields of electricity market modelling and mathematical optimisation (MO).The talk will be comprised of three sections:\n\nThe first section will provide some background and context for the audience. We will describe what an electricity market is, how it functions, and the energy transition which is changing how we build and operate the grid. We will also provide some background on mathematical optimisation - how it works, and why it is the most common way to model energy markets.\n\nIn the second section, we will walk through how you build an optimisation model together. We will describe an extremely simple electrical grid, and show we can simulate the dispatch of power stations through a mathematical optimisation model. We will also explore some of the benefits of these models, including how electricity prices are generated by extracting the marginal value of constraints.\n\nFinally, we will break down the core components of a mathematical optimisation model and discuss how this approach can be used to solve quantitative problems in many other sectors.", "description": "By 2050, the electrical grid will be a fundamentally different system to the one we have today. Over the coming years, we need to learn how to plan, build, and run a new type of grid, and all the while preventing it going down, even for a second.\n\nIn order to conduct the analysis and experiments required for this transition, we need to be able to model the grid in all of its rich detail and complexity. If we close a coal power station in New South Wales, build a solar farm in Queensland, new transmission lines are delayed in South Australia, or the build cost of offshore wind in Victoria changes, we need to be able to rapidly assess how this will impact the stability and future of the grid.\n\nTo accomplish this, we utilise the analytical technique of mathematical optimisation (MO). This allows us to build a mathematical representation of the grid, describe its constraints and limitations, and then simulate how it will operate and evolve now and into the future.\n\nIn this presentation, we will introduce the audience to the field of electricity market modelling and explain how to turn the data and structure of the grid into a mathematical optimisation that we can solve. We\u2019ll build a very simple electricity market dispatch optimisation together and explore the key components of an optimisation model that can be applied to problems in multiple industries.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HQSSZQ", "name": "Dr Jack Simpson", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HQSSZQ_DUSlUYX.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Dr Jack Simpson", "guid": "ffa0d3f8-ecaa-55fa-ae6e-8f86f65de334", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HQSSZQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/HT8KQC/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/HT8KQC/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "b65daefd-954b-5705-80e1-fbd93691071d", "code": "L7AWTU", "id": 73039, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T16:10:00+10:00", "start": "16:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73039-pyearthtools-machine-learning-for-earth-system-science", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/L7AWTU/", "title": "PyEarthTools: Machine learning for Earth system science", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "PyEarthTools is an open-source, Python software framework that supports the development of machine learning models, big and small, for Earth system science. See https://pyearthtools.readthedocs.io/ .", "description": "Models based on physical processes and equations of motion have been built, over decades, to model the physical structure and composition of the ocean, atmosphere, and land surface.  Other scientific models have been built to process very complex, high-dimensional data from instruments such as satellites and radar into simpler data products such as images and surface field estimates. These models are often computationally intensive.\n\nPrior to around 2022, the complexity of many of these tasks was seen as infeasible for machine learning systems. In the years since, deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance across the types of models described above. \n\nPyEarthTools contains modules for:\n\n- Loading and indexing Earth system data into Xarray;\n- Processing and normalising Earth system data for machine learning;\n- Defining machine learning (ML) models;\n- Training ML models and managing experiments; and\n- Evaluating ML models.\n  \nCome to this talk to learn how to:\n\n- Get started with machine learning for Earth system science\n- Learn about the PyEarthTools framework and how to build re-usable ML pipelines\n- Catch the science bug and try out some simple projects\n- Train your own weather models from scratch\n\nThis talk is suitable for beginners through to professional scientists and data scientists.\n\nPyEarthTools was initially developed by the Bureau of Meteorology (Australia), and now also has developers from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (New Zealand), and the Met Office (United Kingdom).", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "ZZQ9TE", "name": "Tennessee Leeuwenburg", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/ZZQ9TE_qAvIPW9.webp", "biography": "Tennessee Leeuwenburg is a data scientist and software developer, at the Bureau of Meteorology, with over 20 years of experience. He has an interest in open source software, machine learning, and forecast verification. His current research work includes the development of scientific machine learning models for weather and environmental prediction. For an overview of his recent publications, please visit https://orcid.org/0009-0008-2024-1967 . He also maintains two open source software packages (https://github.com/nci/scores and https://github.com/ACCESS-Community-Hub/PyEarthTools).", "public_name": "Tennessee Leeuwenburg", "guid": "bc11dba0-35d9-5308-a786-32b58bd8285f", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/ZZQ9TE/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/L7AWTU/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/L7AWTU/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "47be17ae-946f-536f-a780-819672490835", "code": "DV8XQU", "id": 71847, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/DV8XQU/Screenshot_2025-05-24__fnpqnRH.png", "date": "2025-09-12T16:50:00+10:00", "start": "16:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-71847-high-altitude-balloon-imagery-decoding-in-the-browser-with-c-js-and-python", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DV8XQU/", "title": "High altitude balloon imagery decoding in the browser with C, JS, and Python", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "WebHorus and WebWenet are entirely browser based implementations of the Horus and Wenet radio demodulators which are commonly used for receiving amateur high altitude balloon telemetry and imagery. By producing web versions of these tools, it has significantly lowered the barrier of entry to set up a receiver. It's even possible to receive on a mobile phone connected to a USB software defined radio!\n\nWe'll be running through how we compiled the C applications into Python modules, built the Python modules for WebAssembly and finally how they are called from JavaScript. No server involved. Packaged into a progressive web app that even works offline.", "description": "Python is quickly becoming my favourite web programming language while HTML and PWAs are becoming my favourite way of distributing Python applications. Historically, a lot of the amateur balloon tooling has been based around compiling C apps, piping a bunch of binaries into each other, and hoping for the best. More recently, Project Horus has been moving to using Python to orchestrate the applications and in some places building Python libraries to interface with the C code.\n\nWhat started as a joking \"what if\" turned into an entirely usable web application. First, harnessing the Python CFFI library to make Python modules for the C apps. Then by using Pyodide to bring these into WebAssembly, we've been able to get users decoding balloon data in their web browser, without them compiling or installing any apps.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "PYYPRP", "name": "Michaela Wheeler", "avatar": null, "biography": null, "public_name": "Michaela Wheeler", "guid": "633d4c29-60d7-5f65-a019-30a44d5625d2", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/PYYPRP/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DV8XQU/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DV8XQU/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "bc00a67f-3e42-582a-abd7-605fb1a91aac", "code": "YSJJ9C", "id": 75478, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T17:20:00+10:00", "start": "17:20", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75478-scientific-python-track-closing", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YSJJ9C/", "title": "Scientific Python Track Closing", "subtitle": "", "track": "Scientific Python", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Thanks for coming to the Scientific Python track!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HUN8CD", "name": "Genevieve Buckley", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HUN8CD_GHHMUg1.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Genevieve Buckley", "guid": "0a12f230-ee52-5dfa-b825-c2884d382536", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HUN8CD/"}, {"code": "EQJWS9", "name": "Kai Striega", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/EQJWS9_ypisb80.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Kai Striega", "guid": "f37116a1-3af9-5e16-a142-ef2934478d53", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/EQJWS9/"}, {"code": "GSGFY3", "name": "Charles Turner", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/GSGFY3_LGMwYG0.webp", "biography": null, "public_name": "Charles Turner", "guid": "328e760b-87ac-56ff-824e-b56b54bffa01", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/GSGFY3/"}, {"code": "TASC8P", "name": "Jo Basevi", "avatar": null, "biography": null, "public_name": "Jo Basevi", "guid": "89c52e7c-bfdc-5221-8371-7ac0d26cbbce", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/TASC8P/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YSJJ9C/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YSJJ9C/", "attachments": []}], "Ballroom 1": [{"guid": "fd420a2f-a1f0-5b54-bcb2-b2c38fe6dad0", "code": "QVEDFH", "id": 75479, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T09:00:00+10:00", "start": "09:00", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75479-data-ai-track-opening", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/QVEDFH/", "title": "Data & AI Track Opening", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "The Data & AI specialist track is all about the technology, skills, and practices that engineers, data scientists, and researchers need when building effective and reliable solutions that involve data and leverage different flavours of machine learning and automation. We\u2019re excited to hear talks that cover a wide range of topics relating to data science, data engineering, ML engineering, and modern artificial intelligence.", "description": "During the track opening we\u2019ll cover some important details about PyCon AU and the specialist track day.\n\n* Housekeeping and important need to know\n* Quick introduction to our speakers & sessions for the specialist track\n\nWe run a friendly and informal culture here at Data & AI, so sit back, relax, and kick off the day with that last minute coffee. We\u2019re looking forward to a day full of exciting and enthralling talks ahead.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "N3NQGU", "name": "Nic Crouch", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/N3NQGU_yrvjpUz.webp", "biography": "Nic is a Senior Performance Engineer in Snowflake's Applied Performance Group, working with product engineering teams to identify and implement performance improvements to real-world customer use cases. He specialises in Snowpark, which brings Python and other non-SQL languages to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.\n\nPrior to his work with Snowflake's engineering team, he has over 10 years of experience in data engineering and analytics, primarily using Python and SQL. \n\nNic was the Sponsorships Lead for PyCon AU '23 and '24, and this year is co-lead of the Data & AI Specialist Track. You might know him as \"the jacket\".", "public_name": "Nic Crouch", "guid": "b4de58e8-7c77-5e40-8b8c-c036f46cfe4a", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/N3NQGU/"}, {"code": "PB9BKD", "name": "Jack Skinner", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/PB9BKD_MVrZUtt.webp", "biography": "Jack is a consultant CTO For Hire, specialising in all things web and APIs. He consults to small and growing software companies on patterns and practices for scaling teams and technology.  He\u2019s spent the past decade growing technical communities as a speaker, organiser, facilitator and coach.\n\nJack has worn several hats at PyCon AU over the years, and one of those in 2025 is co-lead of the Data & AI Specialist Track. You might know him as \"the hair\".", "public_name": "Jack Skinner", "guid": "1c79b2b8-9027-53f3-b76f-fb99766ff289", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/PB9BKD/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/QVEDFH/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/QVEDFH/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "8050682c-96c7-573b-bc1d-d6038f0bda9c", "code": "ECVWJU", "id": 73356, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T09:20:00+10:00", "start": "09:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73356-life-beyond-pandas-workflows-with-duckdb-daft-polars-and-datafusion", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ECVWJU/", "title": "Life Beyond Pandas: Workflows with DuckDB, Daft, Polars, and Datafusion", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "In this talk, we\u2019ll explore four modern data engines ; Daft, DuckDB, Polars, and DataFusion, that offer varying levels of out-of-core execution. These engines allow you to work with datasets larger than memory without the need to rewrite everything for a distributed system.\n\nThey\u2019re fast, expressive, and, above all, Pythonic\u2014though SQL support might still be the deciding factor for many workflows.\n\nRather than comparing which engine is best (they\u2019re all open source, and good ideas tend to spread quickly), this talk will highlight exciting recent developments. We\u2019ll showcase, for example, how one workload saw a 2\u00d7 performance boost in under a year, and how open table formats are bringing cloud data warehouse capabilities to local Python workflows.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "DHTAY8", "name": "Mimoune DJOUALLAH", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/DHTAY8_e2kJCJr.webp", "biography": "Mimoune \"Mim\" Djouallah, a former Construction Planner, has been a member of the Microsoft Fabric CAT team since December 2023. Holding a BSc in Civil Engineering, he's been deeply involved with the Power BI stack since 2016. An early adopter of Fabric, Mim actively blogs about Python notebooks, GIS, and various data engines that integrate with Onelake.", "public_name": "Mimoune DJOUALLAH", "guid": "3aba59d5-9889-5b6b-978d-6faf2846e550", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/DHTAY8/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ECVWJU/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ECVWJU/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "dd279523-b2d2-57fd-a861-37995255b1be", "code": "3JMK73", "id": 72732, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T10:00:00+10:00", "start": "10:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72732-the-duck-and-the-dataframe-a-data-engineer-s-journey-with-duckdb", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3JMK73/", "title": "The Duck and the DataFrame: A Data Engineer\u2019s Journey with DuckDB", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "I\u2019ve used pandas for years, but as my data grew, my local workflows started to slow down. Joins got sluggish, memory errors showed up, and simple tasks became harder to manage. That\u2019s when I found DuckDB, a fast, in-process SQL engine that brought the speed and flexibility I was missing.\n\nThis talk isn\u2019t about replacing pandas. It\u2019s about knowing when to reach for something different. I\u2019ll share how DuckDB helped streamline my workflow, with real examples, side-by-side comparisons, and a quick intro to DuckLake, a SQL-based Lakehouse format that fits naturally into modern Python analytics.", "description": "This talk picks up where that shift began. I\u2019ll walk through the challenges I hit with pandas and how DuckDB gradually became a core part of my workflow. We\u2019ll explore how it handles real data tasks, complements existing tools, and helps simplify analysis. You\u2019ll also see how local-first tools like DuckDB and DuckLake can streamline data work without needing extra infrastructure.\n\nBy the end of the session, you\u2019ll:\n- Recognize where pandas starts to struggle and why it\u2019s okay to want more\n- See how DuckDB can supercharge your workflow without changing everything\n- Leave with real-world tips for faster analytics with no cluster required", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "MNFLRN", "name": "Ankur Jain", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/MNFLRN_NWBkWfn.webp", "biography": "Ankur is a Senior Data & Cloud Engineer at Innablr, working at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and modern data platforms. Based in Melbourne, he helps teams design efficient pipelines and scale analytics using tools like DuckDB, Databricks, and dbt.\n\nOutside of work, he\u2019s an anime nerd and a firm believer that ducks are objectively the coolest animals. Ankur thinks good tooling should feel like magic, bad tooling should be deleted, and Jupyter notebooks should come with a warning label.", "public_name": "Ankur Jain", "guid": "9270133a-b493-59b0-af81-2bdf9b3229d4", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/MNFLRN/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3JMK73/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3JMK73/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a90deba1-aa56-5c4f-8f14-7c3c3c29bdee", "code": "BMHAZA", "id": 73357, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T11:00:00+10:00", "start": "11:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73357-a-case-study-on-building-our-first-llm-feature-how-to-balance-speed-quality", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/BMHAZA/", "title": "A case study on building our first LLM feature \u2013 how to balance speed + quality", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "We\u2019re all building AI features now \u2013 or will be soon. But working with teams who are building with LLMs brings its own challenges \u2013 namely: How can we bring in the latest research, consider AI ethics, and consider the cost of different models without blowing past delivery dates. Not to mention making sure that the features we build will be stable, reliable, and maintainable in the future. \n\nIn this talk, I\u2019ll share a case study of how we built our first LLM feature. In 1 month, we did everything from running experiments, developing evaluation methods, assessing the risks, and considering ethical concerns to build the feature. Specifically, over this period we did a literature review, consultation with academic experts, data labelling, model experimentation, a cost assessment, and finally, all the ML engineering to launch it into production. The outcome: <1% extreme misclassification and zero hallucinations.\n\nIn this talk, we\u2019ll share our approach to building LLM features \u2013 how we partnered with academia (without being delayed by their timelines), what tooling we used, and how we made the cost and money tradeoffs to keep business stakeholders happy. As one example, we\u2019ll share how important evaluation data was for building our features, because it helped us improve our definitions and revealed gender differences in how people perceive feedback. We\u2019ll share the principles we used when balancing rigorous, robust practices with cost and timeline considerations. Finally, we\u2019ll share which frameworks actually helped us make the right calls, avoid expensive do-overs, and navigate the AI ethics side as well.\nYou'll walk away with hands-on tools for leading the AI conversation within your own organization \u2013 including how to identify ethical issues early, address them efficiently, and still deliver on time and on budget.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HZKXKG", "name": "Vivek Katial", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HZKXKG_83hwGWv.webp", "biography": "Vivek is Lead Data Scientist and a founding team member at Multitudes, where he drives & executes the company's Data and AI strategy. He is passionate about building data products that create positive change. As co-founder and Executive Director of The Good Data Institute (GDI), he's led an Australian NGO that helps charities build data capabilities, supporting over 65 organisations on more than 80 projects globally. In his spare time, Vivek loves to jam on data science, ML and ethics. He's recently spoken at Tech 4 Social Justice, OPTIMA-CON, and LAST Conf, and he also holds a PhD in Optimisation via Quantum Computing.", "public_name": "Vivek Katial", "guid": "59f72106-4c2b-598d-929a-91c32e52f168", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HZKXKG/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/BMHAZA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/BMHAZA/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "d4e8039f-5a6a-553c-bcc7-8f1a5dd16fd2", "code": "NXFGLG", "id": 74122, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T11:40:00+10:00", "start": "11:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74122-needle-in-the-haystack-applied-ml-for-inspections-of-power-infrastructure", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/NXFGLG/", "title": "Needle in the Haystack: Applied ML for Inspections of Power Infrastructure", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "What do you do when you\u2019ve captured millions of aerial images across thousands of kilometers and want to find the handful of problems that could take out a state\u2019s power supply? This talk explores how we built a full-stack system \u2014 combining machine learning, Django, and self hosted infrastructure \u2014 to identify critical anomalies in Australia\u2019s electricity transmission network. \n\nYou\u2019ll learn how we perform image processing at scale, reducing an overwhelming data problem into a handful of insights that matter and how we present these results to users.", "description": "Many of Australia\u2019s overhead transmission lines are aging, and targeted maintenance is crucial to prevent failures. At scale, this means analysing millions of high-resolution images to detect rare and subtle issues. This talk walks through a real-world application that uses Machine Learning and Django to turn this data problem into something manageable, finding the needles in the haystack.\n\nWe\u2019ll look at:\n\t\u2022\tHow aerial inspection imagery is processed using machine learning pipelines\n\t\u2022\tHow we host and manage large volumes of images (~400 TB)\n\t\u2022\tThe architecture of a Django-based web portal that turns model outputs into customer-facing insights\n\t\u2022\tHow we render dashboards, data tables, and generate structured PDF reports\n\t\u2022\tLessons learned from managing complexity, performance, and usability at scale\n\nThis is a practical and technical talk, best suited to software engineers, data practitioners, and ML engineers interested in building end-to-end systems using Python.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "ZYNFEG", "name": "Boaz Ash", "avatar": null, "biography": "Boaz is a software engineer with an interest in applied machine learning. He has previously worked in control systems, working on gimbals and self-balancing bicycles. He loves Python and working with Django.", "public_name": "Boaz Ash", "guid": "46fb6b1c-6d50-5a6f-ac6e-0aeebbeaf20c", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/ZYNFEG/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/NXFGLG/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/NXFGLG/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "8e679323-b4bb-593a-8cf8-23dd352fc07d", "code": "8PM8L9", "id": 73999, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T12:20:00+10:00", "start": "12:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73999-hierarchical-clustering-finding-the-awkward-reunions", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8PM8L9/", "title": "Hierarchical Clustering: Finding the awkward reunions", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Networks have in recent years emerged as an invaluable tool for describing and quantifying complex systems in many branches of science. Recent studies suggest that networks often exhibit hierarchical organization, where vertices divide into groups that further subdivide into groups of groups, and so forth over multiple scales. Here we present a general technique for inferring hierarchical structure from network data and demonstrate that the existence of hierarchy can simultaneously explain and quantitatively reproduce many commonly observed topological properties of networks, such as right-skewed degree distributions, high clustering coefficients, and short path lengths. We further show that knowledge of hierarchical structure can be used to predict missing connections in partially known networks with high accuracy, and for more general network structures than competing techniques. Taken together, our results suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.", "description": "A great deal of recent work has been devoted to the study of clustering and community structure in networks. Hierarchical structure goes beyond simple clustering, however, by explicitly including organization at all scales in a network simultaneously. Conventionally, hierarchical structure is represented by a tree or dendrogram in which closely related pairs of vertices have lowest common ancestors that are lower in the tree than those of more distantly related pairs\u2014. We expect the probability of a connection between two vertices to depend on their degree of relatedness. Structure of this type can be modeled mathematically using a probabilistic approach in which we endow each internal node r of the dendrogram with a probability pr and then connect each pair of vertices for whom r is the lowest common ancestor independently with probability pr  This model, which we call a hierarchical random graph, is similar in spirit (although different in realization) to the tree-based models used in some studies of network search and navigation . Like most work on community structure, it assumes that communities at each level of organization are disjoint. Overlapping communities have occasionally been studied  and could be represented using a more elaborate probabilistic model, but as we discuss below the present model already captures many of the structural features of interest.\n\n Given a dendrogram and a set of probabilities pr, the hierarchical random graph model allows us to generate artificial networks with a specified hierarchical structure, a procedure that might be useful in certain situations. Our goal here, however, is a different one. We would like to detect and analyze the hierarchical structure, if any, of networks in the real world. We accomplish this by fitting the hierarchical model to observed network data using the tools of statistical inference, combining a maximum likelihood approach  with a Monte Carlo 2 sampling algorithm on the space of all possible dendrograms. This technique allows us to sample hierarchical random graphs with probability proportional to the likelihood that they generate the observed network. To obtain the results described below we combine information from a large number of such samples, each of which is a reasonably likely model of the data.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "8JDAFU", "name": "Neha", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/8JDAFU_KjMLCeg.webp", "biography": "I am Neha, a passionate PhD researcher currently pursuing my doctorate in Precision Medicine in Oncology and Complex Disorders at the University of Newcastle. As an international student from India, I am deeply invested in exploring the intersection of machine learning, oncology, and complex disorders to advance personalized healthcare solutions.\n\nWith over 8 years of experience in the IT sector, I have worked with esteemed companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and HCL Technologies, where I honed my skills in IT infrastructure, data analytics, and machine learning. My professional journey has provided me with a solid foundation in leveraging technology to solve real-world challenges.\n\nIn addition to my research, I am proud to have received fellowships from the Indian government as a Women Scientist and CMIE Fellow, recognizing my contributions to both technology and scientific research. Outside of academia, I work part-time with organizations like Junior Engineers and Code Camp, where I teach coding to students in schools across Australia, inspiring the next generation of tech leaders.\n\nI am deeply committed to empowering women in technology and STEM education, particularly in the areas of machine learning and data science, and I actively strive to make a difference through mentorship and community outreach. My work in precision medicine aims to bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and clinical application, and I am excited to contribute to advancements in oncology and complex disorder research.", "public_name": "Neha", "guid": "24373bba-d01d-5994-b94f-a6cf5fa2c996", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/8JDAFU/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8PM8L9/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8PM8L9/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "788b6586-a214-5b70-a5ea-4d8061ff3706", "code": "9CB8US", "id": 73036, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T13:50:00+10:00", "start": "13:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73036-taking-back-the-streets-navilens-and-the-fight-for-open-navigation", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/9CB8US/", "title": "Taking Back the Streets: NaviLens and the Fight for Open Navigation", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "NaviLens is a for-profit service that provides navigational data resolution, based on ddTags placed around the environment. The tags are designed so that they can be quickly scanned with a mobile device while at a much greater distance than QR codes or while moving. The main use case of NaviLens is to improve navigation for those with visual impairments. \n\nThis system is now in use on trams in Melbourne, Australia. I argue that while this is a step in the right direction for accessibility, it also grants monopolistic control of the \u201cphysical namespace\u201d to a profit seeking entity.\n\nThis talk will explore the technology behind Navilens and the social issues around its adoption. I'll demonstrate a path to a free and open alternative using Python and the community dataset that was started during PyCon AU 2024.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "VXBVLZ", "name": "Stephen Tierney", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/VXBVLZ_VvqSPiv.webp", "biography": "Stephen is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney in the fields of Statistics, Data Science and Machine Learning.", "public_name": "Stephen Tierney", "guid": "74082cfa-9164-5247-89f8-426f072e85f7", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/VXBVLZ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/9CB8US/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/9CB8US/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "f2ac98e6-e5de-5fdf-bea7-b1820ffa159a", "code": "E3KDGD", "id": 74210, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T14:30:00+10:00", "start": "14:30", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74210-beyond-vibes-building-evals-for-generative-ai", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/E3KDGD/", "title": "Beyond Vibes: Building Evals for Generative AI", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "AI can draft product descriptions, handle customer support, and create impressive summaries, yet in production we still struggle to answer a basic question: is this output measurably any good? Traditional accuracy metrics fall short when your LLM needs to write _engaging_ content or your image model is expected to produce _aesthetic_ results. And checking outputs manually? That doesn't scale. \n\nThis talk is a friendly introduction to building evaluation loops that work for GenAI models. We'll explore everyday examples such as grading LLM summaries and judging whether chatbot responses help or frustrate, showing why deterministic metrics fail for open-ended outputs. From there, we outline a three-part approach combining simple metrics for quick first-pass evaluation, human-preference samples for nuance, and repeatable tests that run with every model change.\n\nTo ground these ideas, we'll walk through a real project that turns elevation data into high-quality Swiss-style relief maps. The domain may seem niche, but the lessons learned of balancing automation with human judgment, tracking non-deterministic outputs, and iterating quickly without drowning in data, apply to every project. You\u2019ll leave with a mental checklist and a starter toolkit for proving that your GenAI output is getting better, not just different.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "BSSLH3", "name": "Dilpreet Singh", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/BSSLH3_40kHl8u.webp", "biography": "I'm a Lead ML Engineer with over 10 years of experience in building systems across startups, research, and public sector work. I run a consultancy called Loom Labs, helping teams turn AI ideas into working products.", "public_name": "Dilpreet Singh", "guid": "3200a80f-bc05-5f10-af6e-6ead68348540", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/BSSLH3/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/E3KDGD/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/E3KDGD/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "125fa56f-9e30-52f0-ad55-776461c5787d", "code": "CLKYZC", "id": 73291, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T15:10:00+10:00", "start": "15:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73291-what-s-in-a-name-fuzzy-matching-techniques-for-proper-nouns", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/CLKYZC/", "title": "What\u2019s in a Name? \u2013 Fuzzy Matching Techniques for Proper Nouns", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Free form data entry is a realm that is simply begging for data that you\u2019ll never be able to crossmatch. Whether it\u2019s typos, using obscure initialisations, or deciding that \u201cname\u201d sometimes means \u201cfull name\u201d and sometimes means \u201cnickname of the day\u201d your data is never going to be a perfect match. And let me tell you, those problems are multiplied if some of that data is entered by children!\n\nI\u2019ll take you through the techniques from edit distance to generative AI (and combinations thereof) I have used to match up proper nouns ranging from people\u2019s names to schools and see how some techniques work for people and not for places, and vice versa. I\u2019ll show you how it is working in practice to help track event participants over the course of a single workshop day and ultimately over the course of their journey through our community.", "description": "I have a problem. I have masses of free-form textual data that captures the participation of members of a community in our events over many, many years! This data includes things like student names, school names, and other proper nouns \u2013 things that might have many interpretations of a \u201ccorrect\u201d answer or \u201cgood enough\u201d answer, and things that kids and their parents certainly have different thoughts on. \n\nI needed to get to the bottom of fuzzy matching of proper nouns and to work out what combinations of different algorithmic and AI techniques worked best for different types of nouns. So come with me on this journey of typos, nicknames, and how this non-Sydney-schooled Pythonista was able to figure out which schools \u201cSpats\u201d, \u201cTech\u201d, and \u201cCathedral\u201d actually were.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "TQKR8P", "name": "Renee Noble", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/TQKR8P_rkZ4sJR.webp", "biography": "Renee Noble spends her time bringing together tech, teaching, and community in as many ways as possible.\n\nAs a Cloud Developer Advocate on the Python Advocacy team at Microsoft, she spends her time teaching the community through global events, creating Python learning resources, and local workshops for students and professionals. Renee is also the CEO and Co-Founder or Tech Inclusion, best known for Girls\u2019 Programming Network workshops that run around Australia. On top of this, Renee started her own Business, ConnectEd Code, bringing tech education opportunities to schools\n\nWell known for her work in tech education and the advancement of women, Renee was most recently awarded as Champion of Change 2025 by Women Leading Tech.", "public_name": "Renee Noble", "guid": "0abbf5e8-7d2a-5b2b-8ebb-173c7014bf05", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/TQKR8P/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/CLKYZC/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/CLKYZC/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "1e8144d7-1efc-58cd-ab98-6536f1fcfc68", "code": "WUSRTK", "id": 73397, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/WUSRTK/1740021206790_P02hn7X.jpeg", "date": "2025-09-12T16:10:00+10:00", "start": "16:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73397-scaling-security-anomaly-detection-in-enterprise-knowledge-base-with-dask", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/WUSRTK/", "title": "Scaling Security Anomaly Detection in Enterprise Knowledge Base with Dask", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Detecting misconfigured permissions and sensitive data leaks across enterprise knowledge base platforms like SharePoint, Confluence and Google Drive demands analysing massive volumes of document metadata - permissions, user identities, groups, and organisational structures. This challenge rapidly becomes overwhelming at scale due to the terabytes of data involved.\n\nIn this talk, I'll share our practical experience building a data pipeline in Python to tackle anomaly detection at scale using Dask, a flexible, open-source Python library that enables parallel computing and scales data processing workloads seamlessly from a single machine to distributed clusters.\nOur pipeline ingests raw metadata from knowledge base APIs, transforms it into canonical CSV datasets, and applies a combination of unsupervised machine learning techniques (e.g. NMF/SVD), rule-based logic, and sensitive-data-pattern detection. Results are translated back into structured formats (jsonl), to publish actionable security alerts for our clients.\n\nDask\u2019s familiar pythonic API let us scale beyond single-node limits and handle large, I/O-heavy computations. We'll highlight some key Dask concepts we relied on.\n\nHowever, scaling up wasn\u2019t without challenges: we faced numerous performance bottlenecks and memory management issues, including out-of-memory (OOM) errors and task graph stalls.\nI\u2019ll walk through the key strategies we developed to overcome these challenges, including custom loaders to better manage memory usage and mitigate issues caused by handling large volumes of files. We\u2019ll cover how we used strategic repartitioning to rebalance workloads, and selectively persisted intermediate results to avoid redundant computation. Finally, we\u2019ll explore how the Dask dashboard helped us pinpoint bottlenecks and debug stalled graphs in production.\n\nAttendees will leave with practical insights and effective debugging techniques they can apply to scale their own data workloads with Dask.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "AU8GQD", "name": "Isabelle De Backer", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/AU8GQD_zzuGiEk.webp", "biography": "Isabelle De Backer is a software engineer and technologist with a background in complex systems and a passion for new technologies and AI. She enjoys hands-on experimentation, building practical solutions across cloud platforms and data-driven applications. Isabelle is a Gen AI Builders Club Fellow and is always exploring the next innovation to experiment with.", "public_name": "Isabelle De Backer", "guid": "b600eee4-2910-563f-81b8-d8d1444cc37e", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/AU8GQD/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/WUSRTK/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/WUSRTK/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "38efcc1c-50aa-532a-874d-04f8158f7318", "code": "YLXPBP", "id": 74127, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T16:50:00+10:00", "start": "16:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74127-ai-for-good-using-responsible-ai-to-drive-social-impact-and-inclusion", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YLXPBP/", "title": "AI for Good: Using Responsible AI to Drive Social Impact and Inclusion", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "This talk explores how the social sector can leverage responsible GenAI and agentic AI to expand equity, inclusion, and impact\u2014while staying true to human dignity and ethical principles.", "description": "The rise of generative AI and agentic AI presents a game-changing opportunity for the social sector\u2014from helping caseworkers triage clients more effectively, to offering personalized multilingual support, to freeing staff from admin burdens so they can focus on empathy and care.\n\nBut these tools are powerful, and must be used responsibly. In this talk, I\u2019ll explore how AI can advance equity and access without compromising trust, safety, or human dignity. I\u2019ll cover real-world, hands-on use cases from across housing, disability support, crisis response, and financial inclusion\u2014many with direct relevance to Australia and New Zealand.\n\nTopics include:\n\n - Using GenAI for form simplification, translation, and personalized communication\n\n - Building ethical AI agents to support frontline staff and automate routine tasks\n\n - Ensuring bias mitigation, data privacy, and accessibility in AI design\n\n - Keeping humans in the loop\u2014augmenting, not replacing social care\n\nAttendees will walk away with inspiration, practical ideas, and a mental roadmap for adopting AI ethically in service of social good.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "FN7NA8", "name": "Dr.Swapnilsony Singh", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/FN7NA8_mWYef9H.webp", "biography": "Dr. Swapnilsony Singh (She/Her) is a visionary Social and Economic Impact leader, currently serving as Manager \u2013 Client Value and Optimisation at Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand. With a PhD in Microfinance and over a decade of experience spanning financial inclusion, sustainability, and circular economy, she is dedicated to leveraging technology and human-centered innovation to create lasting social impact.\n\nAt Good Shepherd ANZ, Dr. Singh leads the design and delivery of AI-powered systems for social inclusion, including the award-winning AnswerSmart\u2014an intelligent agent built to support frontline workers through real-time, equitable knowledge access. Her work blends agentic AI, digital transformation, and service design to support vulnerable communities more efficiently and ethically.\n\nPreviously, Dr. Singh served as Global Head of People Function & Strategy at Decision Minds and as CEO & Co-Founder of Consulytics, where she built ezInclusion, a pioneering analytics platform for microfinance institutions. She has also contributed to global social good initiatives through the United Nations Volunteers, with a focus on sustainable energy and economic empowerment.\n\nRecognized for her thought leadership in responsible innovation, she is passionate about building solutions that respect human dignity, empower women and migrants, and bridge the digital divide. Her work is driven by the belief that technology should amplify compassion, not replace it.", "public_name": "Dr.Swapnilsony Singh", "guid": "30c3e2b3-de1e-5b5c-b0f7-647de93cead3", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/FN7NA8/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YLXPBP/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YLXPBP/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "c8773c88-762f-5e98-8bdf-55c9369e8f27", "code": "ZLJL8G", "id": 75480, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-12T17:20:00+10:00", "start": "17:20", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75480-data-ai-track-closing", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZLJL8G/", "title": "Data & AI Track Closing", "subtitle": "", "track": "Data & AI", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "The Data & AI specialist track is all about the technology, skills, and practices that engineers, data scientists, and researchers need when building effective and reliable solutions that involve data and leverage different flavours of machine learning and automation. We\u2019re excited to hear talks that cover a wide range of topics relating to data science, data engineering, ML engineering, and modern artificial intelligence.", "description": "At the end of the day we\u2019ll recap our highlights, insights and key takeaways. The track \u2018close\u2019 helps us tie a ribbon around our full program of talks. We\u2019ll see where the conversation takes us, and will conclude at or before 5:40pm.\n\nBut wait! As one door closes (on the specialist tracks) another one opens! Stick around at PyCon AU for the main conference on Saturday and Sunday!", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "N3NQGU", "name": "Nic Crouch", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/N3NQGU_yrvjpUz.webp", "biography": "Nic is a Senior Performance Engineer in Snowflake's Applied Performance Group, working with product engineering teams to identify and implement performance improvements to real-world customer use cases. He specialises in Snowpark, which brings Python and other non-SQL languages to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.\n\nPrior to his work with Snowflake's engineering team, he has over 10 years of experience in data engineering and analytics, primarily using Python and SQL. \n\nNic was the Sponsorships Lead for PyCon AU '23 and '24, and this year is co-lead of the Data & AI Specialist Track. You might know him as \"the jacket\".", "public_name": "Nic Crouch", "guid": "b4de58e8-7c77-5e40-8b8c-c036f46cfe4a", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/N3NQGU/"}, {"code": "PB9BKD", "name": "Jack Skinner", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/PB9BKD_MVrZUtt.webp", "biography": "Jack is a consultant CTO For Hire, specialising in all things web and APIs. He consults to small and growing software companies on patterns and practices for scaling teams and technology.  He\u2019s spent the past decade growing technical communities as a speaker, organiser, facilitator and coach.\n\nJack has worn several hats at PyCon AU over the years, and one of those in 2025 is co-lead of the Data & AI Specialist Track. You might know him as \"the hair\".", "public_name": "Jack Skinner", "guid": "1c79b2b8-9027-53f3-b76f-fb99766ff289", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/PB9BKD/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZLJL8G/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZLJL8G/", "attachments": []}]}}, {"index": 2, "date": "2025-09-13", "day_start": "2025-09-13T04:00:00+10:00", "day_end": "2025-09-14T03:59:00+10:00", "rooms": {"Ballroom 3": [{"guid": "d61352b5-1bdc-5c0c-84ed-e228a3b737b7", "code": "MXPDUX", "id": 75487, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T08:30:00+10:00", "start": "08:30", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75487-first-timers-session", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MXPDUX/", "title": "First Timers Session", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Everything you need to know if you've never been to a PyCon AU before.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "JYUNEP", "name": "Peter Hall", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/JYUNEP_g0gc2ko.webp", "biography": "Peter is the Conference Director of PyCon AU. He has been a software professional for 20 years and in that time has written software that allowed people with vision impairments to vote secretly, ensured a steady supply of croissants, and used lasers to send people places with chainsaws, among many other projects. His professional experience is mostly with Java and Go and he uses Python for personal projects.", "public_name": "Peter Hall", "guid": "345872e4-ded6-50a3-aae9-df915d96430d", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/JYUNEP/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MXPDUX/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MXPDUX/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "4ba4acfb-0474-5d4a-a980-f431870d23b9", "code": "W7W3VR", "id": 75483, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T09:00:00+10:00", "start": "09:00", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75483-conference-opening-saturday", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/W7W3VR/", "title": "Conference Opening (Saturday)", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Welcome to Saturday!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "JYUNEP", "name": "Peter Hall", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/JYUNEP_g0gc2ko.webp", "biography": "Peter is the Conference Director of PyCon AU. He has been a software professional for 20 years and in that time has written software that allowed people with vision impairments to vote secretly, ensured a steady supply of croissants, and used lasers to send people places with chainsaws, among many other projects. His professional experience is mostly with Java and Go and he uses Python for personal projects.", "public_name": "Peter Hall", "guid": "345872e4-ded6-50a3-aae9-df915d96430d", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/JYUNEP/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/W7W3VR/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/W7W3VR/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "fab3198c-1e6b-5e56-b1a3-ef85b052bdeb", "code": "ZKJQAP", "id": 75744, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T09:20:00+10:00", "start": "09:20", "duration": "00:50", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75744-ethics-in-ai-building-fair-and-just-intelligence-systems", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZKJQAP/", "title": "Ethics in AI: Building Fair and Just Intelligence Systems", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Keynote", "language": "en", "abstract": "AI systems increasingly make life-changing decisions about healthcare, employment, criminal justice, and financial services, but often perpetuate systemic discrimination against marginalized communities. Through real-world examples this talk examines how bias enters AI through biased data, algorithmic design, and deployment feedback loops. Attendees will learn a practical three-phase framework for building anti-oppressive AI systems and leave with concrete tools for identifying bias, implementing fairness metrics, and advocating for ethical AI practices in their organizations.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "BCDL99", "name": "Dr. Arwen Griffioen", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/BCDL99_Z1c6AXx.webp", "biography": "I am a machine learning leader, technologist, and mum who moved from Oregon to Melbourne in 2010 and never looked back. I started in academia with a PhD in ML (plus a side of ecoinformatics), wrangled data for environmental science, then shifted to industry for real-world impact.\n\nI\u2019ve led teams at Zendesk (hi, Answer Bot \ud83d\udc4b), Culture Amp and now I\u2019m Head of AI at Hatch, where we\u2019re using data and design to help people find work they actually want. My work lives at the intersection of ethics, equity, and AI\u2014and I care deeply about the long-term social impact of the systems we build. It's never \u201cjust tech\u201d\u2014it\u2019s about power, access, and the messy human stuff behind the algorithms.\n\nAlong the way, I\u2019ve juggled research, parenting, imposter syndrome, and the occasional chicken. What keeps me grounded? Gardening, gaming, and mentoring folks who don\u2019t always see themselves in tech\u2014yet.", "public_name": "Dr. Arwen Griffioen", "guid": "56dc74e3-cfb1-509b-b145-9c3a22e8d84c", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/BCDL99/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZKJQAP/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZKJQAP/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "4b450b59-2065-5780-8aaa-7dc11ed9afd9", "code": "BUUL8V", "id": 73176, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T10:40:00+10:00", "start": "10:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73176-the-primordial-code", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/BUUL8V/", "title": "The Primordial Code", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "You, by which I mean all the Eukaryotes in the audience, are running on an operating system a couple of billion years old. Every cell in your body is full of primordial libraries, monkey patches, self-modifying code, viral hacks and even containers embedding a different operating system.  This talk is all about the freakish parallels between cell biology and computer architecture, and will leave you less confident than ever that your seemingly complex life is anything more than a molecule's way of making more molecules.", "description": "A fun talk intended to get the audience thinking about what programmers can learn from biology and biologists can learn from computer science, and to remind you that no matter how weird technology gets, nature has us all beat.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "JEXXZQ", "name": "Nick Moore", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/JEXXZQ_xlviwdZ.webp", "biography": "Nick has attended, presented and volunteered at multiple PyConsAU, as well as LinuxConfAU, BuzzConf, OSDC and various meetups.  His consulting career has taken him to many industries and open source projects, and recently he's been developing tools for use in bioinformatics, supporting research into cancer and genetic diseases.\n\nhttps://nick.zoic.org/", "public_name": "Nick Moore", "guid": "4829b977-04b7-55e7-b70b-67c322949a08", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/JEXXZQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/BUUL8V/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/BUUL8V/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "d4d03861-63d6-59d4-b052-3f8589b21bc7", "code": "LASUCM", "id": 74234, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/LASUCM/python_conductor_S1POjQP.png", "date": "2025-09-13T11:20:00+10:00", "start": "11:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74234-building-with-multiple-languages-a-python-first-approach", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LASUCM/", "title": "Building with Multiple Languages: A Python-First Approach", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Python is slow for certain tasks. That's not news. The usual response is to either accept the performance hit or rewrite everything in another language. There's a third option: use Python as the control centre and delegate specific tasks to languages that excel at them.\n\nThis talk provides practical patterns for building polyglot applications. I'll show JavaScript handling real-time web interfaces, Rust rendering data visualisations, and C++ accelerating numerical computations\u2014all orchestrated by Python. Through different short live demos and visual explanations, you'll learn when and how to integrate other languages without sacrificing Python's strengths, resulting in applications that are both fast and maintainable.", "description": "This talk presents three real-world scenarios where Python acts as the glue between specialized languages. We'll start by walking through the architecture of a data dashboard where JavaScript manages UI interactions while Python handles backend analytics. Using WebSockets and FastAPI, you'll see how to create responsive interfaces that leverage Python's data science libraries without the lag. Next, we'll generate scientific visualizations that render large datasets in real-time, with Rust handling the rendering pipeline while Python manages data processing and provides a familiar API. The demo shows interactive plots processing a significant amount of data points smoothly. Finally, we'll accelerate a climate model's core calculations by 100x, where C++ handles the intensive matrix operations while Python manages data I/O, preprocessing, and visualization. Modern tools like pybind11 make these integrations straightforward.\n\nThe presentation uses animated diagrams to show data flow between languages and includes live demonstrations of each integration. You'll learn to identify performance bottlenecks that justify polyglot solutions, understand modern binding tools (PyO3 for Rust, pybind11 for C++, WebSockets for JavaScript), and apply architectural patterns that keep complexity manageable. All examples come from production systems I've built or worked on. Attendees will leave with working code examples and a blueprint for building polyglot applications that enhance rather than complicate their Python projects.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "VCBQLA", "name": "Ramon Perez", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/VCBQLA_LMYESGD.webp", "biography": "Ramon is a research engineer and educator working at the intersection of AI and robotics at Menlo Labs. Currently, he is helping build the brain of a robot, a C++ tool to help bring different AI models into robots. Before that, he worked as a product developer and researcher, creating custom data tools, running workshops and developing training programs for clients in various industries. He has participated in several conferences and meetup events including PyCon, SciPy, PyData, MLOps World, and ODSC. In his free time, you will most likely find him traveling to a new place, mountain biking, or both.", "public_name": "Ramon Perez", "guid": "cae14840-7977-5163-8aab-676a3c7b07e0", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/VCBQLA/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LASUCM/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LASUCM/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "21bebc66-9e71-5007-b530-cb111fb446ad", "code": "SQUT77", "id": 73259, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T12:00:00+10:00", "start": "12:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73259-taking-wheels-mobile", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SQUT77/", "title": "Taking wheels mobile", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "One of the big features added in Python 3.13 is Tier 3 support for iOS and Android as platforms. This means you can now run Python code that uses the standard library on mobile devices without modification. However, most interesting projects also use code from PyPI... so how do you get *that* code to run on iOS and Android? How do you even produce a wheel in the first place?", "description": "In this talk, you'll learn about the eccentricities of iOS and Android as Python platforms, and what is involved in generating Python wheels that can be used for iOS and Android. You'll be introduced to cibuildwheel, a tool that can dramatically simplify the process of building wheels; and how to configure cibuildwheel to build iOS and Android wheels. Lastly, you'll be shown how to add these wheels to your own projects while you wait for official versions to be published.\n\nAlthough this talk is presented primarily for the benefit of people who may want to add iOS and Android Python support to a package, it also serves as an introduction (or refresher on recent changes in standards) to Python packaging for desktop platforms.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "LDFVBH", "name": "Russell Keith-Magee", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/LDFVBH_vINhTd8.webp", "biography": "Dr Russell Keith-Magee is the founder of the BeeWare project, a project developing GUI tools and libraries to support the development of Python software on desktop and mobile platforms. He joined the Django core team in 2006, and was the President of the Django Software Foundation for 5 years. He joined the CPython core team in 2024. He is a frequent speaker at Python and Django conferences around the globe, sharing his experience as a FLOSS developer, community maintainer, and (unsuccessful) startup founder. In his day job, he is a Principal Engineer at Anaconda, working on BeeWare in the OSS team.", "public_name": "Russell Keith-Magee", "guid": "ff535dce-c040-5da4-a097-c95024c4531c", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/LDFVBH/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SQUT77/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SQUT77/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a9087650-1a20-5fa9-89da-28c7f1f386e7", "code": "FBY7ZR", "id": 74150, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T13:30:00+10:00", "start": "13:30", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74150-guardrails-an-alternative-view-of-safely-working-in-python", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FBY7ZR/", "title": "Guardrails: An Alternative View of Safely Working in Python", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Python \u2013 like many languages \u2013 lets you do things that are completely inadvisable. Many of the features that (left unchecked) allow you to do inadvisable things were used to achieve things that have since become necessary and defining features of Python.\n\nPython \u2013 unlike many languages \u2013 discovered that leaving these obvious and necessary features lying around next to inadvisable things was a bad idea, and built guardrails around them.\n\nIn real life, guardrails are structures that make it easier to understand how to be safe in an area where there is otherwise danger. If respected, guardrails make you safer, but unlike walls or fences, guardrails do not block you from danger.\n\nIn Python, features like decorators, context managers, async functions, importlib, and more are all guardrails that let you work with less-safe Python machinery from a much safer distance.\n\nIn this talk, we\u2019re going to explore the idea of guardrails as a design philosophy, and use that to explain Python\u2019s attitude to safely working with the language and its internals.\n\nWe\u2019ll explore features of Python that are guardrails around less-safe features \u2013 what features they replaced, how those features could be used incorrectly, and how the newer features allow you to use Python more safely. As a special treat, you may also get to see how Python lets you abuse these features*.\n\nWe\u2019ll conclude with a discussion of how you can use Python\u2019s guardrail philosophy in your own code.\n\n---\n\n(* SKILLED OPERATOR ON CLOSED CIRCUIT; DO NOT ATTEMPT)", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "QWCHX7", "name": "Christopher Neugebauer", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/QWCHX7_xkYQQCh.webp", "biography": "Christopher Neugebauer is an Australian developer, speaker, and serial community conference organiser, who presently lives in the United States.\n\nHe serves as a Director of the Python Software Foundation, and is co-organiser of the acclaimed North Bay Python conference, a boutique one-track conference run in unusual venues \u2014 include an old vaudeville theatre, and more recently a barn on a farm \u2014 in Petaluma, California.", "public_name": "Christopher Neugebauer", "guid": "a2188a3b-d43b-57cc-bf87-f1d365871d2d", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/QWCHX7/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FBY7ZR/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FBY7ZR/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "fba700c2-d802-5bbd-813b-14b00ba2eda7", "code": "FB7ECA", "id": 73308, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T14:10:00+10:00", "start": "14:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73308-i-learned-everything-about-the-match-statement-so-you-don-t-have-to", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FB7ECA/", "title": "I learned everything about the match statement so you don't have to", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Python has match statements now. What are they? Why are they? How do they work? Discovering the true power of Python's structural pattern matching has made my classes more powerful than ever! Want to learn this power? Then come to my talk! It promises to inform, engage and entertain with real world  worked examples, arcane facts, and interactive questions.", "description": "Most of the Python devs I know just don't get the match statement. They're great at ifs. They know their elses. Surely the match statement is just those but\u2026 rearranged a bit? I thought like this once. But then I saw the light! Have you ever been working in a project with a dozen different classes, each with eighteen different attributes and fifteen different methods? No? Just me? Well you can check all of those in a single match statement, with no ands in sight, and with easy readability! Don't believe me? Come and be amazed! This talk will be accessible to novices and still interesting for the more experienced.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "V8CC7B", "name": "Sam", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/V8CC7B_N481dZu.webp", "biography": "Hi! I'm Sam, a student at UTS doing IT. I've been writing Python about five years fewer than I've been writing English, but it took most of that time to figure out how classes work. I spend most of my free time bouldering, at scouts, tinkering with elderly laptops, and coding python. This is my fourth time speaking at PyconAU, thanks to the student showcase.", "public_name": "Sam", "guid": "cf8b903f-6283-5f40-939e-5673bfcc119f", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/V8CC7B/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FB7ECA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FB7ECA/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "3aee03ae-bce5-5850-9531-c308d87d2f31", "code": "MKRBZA", "id": 73404, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T14:50:00+10:00", "start": "14:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73404-pipe-ifying-python-the-how-and-why-of-interpreter-hacking", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MKRBZA/", "title": "Pipe-ifying Python: The how and why of interpreter hacking", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Have you ever thought about adding a feature to the Python language itself?\n\nIf you have, or just want to learn a bit about how Python works under the hood, we will step through the story of adding a small feature to a fork of Python, learning about compilers and interpreters along the way!", "description": "In languages such as OCaml and Elixir, a pipe operator (`|>`) can be used to thread the return value of a function through to the argument of the next, to reduce nesting and improve readability: it lets you turn `x |> f(a, b)` into `f(a, b, x)`. Frustrated by the lack of such an operator in Python, and armed with some previous experience in compilers, I started a side project to fix the problem myself! \n\nIn this talk I will step through the story of how and why I added this feature to a fork of Python I've nicknamed 'Pypethon'. We will explore some of the internal workings of the Cpython interpreter, focusing on lexing, parsing and the abstract syntax tree. We will also explore why you might want to make changes to the interpreter, the design challenges you can face when adding new language features, as well as potential tradeoffs. No experience in compilers required!", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "U7ZMWY", "name": "Alex Mirrlees-Black", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/U7ZMWY_qzcW8ea.webp", "biography": "Alex is a student at ANU, currently completing her honours in computer science. She has been a long time lover of languages, both for computers and people, and is always willing to share her passion for niche programming language features.\n\nWhen she isn't dreaming of syntax trees and compiler optimisations, Alex enjoys playing the organ, board games, baking and being snobby about tea \u2615.", "public_name": "Alex Mirrlees-Black", "guid": "8eb74b03-74cf-5381-85b9-ba07e35ac73b", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/U7ZMWY/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MKRBZA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MKRBZA/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "ab07096c-18cf-5251-9bd7-58889493a115", "code": "GKUAEL", "id": 75488, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T15:50:00+10:00", "start": "15:50", "duration": "01:00", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75488-lightning-talks-saturday", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GKUAEL/", "title": "Lightning Talks (Saturday)", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Lightning talks", "language": "en", "abstract": "Like regular talks, but shorter! Anything could happen!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GKUAEL/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GKUAEL/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "f502df2e-ed19-5e99-af4b-179570bef094", "code": "PHUBLT", "id": 75484, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T16:50:00+10:00", "start": "16:50", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75484-conference-closing-saturday", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/PHUBLT/", "title": "Conference Closing (Saturday)", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Thank you for coming to Saturday!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "JYUNEP", "name": "Peter Hall", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/JYUNEP_g0gc2ko.webp", "biography": "Peter is the Conference Director of PyCon AU. He has been a software professional for 20 years and in that time has written software that allowed people with vision impairments to vote secretly, ensured a steady supply of croissants, and used lasers to send people places with chainsaws, among many other projects. His professional experience is mostly with Java and Go and he uses Python for personal projects.", "public_name": "Peter Hall", "guid": "345872e4-ded6-50a3-aae9-df915d96430d", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/JYUNEP/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/PHUBLT/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/PHUBLT/", "attachments": []}], "Ballroom 2": [{"guid": "6fcc1d57-5733-53ed-bb72-04abb273be80", "code": "VMXZYP", "id": 74009, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/VMXZYP/trippler_A9cXwiA.jpg", "date": "2025-09-13T10:40:00+10:00", "start": "10:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74009-an-ev-trip-planner-for-australia", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/VMXZYP/", "title": "An EV trip planner for Australia", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "EVs are transforming transport, while Australia has unique resilience requirements for our beloved road trips. Could I build an app with data & AI to help more Aussies electrify their rides?\n\nCome on a journey through operations research, spatial data, graphs and more, prototyping with python, streamlit and a host of useful libraries and open data services. Follow the winding road of development as we encounter and resolve challenges.\n\nWe'll also explore the applicability of this approach to related problems in EV network and fleet planning. I hope you'll leave full of charge for your next data-driven adventure.", "description": "You can try out the app at https://trippler.streamlit.app/\n\nThis talk will set the scene and tell the overall story of development, but can also go the extra mile and read about the development process at https://safetydave.net/category/electric-vehicles/", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "3C7EAA", "name": "David Colls", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/3C7EAA_LvbUHGg.webp", "biography": "David is a transformative technology leader, who likes building things and teams to make the world better. He currently leads Data Platforms and Products at MYOB, and is an author of Effective Machine Learning Teams. David previously established the Data & AI practice at Thoughtworks Australia.", "public_name": "David Colls", "guid": "2d462b6f-9d9a-58a5-83a8-51fdfd3b52eb", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/3C7EAA/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/VMXZYP/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/VMXZYP/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "06b158f7-2133-5ab6-9749-67568b376fe3", "code": "QU97S8", "id": 80983, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T11:20:00+10:00", "start": "11:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-80983-scaling-python-powered-machine-learning-with-snowflake", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/QU97S8/", "title": "Scaling Python-Powered Machine Learning With Snowflake", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Discover how Snowflake's AI Data Cloud revolutionizes Python-powered machine learning at scale. Learn how Snow Pandas brings familiar pandas operations to massive datasets for scalable data engineering, explore advanced feature engineering with Snowflake ML's distributed processing capabilities, and witness distributed ML training. Build millions of models in parallel across partitions with popular libraries like scikit-learn, XGBoost etc \u2014 all seamlessly integrated for enterprise-grade MLOps.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "ASHBPB", "name": "Sheena Nasim", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/ASHBPB_emMPr36.webp", "biography": "I am an Artificial Intelligence expert with international working experience. My passion and expertise lies in identifying opportunities in businesses that can be powered by AI solutions that deliver real life business benefits. I have deep expertise in solving complex computer vision and image-based AI problems, with hands-on experience applying cutting-edge research to real-world challenges. I was the lead Computer vision data scientist of the PROJECT: CORAIL, a smart underwater camera prototype for coral restoration.\n\nIn addition to my professional pursuits, I actively contribute to the tech community as a guest speaker at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Engineering. I\u2019m passionate about thought leadership\u2014authoring technical blogs, speaking at industry conferences, and engaging in meaningful discussions around data and AI.\n\nI\u2019m also deeply committed to women\u2019s empowerment in technology. As the Singapore Ambassador for Women in Data Science (WiDS), I had the privilege of hosting a highly successful event in May 2023, bringing together 100+ women in collaboration with Dataiku, Snowflake, and AWS. I also participate as a mentor in Women's graduate mentorship programs for both NUS and NTU, supporting aspiring professionals as they transition into the industry.", "public_name": "Sheena Nasim", "guid": "efcd54df-f91e-52a1-b950-01a0692c62c9", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/ASHBPB/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/QU97S8/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/QU97S8/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "d6590eb7-ca7d-511c-90a2-5ec4bbb07eeb", "code": "JN8DGA", "id": 71980, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/JN8DGA/Robots_in_lab_xjnlfCe.jpg", "date": "2025-09-13T12:00:00+10:00", "start": "12:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-71980-escape-the-python-ten-years-of-australia-s-best-escape-rooms", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JN8DGA/", "title": "Escape the Python - Ten years of Australia's best Escape Rooms", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Cubescape is a tiny company based in Melbourne that designs, builds, and operates Escape Rooms. Our rooms are full of technology and robotics, and run a mini-operating system across a network of Raspberry Pis all running python code with a heavy dose of asyncio. Starting with Python 3.3 and Debian 8 back in 2014 we've kept our oldest games running for ten years and will be launching our latest game this year with the same codebase, compatibly migrated to 3.11 and Debian 12. This talk will dive into our codebase to show how and why we did things the way we did, and some lessons learned from keeping a commercial project alive this long.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "SLMRZY", "name": "Dr Tom", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/SLMRZY_o3SAoxl.webp", "biography": "Tom is an Australian engineer with a background in robotics, a wealth of software experience, and a handful of successes in the startup world. He has spent the last fifteen years in consulting and permanent roles across various industries while working on side projects and startups by night.\n\nHis first love is working in the field of mechatronics, at the intersection of software and hardware. To this end Tom has worked in engineering teams building medical devices, self-driving cars, optical radar, autonomous wheelchairs, internet services, and various consumer products. For the last seven years he's led software teams as a CTO, Head of Engineering, and Director of Software.\n\nTom holds a B.E./B.Sc. from Sydney University majoring in Mechatronics and Computational Physics, and a Ph.D. from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics.", "public_name": "Dr Tom", "guid": "0b09c82c-4cc8-5d61-8401-42e2d1765fc6", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/SLMRZY/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JN8DGA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/JN8DGA/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a171d41c-580b-58b2-bb1b-6f35d9deecab", "code": "GWUBWQ", "id": 71923, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T13:30:00+10:00", "start": "13:30", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-71923-the-long-hello-world", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GWUBWQ/", "title": "The Long Hello World", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Hello World is often used as a stand-in for \"the simplest program\", great for teaching and getting people started on their coding journey. But what _really_ happens in that one line? This talk will be a deep dive into the Python interpreter, C libraries, Linux kernel, and beyond. We will poke holes in every abstraction and learn about our computers like never before, both to aid in debugging and to pick the best level of tooling for future development projects.", "description": "As described in the abstract, this talk is a 30 (or more) minute deep dive into the line `print(\"Hello world\")`. This will include Python-level things like the parser, abstract syntax trees, and peeping at the generated bytecode, then how that bytecode is interpreted (and now JIT'd) by CPython, how the `print()` builtin gets found and executed, what's inside `builtin_print_impl()` and how that eventually calls into libc, then (time permitting) into syscalls, kernel-space code, file descriptor tables, and then back up the stack towards the shell and then terminal program receiving the output. I would like to fit in at least a little bit of a discussion of x86_64 instructions as well, likely as part of discussing how syscalls actually work. The goal is for everyone to walk away with a better understanding of what goes on \"under the covers\", and to be more comfortable diving down into deeper layers of abstraction when needed for debugging or future development.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "MY7QMZ", "name": "Noah Kantrowitz", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/MY7QMZ_y0OB8S3.webp", "biography": "Noah Kantrowitz is a web developer turned infrastructure automation enthusiast, and all around engineering rabble-rouser. By day he runs infrastructure at Geomagical/IKEA and by night he makes candy and stickers. He is an active member of the DevOps community, and enjoys merge commits, cat pictures, and beards.", "public_name": "Noah Kantrowitz", "guid": "1cd24cd0-d6a3-51cf-9411-99e974228600", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/MY7QMZ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GWUBWQ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GWUBWQ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "40333177-2ccc-551b-b730-6784415f00ff", "code": "HXALCX", "id": 72955, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T14:10:00+10:00", "start": "14:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72955-developer-friendly-jobs-across-time-zones-when-out-of-hours-no-longer-exists", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/HXALCX/", "title": "Developer-friendly jobs across time zones when \"out of hours\" no longer exists", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Kraken Technologies ships over 100 versions of code per day across 25 environments in more than 10 countries with new versions being kicked off to deploy upon merge into master.\n\nWe want to be able to run jobs across all of our various environments without slowing down developers (by blocking deployments) or having an impact on clients during their operating hours (outages or performance degradation). \n\nBut how do you run jobs out of hours when there are no time zones that are out of hours for everyone? In this talk, I will introduce the Housekeeping Framework, our internal solution to this problem.", "description": "The Housekeeping Framework was developed with the aim to allow developers to:\n- Easily deploy code that runs across all environments\n- Specify only certain hours it can run in (in the local time of its environment)\n- Easily see when the status of a job changes\n- Not require manual changes across 25+ environments\n\nThis talk will present the context that the housekeeping framework was developed within, then dig into how the framework was structured and developed using Python. Additionally, we will reflect on the experience of writing a framework and how important \"developer friendly\" tooling has been in encouraging adoption of the Housekeeping Framework within Kraken.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "WRLNJE", "name": "Suzannah Cooper", "avatar": null, "biography": "Suzannah first started with Python to get a \"head start\" on learning how to program before a particularly notorious university course in the C programming language. \n\nSince then, they have been dabbling with Python on and off in various domains from data analysis to machine learning to software development.\n\nNowadays, Suzannah primarily uses Python in their role of senior software engineer at Kraken Technologies. Suzannah enjoys diving deep into understanding systems, concepts and technologies in order to use what they learn to bring value to customers, their team and the wider community.", "public_name": "Suzannah Cooper", "guid": "59f5826f-f36a-5bb4-81f1-4ed923663532", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/WRLNJE/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/HXALCX/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/HXALCX/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "56e3e903-8d77-597b-8439-f3ac993b011f", "code": "RZQCKS", "id": 74231, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T14:50:00+10:00", "start": "14:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74231-what-emergency-service-volunteering-has-taught-me-about-incident-management", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/RZQCKS/", "title": "What emergency service volunteering has taught me about incident management", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "When something has gone wrong in your neighbourhood, and they're calling you... whatcha gonna do?", "description": "As a volunteer emergency responder I spend a lot of my spare time preparing to respond to an incident, and then putting those preparations into practice. But then in my work in tech I see what happens when we don\u2019t prepare to respond to emergency incidents. Using the core framework of all Australian emergency situations, we will explore the key components of an emergency, and how to best plan, prepare and respond.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "RMHYR3", "name": "Rachel Bunder", "avatar": null, "biography": "Rachel divides her time being a ML engineer, crocheting caterpillars and dealing", "public_name": "Rachel Bunder", "guid": "dde3f903-90a2-5cf2-a0f4-414d3a38d3bb", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/RMHYR3/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/RZQCKS/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/RZQCKS/", "attachments": []}], "Ballroom 1": [{"guid": "1a46df92-e6d4-543a-bfc6-45a24b059866", "code": "A3J3HR", "id": 73268, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T10:40:00+10:00", "start": "10:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73268-the-continued-developer-evolution", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/A3J3HR/", "title": "The Continued Developer Evolution", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "The developer landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. What began with coding assistants has rapidly\nevolved into AI agents and autonomous systems that are reshaping how we build software. This evolution isn't\nslowing down\u2014it's accelerating.\n\nIn this session, we'll examine the current state of the developer ecosystem and how AI is fundamentally changing what it means to be a developer.\n\nWhether you're concerned about keeping pace with change or excited about the possibilities ahead, this session\nwill equip you with insights to make decisions about your development practices and career path in an AI-augmented future.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "MSK3HR", "name": "Derek Bingham", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/MSK3HR_ZS8rgBD.webp", "biography": "Derek is a long time developer with a passion for building software, as a Developer Advocate he enjoys talking and writing about what he used to do for a living... for a living. Derek helps and supports various technical communities across Australia and New Zealand and is excited to see how software development technology and practices are constantly evolving, he is also happy mentoring people who are navigating the ambiguities and complexities of a career in tech.", "public_name": "Derek Bingham", "guid": "a43ad6af-e716-5864-971a-6141f96084e1", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/MSK3HR/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/A3J3HR/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/A3J3HR/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "81a72be1-2aca-58f7-ac71-fe4069a95655", "code": "K8P3ZT", "id": 73420, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T11:20:00+10:00", "start": "11:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73420-beyond-the-hype-using-ai-coding-agents-today", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/K8P3ZT/", "title": "Beyond the Hype: Using AI Coding Agents Today", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "There is a lot of hype swirling around about AI coding. But there are many sceptical developers who have tried AI coding tools and found them rubbish.\n\nThis talk aims to move beyond the hype and focus on AI coding best practices as technology stands today. These tips are applicable for developers who write code everyday and people who haven\u2019t written a single line of code. Don't expect to become a 10x developer overnight. But with the right habits, you might get 10% more productive and a lot less frustrated.\n\nNote this talk will focus on using CLI-based coding agents (e.g. Claude Code), rather than AI auto-completers in IDEs (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Cursor).", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "TLK9CR", "name": "Michael Gribben", "avatar": null, "biography": "Hello I'm a software engineer who loves building products that help people. I'm really excited by using AI and Python to lower the barriers to entry to coding for fun and profit.\n\nI currently work at an AI customer support startup called Lorikeet based in Surry Hills and focus on improving conversation quality. Previously, I worked at Canva, also based in Surry Hills, and focused on improving search quality. And prior to that, I studied Computer Science at UNSW.", "public_name": "Michael Gribben", "guid": "3c5c5103-0a35-5e80-ac40-ae1ca5cb3efb", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/TLK9CR/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/K8P3ZT/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/K8P3ZT/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a8aa99ce-d00b-5508-9fdb-32e1e6403d31", "code": "B38QTB", "id": 73082, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T12:00:00+10:00", "start": "12:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73082-args-amazing-or-approaching", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/B38QTB/", "title": "Args: Amazing or Approaching?", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "From default args, to `**kwargs`, and everything in-between, Python's comprehensive argument system lends itself to some of the most effective code, through encouraging readability, reuse, and easy refactoring.\n\nBut is that really true? Why, and why not?\nWhat could we learn from other languages?\nAnd what else could lie in their future?", "description": "In this session, we'll give a rundown of Python's comprehensive function argument system and how its features allow for safety, conciseness, and expressiveness (whether you're calling or writing functions).\n\nWe'll then give examples for where that system lacks, where it could bite you, and give suggestions for what more could be done on Python code to fix those limitations.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "AHET73", "name": "Evan Kohilas", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/AHET73_7Ky4wOa.webp", "biography": "Evan is a serial international speaker and engineering productivity advocate who values frictionless simplicity, taming tech debt, thinking in systems, and tightening feedback loops \u2013 all to improve the developer experience and achieve nohumanerrors.com\n\nWhen he's not working on his next talk or project idea, you may catch him as the Assistant Director for PyCon Australia, tumbling down slopes with a snowboard, chasing frisbees, or defending subway cookies.", "public_name": "Evan Kohilas", "guid": "ce8fe9d1-18e9-59ab-8508-85ed8a1024a2", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/AHET73/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/B38QTB/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/B38QTB/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "14065910-832a-5447-a4ca-3a686ddf2fa1", "code": "MGSHYT", "id": 73253, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T13:30:00+10:00", "start": "13:30", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73253-my-ai-is-slow-make-it-faster", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MGSHYT/", "title": "My AI is slow. Make it faster!", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "If there's anything that AI is known for, it's not speed. Other than throw more GPU's at the problem, what can you do to make AI models run faster? In this talk, you'll learn about AI model performance, what impacts it and what you can do to improve it.", "description": "This talk is for developers working with or building AI models. In this talk, you'll learn about what impacts the performance of AI and how to think about your requirements for speed versus quality.\nAfter attending this talk, you'll know how to benchmark AI models and understand more about configuring models and picking the right model for the job. \nThis talk is not target at AI/ML experts, we will cover some newer technical concepts like semantic model routing but it will be fully explained.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "FVC9YV", "name": "Anthony Shaw", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/FVC9YV_Pr1bziH.webp", "biography": "Anthony is from Sydney, Australia and is a contributor to many open-source communities. Running and contributing to several popular open-source tools for DevOps, Security, Automation and Code Quality. He has been recognized for his contribution to open source, including as Fellow of the Python Software Foundation and member of the Apache Software Foundation. Anthony runs a Python blog and YouTube channel and wrote the book \"CPython Internals\"", "public_name": "Anthony Shaw", "guid": "d1cac061-84f1-5d3c-84ea-081f68794199", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/FVC9YV/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MGSHYT/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/MGSHYT/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "18c5fdd0-8fb2-5703-bbac-50e1ba7d78a2", "code": "LUJHMM", "id": 72944, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T14:10:00+10:00", "start": "14:10", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72944-escape-from-tutorial-hell", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LUJHMM/", "title": "Escape from Tutorial Hell", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "When you're learning to code, no matter what the language, you learn small components: write a function to do something, create a class to do other things, add a user interface component and so on.\n\nThen you get out into the real world and there's nobody telling you what components to write. You know how to code, but you don't know how to develop. So you do more courses and tutorials, watch more videos and read more documentation. But you still don't know how to take that extra step and apply your knowledge to develop an entire project. You're stuck in **tutorial hell**!\n\nI'm going to go beyond the code and show you how to design, structure, and document your projects. I'll also show you how you can use AI to help.\n\nThese problems and their solutions will apply to every language and development environment you'll use through your career, whether or not you're using Python. By the end, I hope I will have given you some tools to help you escape from tutorial hell and start developing your own projects.", "description": "One of the problems you need to solve to escape from tutorial hell is working out what code to write. Before you write a single line of code, step away from the computer and design your project. What exactly is it going to do? What platforms does it need to run on? What technologies will you use to build it? With these decisions made, you can break down the project into smaller parts that you already know how to do.\n\nProject structure is fundamental to reading and maintaining your project. Over the life span of any development project, the code will be read - by you or by other developers - far more often than it is written or edited. Logical file structures and consistently formatted code make it easier to find the code you need. Naming is considered one of the great problems of programming but using good names for your files, classes, functions and variables makes your code more usable and more readable.\n\nDocumentation is crucial for any project, whether you're working alone or in a team. First, I'll look at strategies for discovering and reading official documentation. Then I'll talk about documenting your own code. I'll also discuss strategies for keeping your knowledge up to date.\n\nAI is a powerful tool that can help you write or improve code. I'll talk about ways to improve the results that AI gives you and discuss some of the pros and cons of using AI in your teaching, learning, and development process.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "9L8UEL", "name": "Sarah Reichelt", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/9L8UEL_Ugwv7r8.webp", "biography": "Sarah has been programming since before most PyCon AU-ers were  born (and since before many universities even owned a computer!). Having developed for macOS and the web for many years she has built everything from fermentation monitoring devices to furniture visualisers, but over the decades has never lost the thrill of being able to make a computer do what she wants.\n\nWhile she might not consider herself a teacher, she has literally written the book on macOS development for macOS newbies (well, four books actually). \nSarah's passion is trying to get more people writing apps for the Mac itself, so her latest book \"Escape from Tutorial Hell\" helps people get over that next hurdle from beginner-coder to developer-in-your-own-right.\n\nSarah just can't get enough of computers, so in her spare time you'll either find her playing World of Warcraft or putting Python to work to solve Advent of Code problems.", "public_name": "Sarah Reichelt", "guid": "bf3d30be-f07a-5cbb-bb63-8480991558f9", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/9L8UEL/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LUJHMM/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LUJHMM/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "50d1c0a5-1b60-532c-932d-ff89430633dc", "code": "YF7RPL", "id": 73315, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-13T14:50:00+10:00", "start": "14:50", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73315-self-healing-system-for-ui-tests-using-ml", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YF7RPL/", "title": "Self-healing system for UI tests using ML", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "A system that applies machine learning to make UI tests more resilient by automatically detecting and fixing broken selectors, reducing rework and increasing test stability.", "description": "Broken selectors are one of the leading causes of instability in UI test suites. Even minor interface changes \u2014 like renaming an attribute or moving a component \u2014 can break automated tests, leading to false negatives, increased maintenance effort, and frustration for teams. This kind of fragility slows down CI/CD pipelines and undermines confidence in test automation as a reliable safety net during software delivery.\n\nThis talk presents the design and development of a self-healing system for UI tests that leverages machine learning to make test suites smarter and more resilient. I\u2019ll walk through the key ideas, the motivation behind building such a system, and the main technical challenges encountered during its development. The presentation will cover how this approach helps tests automatically adapt to UI changes, reduces manual rework, and improves the flow of continuous integration and delivery.\n\nAttendees will leave with insights into how machine learning can strengthen test automation, inspiration to enhance their own frameworks, and a deeper understanding of what\u2019s possible when combining ML with UI testing.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "HKMJZ9", "name": "Andressa de Mello Cabistani", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/HKMJZ9_OqVe3aP.webp", "biography": "I am a Software Quality Engineer at Red Hat and I work creating test frameworks and test automation in Python, Golang and Ruby. I am also a passionate programmer and an Open Source and Agile Testing enthusiast.", "public_name": "Andressa de Mello Cabistani", "guid": "cdb6d5d6-2bd0-58f3-a8bc-d935342f0324", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/HKMJZ9/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YF7RPL/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/YF7RPL/", "attachments": []}]}}, {"index": 3, "date": "2025-09-14", "day_start": "2025-09-14T04:00:00+10:00", "day_end": "2025-09-15T03:59:00+10:00", "rooms": {"Ballroom 3": [{"guid": "8f6efdcf-6589-5bc1-b0ee-13a6a748d0e1", "code": "ZF9X8G", "id": 75485, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T09:00:00+10:00", "start": "09:00", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75485-conference-opening-sunday", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZF9X8G/", "title": "Conference Opening (Sunday)", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Welcome to Sunday!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "JYUNEP", "name": "Peter Hall", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/JYUNEP_g0gc2ko.webp", "biography": "Peter is the Conference Director of PyCon AU. He has been a software professional for 20 years and in that time has written software that allowed people with vision impairments to vote secretly, ensured a steady supply of croissants, and used lasers to send people places with chainsaws, among many other projects. His professional experience is mostly with Java and Go and he uses Python for personal projects.", "public_name": "Peter Hall", "guid": "345872e4-ded6-50a3-aae9-df915d96430d", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/JYUNEP/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZF9X8G/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZF9X8G/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a7eae81f-2413-5093-a3eb-69c96acd8a53", "code": "DVTWWU", "id": 75745, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T09:20:00+10:00", "start": "09:20", "duration": "00:50", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75745-you-are-welcome-in-this-world", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DVTWWU/", "title": "You are welcome in this world", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Keynote", "language": "en", "abstract": "Designing for inclusion isn\u2019t about ticking boxes, avoiding lawsuits, or expanding markets\u2014it\u2019s about people. True inclusion starts with the individuals we meet and the stories we choose to share.\n\nMy journey into digital accessibility has been deeply personal\u2014shaped by my Dad, who was blind, navigating a world that too often overlooks people like him.\n\nAs the designers and builders of today\u2019s digital society, we have the power\u2014and responsibility\u2014to make everyone feel welcome. This talk explores how storytelling and small, intentional design decisions can spark more inclusive experiences, both at work and in the world around us.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "T3YFGJ", "name": "Larene Le Gassick", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/T3YFGJ_lKNPADE.webp", "biography": "Larene is the engineering lead for Accessibility at Canva\u2014whose mission is to empower everyone to design. Larene has been a software engineer and accessibility specialist for over 10 years, but her digital accessibility journey unknowingly began when she was much younger, when her Dad started to lose his vision and hearing.", "public_name": "Larene Le Gassick", "guid": "2ddcac41-efed-54d3-8b0a-2271a2989796", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/T3YFGJ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DVTWWU/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DVTWWU/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "50cdaf81-73d6-5c9d-b0eb-63a20984c1ae", "code": "WH3EMB", "id": 73429, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T10:40:00+10:00", "start": "10:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73429-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-reality", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/WH3EMB/", "title": "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Reality", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "\"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.\" - Douglas Adams\n\nComputers, despite a frankly alarming amount of hype, are not good at nuance. They are usually fast, occasionally obedient, and capable of storing quite a lot of cat pictures, but when asked to represent something as slippery as \"a person\" or \"Tuesday\", things begin to get weird.\n\nHuman beings remain the most reliable mediums for intepreting reality in a format that can machines can parse. Regrettably, reality is complex. We make heavy use of abstractions to handle this complexity, but if you ask any seasoned developer about designing systems to handle names, time, geography, or a thousand other \"standards\", you will be met with either a thousand-yard stare or a wild, keening noise. If no group chat can agree on whether cereal is a soup, how can we tell a computer what to do?\n\nApart from the difficulty of agreeing on categories, reality's refusal to be abstracted neatly can lead to system inaccuracies, poor user experiences, security vulnerabilities, and the amplification of social harms. But given our industry, our systems of government, and (quite often) our sense of self are built on top of the very same kind of abstractions, how can we do better in the systems we are responsible for?\n\nIn this talk, we will look at some of the most common ways that our systems and data models frequently do not match reality, explore approaches to handling reality gracefully, and consider how to anticipate flaws in those models and minimise harmful outcomes. This will be an introduction to the topic for some, a refresher for others, and possibly a useful thing to show that one boss with unrealistic expectations.\n\nAttendees will leave with a better understanding of how and when to make effective use of abstractions in systems, and probably an existential headache.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "EFKHVF", "name": "Lilly Ryan", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/EFKHVF_zvLmAMJ.webp", "biography": "Lilly Ryan is a recovering historian and current information security specialist based in Melbourne. Over the last decade she has worked as a Python developer, Linux wrangler, and penetration tester specialising in web application and cloud security. \n\nLilly is a fierce advocate for consumer privacy rights, a human-centred web, and making tech knowledge accessible to all.", "public_name": "Lilly Ryan", "guid": "0199c82a-3c8a-5ee0-931f-bf3ee8cc2c70", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/EFKHVF/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/WH3EMB/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/WH3EMB/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "284eb967-0bb3-5471-9571-dcefb1eb2306", "code": "XSXJYT", "id": 73181, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/XSXJYT/Frame_vkHt77k.png", "date": "2025-09-14T11:20:00+10:00", "start": "11:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73181-found-font-family", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XSXJYT/", "title": "Found Font Family", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "It's impossible to do software without the power of fonts and text rendering. They underpin the terminal we use to run our code, the browsers we use to run our web apps and the emails we get paid too much to write.\n\nBut for many they are a black box of standards and code that seems to effortlessly click together, until they don't. This talk explores how this works from font file structures, internationalization issues and font stack management. Finally we use the knowledge we've gained together to poke at some non standard use cases for fonts which pull back the curtain to show a font file for what it is, arbitrary instructions on how to render a shape on the screen. Cats are involved.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "3WAAEV", "name": "Zain Afzal", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/3WAAEV_uylw7Uu.webp", "biography": "Obsessed with the web and over engineering simple problems, I've worked for 5+ years on various complicated frontend engineering problems and have lived to tell the tale, including a multi year project to launch dynamic colors across the chromeOS operating system, and stints at relume & qwilr where i help make websites that make websites.\n\nCurrently a software engineer at Qwilr, previously a software engineer at Google, before that a computer science student, tutor & lecturer at UNSW and before that a high school student who didn't appreciate the lack of lower back pain.", "public_name": "Zain Afzal", "guid": "a1e079fb-335c-54fe-aed7-39d3bc188b71", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/3WAAEV/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XSXJYT/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XSXJYT/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "13e7d289-ccd1-502a-8f0e-de555ff66e41", "code": "8SAH37", "id": 74084, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T12:00:00+10:00", "start": "12:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74084-skill-issue", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8SAH37/", "title": "Skill Issue", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "With the arrival of large language models and the generative tools built on them we have seen a huge increase in pressure to use these tools in our work.\n\nThis worries me, but it's hard to easily explain why.\n\nAm I being paranoid? Or just overly opposed to a change that's inevitable? Is it just... a skill issue?\n\nI invite you to listen to me dig through the history of the relationship between automation, technology, and work to try to unpack my feelings on where our industry is headed.", "description": "I'm often the one advocating _for_ change in a given environment so it's always a bit of an interesting moment for me when I realise I'm dead against some kind of new hotness. This often triggers a lot of introspection and trying to work out what about it has got my back up.\n\nGenerative tools built on large language models are fascinating things but the ways in which we're being encouraged to use them, both by employers and by peers, give me the heebies. This presentation is an encapsulation of the thinking I did as to why they do that.\n\nWe'll be covering all kinds of stuff from the Luddites, to the globalisation of manufacturing, to the nature of creative work in general. I can't promise a conclusion that will be meaningful for everyone, but I can at least promise an explanation of how I came to mine.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "GQHDVE", "name": "Benno Rice", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/GQHDVE_RTMyYiv.webp", "biography": "Benno is widely known as someone with opinions and a (possibly over-)willingness to share them. He has been working with computers professionally for over 30 years (unprofessionally for longer) and takes particular joy in examining how computers, the Internet, and all that surrounds all of these intersects with the humanity that it is meant to help.", "public_name": "Benno Rice", "guid": "51076bc5-071e-5480-b352-d05f672865ee", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/GQHDVE/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8SAH37/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8SAH37/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "65591d87-295e-5b30-a24b-6270a4db6bd3", "code": "A7XZLS", "id": 73477, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T13:20:00+10:00", "start": "13:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73477-sustaining-open-source-software-tools-for-change", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/A7XZLS/", "title": "Sustaining Open Source Software: Tools for Change", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "How can we sustain open source software?\n\nAs multiple companies re-license their projects to move away from open source, and maintainers everywhere are getting burnt out, it\u2019s time to rethink how to make open source sustainable.\n\nWe present a checklist for assessing the health of an open source project to see if it might be at risk, and what to do about it.\n\nYou\u2019ll learn some approaches for setting up an open source project for long-term success, and some other ideas about how we might keep this thing we all love alive.", "description": "For the last 10 to 15 years, open source software has been dominated by a bunch of VC-funded startups writing software and giving it away for free.\n\nThat was, probably, a really silly thing for most of them to do. Why did they do it? And what might we do differently?\n\nLearn how to recognise the economic structures that lead to decisions that are unhelpful for open source sustainability. Learn how to design a project structure that gives provides the best chance at being sustainable. Learn how to diagnose the problems in your own projects before they hit crisis point. Most importantly: learn what changes to make and how to make them.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "CABYUD", "name": "Justin Warren", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/CABYUD_voYFfXx.webp", "biography": "Justin is the founder and principal analyst at PivotNine, a boutique analyst and consulting firm based in Melbourne, Australia. He covers enterprise infrastructure, cloud, and information security technologies with a particular focus on free and open source software. He has used Linux as his primary desktop environment since 1996.\nAn IT industry veteran with extensive global experience, Justin has worked with enterprise organisations including ANZ bank, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage, Telstra, and VMware as well as a variety of Silicon Valley startups including Isovalent, Illumio, Pulumi, and Solo.io. His preferred programming language is Python.\nJustin holds an MBA from Melbourne Business School, and is a graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.", "public_name": "Justin Warren", "guid": "5f418a19-d611-5f1f-af03-171f53c95eca", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/CABYUD/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/A7XZLS/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/A7XZLS/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "51a6ba45-5fab-5a30-8f5f-6c7897641448", "code": "8L7Q9J", "id": 72979, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T14:00:00+10:00", "start": "14:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72979-keeping-creativity-the-focus-in-visual-effects-and-animation", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8L7Q9J/", "title": "Keeping Creativity the Focus in Visual Effects and Animation", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "This talk will go into detail about how Python is used as the glue to transfer data between applications, and by extension, between artists; and how we use it to allow artists to spend more time creating and less time worrying about technology and associated problems. This talk requires virtually no technical understanding of Python, and will present only a small amount of code -- it is intended for people who are interested in receiving a glimpse \"behind the curtain\" to the technology used in the production of CG and VFX in content of all shapes and sizes, and seeing how Python is a core part of that. Attendees will leave with, not only an understanding of how Python is utilised in the Visual Effects industry, but with a better understanding of how Visual Effects and CG is produced in general.", "description": "I am a Technical Director at a small Animation and Visual Effects studio, and I am responsible for maintaining our studio's \"Pipeline\" -- a collection of custom Python scripts and libraries that we use to transfer data between our digital content creation tools, and within these tools to ensure that each artist's workflow remains consistent and keeps their focus on creativity -- chiefly -- by eliminating the questions \"where should I save this file?\", \"what format should it be\", and \"what should I call it?\". \n\n1. What is a pipeline?\n* A definition: an overloaded term with two meanings -- it is, at once, the broad term for the workflow of steps that happens from the client brief, to the delivery of final files; and the colloquial term for the code that wraps the applications that we use to produce the work during the workflow -- code that is written in Python.\n* I will provide an overview of the \"broader, workflow\" version of the pipeline, with its myriad steps (conform, tracking, clean up / matte paint, layout, modelling, rigging, look development, animation, simulation / fx, lighting, render, compositing, delivery)\n* I will show an animation (a 4 second loop of a CG character waving a flag) that I'll use as an example to explain our workflow, and detail the major steps involved in creating it -- animation, lighting, and compositing. The character already existed as part of our library, so we just needed to make the flag asset and then run it through these few steps of the pipeline in order to finalise it.\n\n2. How do you build a pipeline?\n* Pipeline code is maintained by a team of Pipeline TDs -- in our case, that's a team of one. I started building it from scratch over five years ago, and have been maintaining it ever since.\n* Every studio's pipeline is different, as each visual effects team is unique. Most pipelines are custom, regardless of the size of the studio (e.g. Industrial Light and Magic with over 1000 artists, Rising Sun Pictures with over 200 artists, and where I work with fewer than 10 -- we all wrote our pipelines from scratch internally). As such, the requirements of the pipeline change from studio to studio.\n* All of our projects are different \u2013 we do more than just tv shows and movies \u2013 and so our pipeline needs to account for that. Not all of our projects follow the aforementioned linear workflow that larger studios are sometimes forced to, and as such this introduces flexibility in the design and development of our pipeline. We built ours to ensure that any one of our applications is capable of exporting information in a way that any other application is capable of importing \u2013 giving us greater options of how to approach a given project based on the creative brief.\n* Every pipeline, across every studio, is built on Python, as that's the language that Visual Effects studios, world-wide, have agreed to use. There is a set of guidelines called the \"VFX Reference Platform\" that dictates what versions of various softwares that studios and software developers should be aiming to support. As of 2025, Python 3.11.x is the target release. \n* For us, all of our projects have a discrete directory structure on network storage that is accessible by all workstations and by the render farm. I have written tools that understand this structure and know where different file types should be saved, based on the step of the pipeline that the artist is operating in. \n\n3. The pipeline, in action.\n* Each process of saving, rendering, and publishing all use custom interfaces, ensuring that the file is stored in the expected place, with the expected name, and with incremental version numbers. The naming convention is consistent across all applications.\n* Using the animation example outlined above, I will explain the process of how the animator creates a new scene, and how they save and publish their animation data to the next step in the workflow -- lighting. Then, we'll take the same approach and explain how the lighting artist creates a scene and then saves it and submits it to the render farm (a centralised compute cluster designed for high intensity tasks like rendering and simulation), then publishes it to the next step in the workflow -- compositing. As you'd expect, they create a scene, submit it to the farm, and then provide the output from that to their producer to deliver.\n* Each step in this process is iterative -- i.e. animation takes a few goes to get right, and so we end up with multiple versions of the same animation, improved over time. The tools we use take this into account and allow the artists to \"version up\" each time they publish their work to be reviewed, eventually ending at the version that the supervisor and producer approve. This version is published to the downstream artist.\n* With a consistent directory structure, this ensures that it becomes simple to simply say, for example, \"grab the version 7 lighting render for shot 10\", and the compositor knows _exactly_ where to look and what files to import into their scene.\n\n4. Freedom vs Restriction in the Creative Industries.\n* As a small team, we need something flexible enough to be worked around when required, but structured enough to operate with minimal interference. \"Sensible defaults\" is my solution to that. By default, everything is configured automatically to save files in the correct place, using the correct name. This eliminates the mental load on artists as, instead of thinking about how they should be naming files (and potentially getting it wrong), they simply provide a few key pieces of information about what they're working on and the code generates the correct file path and name automatically.\n* There is a fine line between \"making things easier\" and \"making things limiting\". Part of being a Technical Director is making these decisions -- we need to ensure that things are regimented enough that we can automate the more human-error prone parts of the workflow, but flexible enough to be able to \"hack around it\" when we're up against a deadline. Sometimes the correct thing to do in a given situation is \"throw out the rules\", to ensure that a project is delivered on time. There is very little in our pipeline that cannot be circumvented -- that is by design.\n* The larger the team, however, the more regimented the pipeline needs to be -- if someone _can_ break something, they will, and the more people there are in the team, the more likely you'll have someone break something, intentionally or otherwise. We're lucky, as a small team, as when we need to break the rules, we can very easily communicate that with each other -- in a crew of hundreds, where you're not sure who your downstream artist is, and whether they're in the same building (or country) as you; that's much harder.\n\n5. The Final Product\n* The beauty of working in Visual Effects and Animation is that, once the project is finished, it's over -- it's archived and put to tape. There's no ongoing maintenance, and there's no real need for future-proofing. At worst, we restore an archive and the files are a bit messy because the team got a bit overwhelmed at the end and started saving things in strange places. We're lucky that, once a project is done, we start a fresh one, and everything is clean again. For us, this timeframe is typically single-digit weeks. For bigger studios, this can be months. But it's not a website that needs to be operational for years, or a piece of software that needs to be operational for decades. We can afford the flexibility.\n* The pipeline, however, is a piece of software that needs to be operational for a long time -- it does need constant maintenance and improvements; and it doesn't get discarded or archived at the end of a project. During each project, I mentally go through all of the things that happened during that project and make a list of what could have worked better, what broke, what got in the way, and what worked really well. Luckily, I'm also a Technical Artist as well as a Pipeline TD, so I get to experience first-hand all of the things that go wrong, and so that puts me in a good position to figure out how to solve them for everyone else.\n* Between projects, it is my responsibility to make improvements and changes so that, when the next project begins, it can perform smoother than the last so that the artists involved have even fewer technical things to worry about, and they can focus entirely on their creative passions.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "C8T9XL", "name": "Caitlin Wright", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/C8T9XL_pgWYcmX.webp", "biography": "I am a Lighter and Pipeline TD with a background in Software Engineering and Systems Administration, and have been programming (professionally and otherwise) for over 20 years, of which I've been writing Python for over 10. I have been employed in the Creative Industries for the better part of my career, in both supportive and creative roles.", "public_name": "Caitlin Wright", "guid": "2ea45681-bfdc-5d21-b2e4-4fee605dc144", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/C8T9XL/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8L7Q9J/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/8L7Q9J/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "e5cfd066-c2f7-5849-b840-32226c2b82d9", "code": "GAEB9V", "id": 73281, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/GAEB9V/PinchyPhotoPycon_6NiijXj.jpg", "date": "2025-09-14T14:40:00+10:00", "start": "14:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73281-pinchy-the-bestest-boi", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GAEB9V/", "title": "Pinchy the bestest boi", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Have you ever wondered if life would be better with a robot scorpion by your side? Now\u2019s your chance to find out! Meet Pinchy \u2014 a Raspberry Pi-powered, fully autonomous, and undeniably eye-catching robot companion.\n\nIn this talk, you\u2019ll learn how Pinchy maps its environment and navigates with ease using SLAM algorithms and computer vision. We\u2019ll also dive into the efficient design inspired by real scorpions, blending biology with engineering.\n\nWhether you're into robotics, Python, or just want to see a cool scorpion skitter across the stage, come say hi to Pinchy this PyCon!", "description": "I'm currently still in high school, but I discovered my passion for robotics early on in my tech journey. When I first got my hands on a robotics kit, I surprised myself by putting down my phone just to keep working on my project outside of class \u2014 which, at the time, felt like a major breakthrough.\n\nThat spark turned into a full-blown obsession. Over the past two years, I\u2019ve spent more than 700 hours developing my own robot companion: Pinchy. Along the way, I\u2019ve gone through countless prototypes and design revisions \u2014 starting with foam-core legs and evolving into a fully custom 3D-printed chassis modeled after a real scorpion.\n\nIn this talk, I\u2019ll walk you through the journey of building Pinchy \u2014 from design challenges to unexpected breakthroughs \u2014 and dive into the technical details behind its fully autonomous navigation using Computer Vision and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). I\u2019ll cover how it perceives and maps its environment, how its walking gait is controlled, and how all the systems come together on a Raspberry Pi platform. We\u2019ll finish with a look at what\u2019s next \u2014 including my future plans to take over the world, one robot scorpion at a time.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "Y98KAJ", "name": "Hailey Bartlett", "avatar": null, "biography": "I am currently an A grade high school student with a passion for all things IT. Some of my achievements include attending the National Computing Science School in January 2024, Completing my Bronze Duke of Edinburgh, and being awarded my Australian Scout Award. I am currently working on my Silver Duke of Edinburgh, my Queen scout award, and my certificate 4 in project management.", "public_name": "Hailey Bartlett", "guid": "1d35b5c3-fffb-530e-a1b4-949efd25b74c", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/Y98KAJ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GAEB9V/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GAEB9V/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "4f130629-b7f3-5d13-a6bf-6e70ad311540", "code": "3DDRNQ", "id": 75489, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T15:50:00+10:00", "start": "15:50", "duration": "01:00", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75489-lightning-talks-sunday", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3DDRNQ/", "title": "Lightning Talks (Sunday)", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Lightning talks", "language": "en", "abstract": "Like regular talks, but shorter! Anything could happen!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3DDRNQ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/3DDRNQ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "236f3b6d-9877-52ce-a84e-671be49b97aa", "code": "AMLK87", "id": 75486, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T16:50:00+10:00", "start": "16:50", "duration": "00:40", "room": "Ballroom 3", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-75486-conference-closing-sunday", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/AMLK87/", "title": "Conference Closing (Sunday)", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Opening/Closing", "language": "en", "abstract": "Thank you for coming to PyCon AU 2025!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "JYUNEP", "name": "Peter Hall", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/JYUNEP_g0gc2ko.webp", "biography": "Peter is the Conference Director of PyCon AU. He has been a software professional for 20 years and in that time has written software that allowed people with vision impairments to vote secretly, ensured a steady supply of croissants, and used lasers to send people places with chainsaws, among many other projects. His professional experience is mostly with Java and Go and he uses Python for personal projects.", "public_name": "Peter Hall", "guid": "345872e4-ded6-50a3-aae9-df915d96430d", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/JYUNEP/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/AMLK87/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/AMLK87/", "attachments": []}], "Ballroom 2": [{"guid": "f344552c-a8d7-5875-a942-35f746d910c3", "code": "7XVERX", "id": 81526, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T10:40:00+10:00", "start": "10:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-81526-the-death-of-consequences", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/7XVERX/", "title": "The Death of Consequences", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "The Golden Era of Open Source, in whose late stages we currently exist, has been defined by early decisions to release code with no expectations around who uses our code, and what happens when people abuse the gift they\u2019ve been gifted. Little thought was given to what consequences an extractive or abusive party would face.\n\nToday, we\u2019ve allowed maintainer burnout to take hold in community and volunteer-led projects (with disastrous consequences, see for example xz), and we\u2019re seeing mass rejection of attempts by corporations to impose consequences on those who seek to continue extractive behaviour (see for example Hashicorp\u2019s rapid demise as an independent entity).\n\nThis contrasts to some of the earlier eras in Free and Open Source Software, which were defined by social contracts with consequences for those who chose not to follow them, most notably (but not entirely) those informed by the concept of Copyleft.\n\nBy choosing not to define consequences for disobeying the social contract of Open Source, the broader ecosystem has chosen consequences for us. In this talk, I\u2019ll look at some points of inflection through the history of Open Source where our movement collectively decided imposing consequences, the (in retrospect) highly predictable results of those decisions, and what we could have decided instead. I\u2019ll also talk a bit about how we might want to think about consequences in the future.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "QWCHX7", "name": "Christopher Neugebauer", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/QWCHX7_xkYQQCh.webp", "biography": "Christopher Neugebauer is an Australian developer, speaker, and serial community conference organiser, who presently lives in the United States.\n\nHe serves as a Director of the Python Software Foundation, and is co-organiser of the acclaimed North Bay Python conference, a boutique one-track conference run in unusual venues \u2014 include an old vaudeville theatre, and more recently a barn on a farm \u2014 in Petaluma, California.", "public_name": "Christopher Neugebauer", "guid": "a2188a3b-d43b-57cc-bf87-f1d365871d2d", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/QWCHX7/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/7XVERX/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/7XVERX/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "4b3e80ee-869e-5cdc-9ccc-5c942ee45045", "code": "FHMZBD", "id": 73378, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/FHMZBD/chims_iTocaWx.png", "date": "2025-09-14T11:20:00+10:00", "start": "11:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73378-the-birdwatcher-s-guide-to-optimised-tabular-data-pipelines", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FHMZBD/", "title": "The Birdwatcher\u2019s Guide to Optimised Tabular Data Pipelines", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Sometimes you inherit a clunky pipeline. Sometimes an LLM writes one for you. Either way, you\u2019re stuck with something slow, memory-hungry, and hard to scale.\n\nThis talk is about what happens next \u2014 how to turn a naive tabular data pipeline into something fast, efficient, and scalable. You\u2019ll get a guided tour through a zoo of optimization techniques: reducing algorithmic complexity, minimizing memory usage, improving I/O throughput, and swapping in Polars \u2014 a fast, Rust-based DataFrame library \u2014 in place of Pandas (for reasons beyond just hype). By walking through a real-world example step by step, you\u2019ll see how each change makes an impact \u2014 and come away with a sharper eye for spotting similar bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your own pipelines.\n\nThe walkthrough is grounded in a real-world ML feature engineering task from the aviation industry. But in the spirit of spring, we\u2019ll swap baggage belts for bird feeders \u2014 and reframe the problem through a birdwatcher\u2019s lens, not by tracking airport operations, but by counting sparrows and mynas visiting my backyard feeder.", "description": "This talk walks through how we made a slow, memory-hungry feature engineering pipeline radically (~50\u00d7) faster and more memory-efficient using a range of optimization techniques. We\u2019ll start with a naive baseline \u2014 the kind of code you might get from an LLM: nested loops, written in Pandas, reading and writing CSVs. From there, we\u2019ll iterate step by step, showing how each change impacts performance, using concise code snippets, Polars syntax, and real metrics. The goal isn\u2019t to go deep on any one technique, but to give you a broad, practical map of the optimization landscape \u2014 and a better feel for spotting and fixing slow, clunky pipelines in the wild.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "LAS3LX", "name": "Jenya Bogacheva", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/LAS3LX_PhgDXCa.webp", "biography": "Jenya\u2019s journey into Python started in an unexpected place \u2014 studying African cultures and languages \u2014 and eventually led her to a Master\u2019s in Machine Learning & Data Science. Today, she works on flight delay prediction at a company building tech for the aviation industry \u2708\ufe0f.\n\nA digital nomad currently based in the pine forests of the Vietnamese highlands, she finds joy in birdwatching, doing yoga, and chasing the perfect cup of coffee \u2615.", "public_name": "Jenya Bogacheva", "guid": "ddfe6f1b-ed33-5f99-ace1-305435f1e864", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/LAS3LX/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FHMZBD/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FHMZBD/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "587e30b2-bf4b-5537-8ea1-b8dea50f3283", "code": "FJESVD", "id": 73045, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T12:00:00+10:00", "start": "12:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73045-building-production-ready-mcp-servers-from-protocol-to-patterns", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FJESVD/", "title": "Building Production-Ready MCP Servers: From Protocol to Patterns", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments. This talk explores practical implementation patterns for building robust MCP servers in Python, covering architecture decisions, error handling strategies, and real-world deployment considerations. You'll learn to move beyond basic examples to production-grade implementations that can reliably serve AI applications at scale.", "description": "MCP represents a paradigm shift in how AI applications access external data and tools. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.\nThis session will cover:\n- Foundation & Architecture (8 minutes)\n- Implementation Patterns (12 minutes)\n- Production Considerations (5 minutes)\n- Live Demo (5 minutes)", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "PSCB8W", "name": "Nitish", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/PSCB8W_6ymz4vz.webp", "biography": "Nitish Agarwal is a Senior Engineering Manager at GoDaddy, where he scaled India's largest engineering hub from 25 to 120+ engineers and deployed LLM-powered systems serving millions of users. Previously, he led product development at Balena (IoT marketplace), optimized flight search for 80M+ monthly users at Skyscanner, and built platform infrastructure at Expedia Group.\nWith an MBA from City University London and M.Eng from University of Waterloo, Nitish holds AWS Machine Learning Specialty and Solutions Architect Professional certifications. His experience spans national-scale system architecture, AI/ML implementation, and the intersection of technology policy with large-scale infrastructure deployment.", "public_name": "Nitish", "guid": "71c5c374-7332-5885-aee8-f4243cfe6b63", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/PSCB8W/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FJESVD/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FJESVD/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "e9f62db9-ed0b-5b5d-afb1-3f1e05047973", "code": "LQD9GH", "id": 73854, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T13:20:00+10:00", "start": "13:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73854-unarchiving-vulnerabilities-and-avoiding-tar-pits", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LQD9GH/", "title": "Unarchiving vulnerabilities and avoiding tar-pits", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "I found some vulnerabilities in Python's standard library, and now you've all had to upgrade your Python. Sorry, not sorry.\n\nMy day job is focused on open source and software supply chain security. This has made me curious - how trustworthy even are the core technologies our ecosystems are built on - like 46 year old archiving formats?\n\nSo after I read a vulnerability report that exploited symlinks in TAR files, I wondered whether Python suffered the same problem. I started poking around and ended up finding an arbitrary write path traversal in Python's standard library.\n\nThis talk will provide a detailed look at this vulnerability and demonstrate how it can be exploited by an attacker to compromise an exposed system.\n\nI\u2019ll also discuss how these vulnerabilities demonstrate key security challenges facing developers while building their projects. The challenges range from the different incentives between libraries and their applications, the limits of abstractions, and the difficulties of hardening legacy code.\n\nWith movement towards more regulation, like the EU's Cyber Resilience Act, and more interest in improving software security, appreciating these security challenges can help developers focus more on building exciting projects than mitigating vulnerabilities.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "CGMRAQ", "name": "Caleb Brown", "avatar": null, "biography": "Caleb is a Senior Software Engineer working for Google's Open Source Security Team. At Google he contributes to deps.dev and maintains a [repository of malicious package reports](https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages) for open source packages. Caleb has been using Python for over 15 years, starting with build Django sites at publishing companies.", "public_name": "Caleb Brown", "guid": "adc4e404-0f07-5320-8765-fc378e697ebc", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/CGMRAQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LQD9GH/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LQD9GH/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "9ca7179a-b63d-5023-b136-8d0e9c14a90c", "code": "GVEQKY", "id": 73756, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T14:00:00+10:00", "start": "14:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73756-myths-developers-believe-about-open-source-security", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GVEQKY/", "title": "Myths developers believe about open source security", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Number 5 will shock you!\nForget what you think you know about robust dependency graphs, the security gains of living at Head, and those supposedly solid requirements.txt. We'll get down to the nitty-gritty of open source security, giving you real-world large-scale insights to understanding common misconceptions across programming ecosystems. \n\nWhile it\u2019s true that there is only one dependency graph* (*for you) (*right now) it\u2019s not always understood what impact this can have at an ecosystem level.\n\nWe\u2019ve got ecosystem level stats on just how many PURLs map to multiple different packages, dependency graph shifts that happen faster than you can type git commit, and some surprises with Git (im)mutability! \n\nWe will talk about vulnerabilities in your transitive dependencies, understanding what even ARE your dependencies, and trying to identify what that one (*for certain values of one) CVE you were supposedly affected by actually is. (Not to mention what, if anything, you can do about it.)\n\nYou\u2019ll leave this talk with a better understanding of open source edge cases and just how common they are. You\u2019ll be shocked, amazed, horrified, and hopefully a little optimistic about the state of open source security and your place within it.", "description": "We all make assumptions about our builds and dependencies, but those can lead to misunderstandings and surprises. We aim to test these assumptions by highlighting unexpected things we\u2019ve learned from analysing the world\u2019s open source code, leading to a common understanding of what makes this space so complex and ambiguous. \n\nThis talk will cover information about Python as well as many other programming environments.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "X99XWA", "name": "Nicky Ringland", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/X99XWA_gWCnIFK.webp", "biography": "Nicky describes herself as a recovering academic with a background in Computational Linguistics, and a recovering startup edtech founder. She co-founded Tech Inclusion, a technology education not-for-profit, and Grok Learning: a startup teaching hundreds of thousands of students to solve problems with code, before joining Big Tech where she currently works as a Product Manager in open source security.\nNamed one of Australia's inaugural \u201cSuperstars of STEM\u201d and an AFR 'Women of Influence', Nicky is passionate about teaching the next generation to become the creators of tomorrow, while building a healthy, diverse community for them to thrive in.", "public_name": "Nicky Ringland", "guid": "530a7cd3-c894-58a8-9b3a-6d0617c65e6f", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/X99XWA/"}, {"code": "MCES8F", "name": "Tim Zhang", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/MCES8F_YvwwUBe.webp", "biography": "I work on deps.dev!", "public_name": "Tim Zhang", "guid": "f3b8eb5e-317d-5ebb-8c5f-ee34cdc3b032", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/MCES8F/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GVEQKY/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/GVEQKY/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "cc8f1dfb-c5f1-5e3e-a476-535da7abe0c6", "code": "SPFDLZ", "id": 74232, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T14:40:00+10:00", "start": "14:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 2", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74232-reducing-the-oops-factor-pipelines-for-a-secure-python-development-lifecycle", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SPFDLZ/", "title": "Reducing the \"Oops Factor\": Pipelines for a Secure Python Development Lifecycle", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "The cyber threat landscape is vast, deep and ever-changing. Short of retraining as cybersecurity professionals, How can we, as python developers do our part to help keep ourselves, our customers and our data safe? In this talk, we'll look at the current threat landscape, the ways developers commonly fall short, and just how simple it can be to drastically reduce the \"oops factor\" of our Python development lifecycle.", "description": "Extremely clear, practical and easily actionable advice for how everyday Python developers can improve the security posture of their projects today.\n\nWe'll step through common risk factors, looking at examples of high profile failures including: credential leakage, PyPI and supply chain security and how SAST (static analysis security testing) can help identify common bugs - many of which have been on the OWASP top 10 since the very beginning.\n\nAs we go, we'll build up our own swiss-cheese model of risks and explore Python tooling that we can add to our DevSecOps pipeline to improve our security posture.\n\nThe key takeaways is just how easily we can all score some easy wins with little effort.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "9JRZ8S", "name": "Simon Merrick", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/9JRZ8S_p1JebZR.webp", "biography": "Simon is a Senior SRE  at Stronghold Pay with a background in software development with Python. Previously Simon was a contributor to OpenStack, an open source cloud platform written in Python which sparked his joy for Cloud and DevOps. Coming from a software development background Simon approached his cloud Journey like learning python - through writing code to build and automate cloud infrastructure.", "public_name": "Simon Merrick", "guid": "ab21b56c-14b6-56d6-bc5b-2924cad644fd", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/9JRZ8S/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SPFDLZ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/SPFDLZ/", "attachments": []}], "Ballroom 1": [{"guid": "75b02027-ec4b-5c3d-b435-84c12efbdd14", "code": "D8DNXQ", "id": 72853, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T10:40:00+10:00", "start": "10:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-72853-mcp-for-dummies-feed-more-context-to-llm", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/D8DNXQ/", "title": "MCP for dummies: Feed more context to LLM", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Providing the right context to large language models is challenging. Every integration\u2014whether accessing local files, connecting to Google Calendar, or querying internal databases\u2014requires custom work. Each tool connection becomes a separate, manual effort. This is where MCP comes in. Model Context Protocol (MCP), in simple terms, is a universal adapter for AI models that need external context. It standardizes how context is passed to models, making it easier to build and manage these connections.\n\nMy talk will not only focus on how to get started with MCP, but I will also outline how to build MCP Agents using your own MCP Server tools and the MCP Client UI with Streamlit. At the end of my talk, we will also discuss the security issues associated with MCP and how one can mitigrate those.", "description": "Outline of my talk- breakdown of the 30 minutes:\n- Issues with Large language models and discuss the pain points for the need of MCP (3 min)\n- What is MCP in basic words (2 min)\n- How does MCP work?- Architecture breakdown? (5 min)\n- Need of MCP - Is it overhyped? Share the experience of working with MCP (5 min)\n- Use MCP as a tool in the Agentic Workflow (4-5 minutes)\n- Security concerns and Migration (5-6 minutes)\n- Show a simple code snippet in the end on how to use MCP and Agno Agent (5 min)\n- QA (2 min)", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "XVM8TR", "name": "Tarun Jain", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/XVM8TR_FTeacji.webp", "biography": "Tarun Jain is a Super Agent at AI Planet and is recognized as a Google Developer Expert in AI. He enjoys contributing to open-source projects and maintains two repositories: OpenAGI, for building AI Agents, and BeyondLLM, for quick experimenting, evaluating, and observing RAG pipelines. Tarun also contributed to Google Summer of Code 2024 at Red Hen Lab and Google Summer of Code 2023 at caMicroscope. He is a content creator with over 3500+ subscribers for his channel AI with Tarun.\n\nPrevious Experience: \n- Speaker at PyCon Hong Kong 2024\n- Speaker at PyCon Malaysia 2024\n- Speaker at PyCon APAC - Indonesia 2024\n- Speaker at PyCon Singapore - 2025", "public_name": "Tarun Jain", "guid": "3b5a6fe6-c494-585f-9f13-0163d24d933e", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/XVM8TR/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/D8DNXQ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/D8DNXQ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "d9930453-d8bf-56ed-aceb-fc672d0ccdf0", "code": "LN7HYR", "id": 74225, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T11:20:00+10:00", "start": "11:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-74225-code-without-barriers-inclusive-python-development-with-ai", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LN7HYR/", "title": "Code Without Barriers: Inclusive Python Development with AI", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "This session highlights how AI tools like GitHub Copilot are helping bridge gaps in technical confidence and access, especially for underrepresented developers. We\u2019ll share stories from the launch of the Code; Without Barriers program in Australia, and show how Python and AI can empower new coders to build confidently and creatively.", "description": "We\u2019ll explore how AI supports learning and productivity, especially for those new to Python. The talk will include examples of how AI-assisted coding can reduce onboarding friction, support diverse learning styles, and foster inclusive developer communities. It will also touch on how programs like Code; Without Barriers are shaping the future of AI-ready talent in Australia.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "LHALNK", "name": "Michelle Mei-Ling Sandford", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/LHALNK_UAwTwK2.webp", "biography": "Microsoft Developer Engagement Lead Asia | Tedx Speaker | Dev Community Advocate | MCT | New Breakpoint Host | She Codes Mentor | User Group Host | Hackathon Judge | Open Sourcerer\n\nI live at the heart of the coding community and help drive awareness and engagement as part of the developer relations community. I present at around 50 Conferences and Events around the world each year on AI, Azure, GitHub, Open Source, GameDev and LinkedIn. I judge hackathons and encourage the next generation into technology careers. In 2023 I became the host of the Microsoft ANZ web show - New Breakpoint, which is a show for developers by developers. I run the Microsoft Student Accelerator Program for ANZ encouraging emerging developers to build on Azure.", "public_name": "Michelle Mei-Ling Sandford", "guid": "d4d2d0fd-30cd-59a6-8542-9b4df1e42f32", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/LHALNK/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LN7HYR/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/LN7HYR/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "0128a691-8fe9-5e50-8ac7-dc3e3ead8aec", "code": "EGQWHH", "id": 73124, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T12:00:00+10:00", "start": "12:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73124-tips-and-tricks-data-science-prototype-into-production", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/EGQWHH/", "title": "Tips and tricks: data science prototype into production", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "This is an overview of the tips and tricks I learned while bringing a mathematical optimization model from concept to prototype to production.\nAt its core, the math model is a multi-dimensional knapsack problem, with tens of thousands of items moving between warehouses with up to a hundred user-defined constraints. The model is solved with Google's OR-Tools and is deployed to AWS Lambda.\nSome of the important ideas I want to share are how to build a test suite to ensure that a model of this type is internally consistent and how to handle errors-as-data for your end users. I also learned a really nice way to configure logging in python.", "description": "I learned some things about structuring my data science model. These things are kind of neat, and definitely worth sharing. \nThe test suite for an optimization model needs to ensure internal consistency of the model - so each constraint type is tested in two different ways, once for evaluation and once for optimization. If the individual constraints are consistent, then user requests with multiple constraints have fewer sources of failure. Also, when checking my test coverage reports I discovered the joys of branch testing.\nTo communicate errors as data back to end users, I created a simple InformativeError data model, and included it as an attribute on every response. So the dashboard application will always have a consistent way to display fatal and non-fatal errors back to the user.\nFinally, when building a logging framework, I discovered how to output structured JSON logs, and I have a dictionary config that specifies different filters for logging from the CLI, from Jupyter and from lambda.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "L3CAKQ", "name": "Ruth Luscombe", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/L3CAKQ_Z67lL5c.webp", "biography": "My background is in applied mathematics and data science. I have a PhD and 15 years industry experience. Currently working as a data scientist at a fintech startup where my interest is in building maintainable and robust models for deployment.", "public_name": "Ruth Luscombe", "guid": "625e56ec-0817-527f-a680-d898d9d492fb", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/L3CAKQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/EGQWHH/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/EGQWHH/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "25d68fb4-b41d-51cb-bbfb-a19d8eb2cd04", "code": "CTLQK3", "id": 73482, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-14T13:20:00+10:00", "start": "13:20", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73482-a-chronicle-of-digital-transformation-from-kitchen-chaos-to-kubernetes", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/CTLQK3/", "title": "A Chronicle of Digital Transformation : From Kitchen Chaos to Kubernetes", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "How do you lead digital transformation when your starting point is paper, pens, and a patchwork of spreadsheets? In this session, I share how business users helped drive real change at one of Australia\u2019s largest food and hospitality service providers\u2014progressing from manual paperwork to a cloud-native platform powered by Python, Django, Docker, and Kubernetes.", "description": "I\u2019ll take you behind the scenes of digital transformation in a traditional, paper-heavy business\u2014sharing first-hand experiences from those who faced the frustrations and became part of the solution. Along the way, I\u2019ll highlight real initiatives delivered: from early automation with spreadsheets and scripts, to building a scalable, modern platform.\n\nRather than a technical deep dive, this talk offers an honest look at what it takes to modernise operations in a non-tech environment\u2014while always focusing on people, process, and platform.\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer in a traditional industry or someone championing transformation from within, you\u2019ll find this story relatable, candid, and maybe even a little fun.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "8MX3DS", "name": "Dipendra Paudel", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/8MX3DS_8UfWEIR.webp", "biography": "Dipendra is a Solution Architect at Cater Care. He brings together experience in finance, tech support, and systems analysis to bridge business and technology. He collaborates across teams to streamline processes, drive digital transformation, and create better user experiences, always with a focus on practical, people-first solutions.\n\nA passionate advocate for open source and developer culture, Dipendra works mainly with Python, Django, React, and Google Cloud (with a special interest in serverless). He\u2019s committed to making IT smarter, fostering innovation, and helping teams work better together.", "public_name": "Dipendra Paudel", "guid": "39cbd56c-98ba-5f89-ac68-2be50ede8c87", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/8MX3DS/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/CTLQK3/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/CTLQK3/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "2074962a-b42a-5f35-a036-17b27916b8a1", "code": "ZFWMZ7", "id": 73049, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/ZFWMZ7/MDC-TAGLINE-whitebg_7BFpZfK.svg", "date": "2025-09-14T14:00:00+10:00", "start": "14:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73049-your-datasets-under-your-control-introducing-the-mozilla-data-collective", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZFWMZ7/", "title": "Your datasets, under your control: Introducing the Mozilla Data Collective", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "You're probably familiar with Mozilla's Common Voice project - a crowd-sourced, collective effort that's provided speech data in over 300 languages to help democratise voice technologies and make speech recognition work better for more people.\n\nNow, we're delighted to introduce a sister platform to Common Voice - the [Mozilla Data Collective](https://datacollective.mozillafoundation.org). \n\n## The Problem\n\nAI has a data crisis. We're running out of quality training data because the entire web has already been harvested by crawlers to train AI models  \u2014 leading to the \"Token Crisis\". What\u2019s left? Synthetic data generated en masse - that\u2019s bland, generic and unrepresentative of the world\u2019s diversity. This data is also problematic for training models, as it can lead to model collapse. Meanwhile, quality datasets from diverse contributors sit unused in silos.\n\n## The Solution\n\nMozilla Data Collective is a platform in the truest sense. It\u2019s yours to stand on, and make of it what you will. Mozilla Data Collective works by allowing you to share your data, retain ownership of it, and control who uses it. Upload datasets from research, community collections or specialised corpora. Set your terms - who uses it, for what purpose, and what you get in return. Keep control by tracking who\u2019s using your datasets. \n\n## Why It Matters\n\nOur vision is to encourage the creation of safe, responsible AI that works for _everyone_ - by helping communities to share authentic, ethical and diverse data - a stark contrast to models built by indiscriminately scraping the web and reproducing or synthesising its Anglocentric, white, male biases.\n\nWe want people and organisations - like you - to be able to create, curate and control your data, rather than have it harvested and scraped without your knowledge or consent.\n\nJoin Kathy Reid as she walks you through why better AI requires better data - and why better data requires collective, collaborative, co-created approaches: Mozilla Data Collective.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "WTKLMV", "name": "Kathy Reid", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/WTKLMV_AeP6Pga.webp", "biography": "Kathy Reid works at the intersection of open source, emerging technologies and technical communities.\n\nOver the last 20 years, she has held several technical leadership positions, including roles as Digital Platforms and Operations Manager at Deakin University, managing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Squiz Matrix and Atlassian Confluence, technical lead on projects involving digital signage and videoconferencing, and has worked as a web and application developer.\n\nMore recently, she has run her own technical consulting micro-business, and been engaged on a variety of projects involving data visualisation, certification applications and emerging technologies workshops.\n\nShe was previously Director of Developer Relations at Mycroft.AI, an open source voice assistant startup, and President of Linux Australia, Inc, a not for profit organisation which advocates for the use of open source technologies and runs technical events such as Linux Conference Australia. She brought GovHack \u2013 the open data hackathon \u2013 to Geelong in 2015 and 2016 and in 2011 ran Geelong\u2019s first unconference \u2013 BarCampGeelong. Most recently, she worked as a voice open source specialist for Mozilla.\n\nKathy holds Arts and Science undergraduate degrees from Deakin University and an MBA (Computing) from Charles Sturt University, a Master in Applied Cybernetics (MAppCyber) from Australian National University, as well as several ITIL qualifications.\n\nIn 2019, she was one of 16 people from across the world chosen to undertake a Masters Program in a brand new branch of engineering at the Australian National University's 3A Institute, where she is now a PhD candidate researching voice data and ways to prevent and respond to bias in machine learning systems that use voice and speech, like speech recognition.\n\nKathy currently works with the Common Voice team at Mozilla Foundation as an engineer.", "public_name": "Kathy Reid", "guid": "8557c8ea-c239-5198-b592-805e4aadbfec", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/WTKLMV/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZFWMZ7/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZFWMZ7/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "f752781b-5451-5076-bad6-38664eb4b4d5", "code": "DT7ETX", "id": 73366, "logo": "https://pretalx.com/media/pycon-au-2025/submissions/DT7ETX/maze_2mzwFQk.png", "date": "2025-09-14T14:40:00+10:00", "start": "14:40", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom 1", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-73366-reinforcement-learning-with-quantum-algorithms-simulating-nematode-behaviour", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DT7ETX/", "title": "Reinforcement Learning with Quantum Algorithms: Simulating Nematode Behaviour", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Conference", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "What happens when you combine quantum computing, neuroscience, and reinforcement learning\u2014all in Python? This talk explores how parameterized quantum circuits can be used as \u201cbrains\u201d for agents inspired by the nematode C. elegans, and how these agents learn to navigate their world using reinforcement learning. We\u2019ll see how quantum and classical approaches compare, and what this means for the future of AI and quantum machine learning.", "description": "Can quantum computing help us build smarter, more efficient learning agents? In this talk, we\u2019ll dive into a Python project that simulates the behaviour of the nematode C. elegans using reinforcement learning\u2014once with a classical neural network, and once with a quantum circuit as the agent\u2019s brain.\n\nWe\u2019ll cover:\n\n- The neuroscience inspiration: why C. elegans is a model organism for both biology and AI.\n- How to encode sensory features and actions for both quantum and classical agents.\n- The basics of variational quantum algorithms and how parameterized quantum circuits can be trained using reinforcement learning.\n- How Python (with Qiskit and PyTorch) enables rapid prototyping and benchmarking of these agents.\n- What we learn from comparing quantum and classical brains: learning speed, sample efficiency, and emergent behaviours.\n- Live demos and visualizations of agents learning to solve mazes and perform chemotaxis.\n\nWhether you\u2019re a quantum enthusiast, ML practitioner, or just curious about the intersection of biology and AI, you\u2019ll leave with new ideas and practical tools for exploring these fields in Python.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "3RETGW", "name": "Chris Zaharia", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/3RETGW_mWyEhxs.webp", "biography": "Chris is a software engineer passionate about the intersection of neuroscience, machine learning, and quantum computing.\n\nHe\u2019s currently a Staff Software Engineer at Q-CTRL, building applications to tune and optimize quantum computers. Previously, he was the CTO and co-founder of startups in online education and brain-computer interfaces.\n\nOutside of work, Chris enjoys exploring new technologies, hiking along Australia's coasts and bushland, and playing video games.", "public_name": "Chris Zaharia", "guid": "f0b0ee23-7411-5469-a009-fb6529e787c0", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/3RETGW/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DT7ETX/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/DT7ETX/", "attachments": []}]}}, {"index": 4, "date": "2025-09-15", "day_start": "2025-09-15T04:00:00+10:00", "day_end": "2025-09-16T03:59:00+10:00", "rooms": {"Junior Ballroom": [{"guid": "52b71bec-6d46-559f-ab91-c91d8aa6b0c1", "code": "ZPJ9UL", "id": 79662, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-15T13:30:00+10:00", "start": "13:30", "duration": "03:00", "room": "Junior Ballroom", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-79662-how-to-build-your-own-mcp-powered-genai-agents", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZPJ9UL/", "title": "How to build your own MCP powered GenAI Agents", "subtitle": "", "track": "Development Sprints", "type": "Workshop (3h)", "language": "en", "abstract": "In this workshop we will learn two ways to build AI Agents on AWS. We will learn how to create an agent with the Amazon Strands SDK that is model agnostic, creating a sample application as we go. We will also explore alternate ways we can create agents within Amazon Bedrock and how in each case we can connect to an MCP server and use its tools.", "description": "Don't know what some of these terms are? No problem! As we will also have a 20 min intro into everything you will do in the workshop.\n\n**DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR LAPTOP! \ud83d\ude09**\n\n## How to register\n**IMPORTANT**: Workshops are free to attend, but you must be registered to each session. You can [register a new ticket](https://pretix.eu/pyconau/2025) for \"Just the workshops\".", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "MSK3HR", "name": "Derek Bingham", "avatar": "https://pretalx.com/media/avatars/MSK3HR_ZS8rgBD.webp", "biography": "Derek is a long time developer with a passion for building software, as a Developer Advocate he enjoys talking and writing about what he used to do for a living... for a living. Derek helps and supports various technical communities across Australia and New Zealand and is excited to see how software development technology and practices are constantly evolving, he is also happy mentoring people who are navigating the ambiguities and complexities of a career in tech.", "public_name": "Derek Bingham", "guid": "a43ad6af-e716-5864-971a-6141f96084e1", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/speaker/MSK3HR/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZPJ9UL/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/ZPJ9UL/", "attachments": []}], "Stradbroke Room": [{"guid": "6363a300-6a87-509e-b604-3ddd20fdf25c", "code": "FTGXNV", "id": 79708, "logo": null, "date": "2025-09-15T09:00:00+10:00", "start": "09:00", "duration": "08:00", "room": "Stradbroke Room", "slug": "pycon-au-2025-79708-development-sprints", "url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FTGXNV/", "title": "Development Sprints", "subtitle": "", "track": "Development Sprints", "type": "Sprints", "language": "en", "abstract": "Sprints run on both Monday & Tuesday in the Junior Ballroom.\n\nPython wouldn\u2019t have gotten to where it is without a welcoming community of developers building cool things together. The development sprints are an open space for people to work on projects with a particular focus on open source projects.\n\nThe sprints are a place for everyone, from experienced open source contributors, to interested first-time contributors, and anyone really! Maybe you want to hang out and try out an idea you have, maybe you\u2019d like to find collaborators for a project you want to start, maybe you\u2019d like someone to help you through your first attempts at open source. We\u2019ll provide tables, chairs, wifi, power and a community of supportive developers.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FTGXNV/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/FTGXNV/", "attachments": []}]}}]}}}