2025-10-30 –, Auditorium
Sometimes the best things in life happen by accident. You think you’re just tinkering with code, and suddenly, you’ve stumbled into a path you never planned on. In my case, that path somehow led from late-night coding sessions for university to becoming a CPython core developer. But I didn’t get there alone.
This is a story about the Python community, the mentors, friends, and random emails that nudged me forward at just the right times. From navigating university to that one message that completely changed my direction, every step had someone in the community being there and encouraging me.
We’ll explore what contributing to Python actually teaches you - the technical lessons, sure, but also the more surprising non-technical ones.
Ultimately, it is a story about how communities can catch people at just the right moment, and how each of us has the power to be that pivotal person for someone else. Because in the end, the real magic of open source isn't in the code we write, it's in the friendships we make, and all the unexpected fun that comes with them.
TBD
Lysandros works as a Senior Software Engineer at Quansight Labs, where he spends most of his time on CPython and the PyData ecosystem. He is a CPython core developer, specializing in the parser, the tokenizer and the REPL. He recently worked on supercharging f-strings in Python 3.12, the new REPL for Python 3.13 and introducing fast string ufuncs in NumPy 2.0. Currently, he's mostly dealing with improving support for free-threaded Python in the PyData ecosystem.