Francesco Conte
Who am I?
I'm a scientific researcher with a PhD in astroparticle physics at the Heidelberg University with a strong will to get out of academia – but in my life I worked many jobs and each of them changed me somehow. I gave up trying to solve the puzzle.
What do I like?
I'm passionate about coding, gaming and cats – well, about many other things, actually. For a cat-loving nerd, I'm surprisingly at ease among people, and on a stage.
What makes me comfortable?
If it's about working, kind of everything? Be it coding (mainly Python, Julia, C++, Fortran, IDL, SQL), developing hardware prototypes, scouting for a publishing house, or working in a bookshop. If it's about life – listening to people talking at ease, and entertain them.
What makes me uncomfortable?
People saying that the AI will bring the world to an end. I'm positive that if it happens, it's more likely it'll be because of them rather than the AI.
Anything else?
I'm Italian, but it's not my fault.
Session
DungeonPy – an interactive Dungeon&Dragons app for remote campaigns
As a matter of fact, tabletop RPGs are secretly distributed systems: one canonical world state, many clients, lossy links (players), and strict access control (“no peeking at the DM notes”). This talk introduces DungeonPy, which evolves a Python D&D companion from two local app – a Pygame battle map and a PySimpleGUI initiative/condition tracker – connected by lightweight TCP messages, into an authoritative server with multiple role-aware clients. The result is a fully real-time interactive setup, where the DM controls the full state and can reveal information selectively – under the hood it’s all about client intents, server validation, state updates, event broadcasting and periodic snapshots. We will cover protocol design (deltas vs snapshots, ordering/idempotency), server-side view projections (DM omniscience vs per-player truth and fog-of-war), UI-safe concurrency, and testing your homemade message bus without summoning race conditions. Expect patterns you can reuse in any stateful client/server app – just with more goblins.