Abby Mitchell
Abby started her career in London as a web developer at IBM before moving to NYC in 2022 and joining Meta in 2025. She’s worn a bunch of hats along the way - software developer, developer advocate, product manager, people manager, and is currently a Senior Developer Advocate focused on the Python Open Source community. Over the years her work has often sat at the intersection of software development and emerging technologies, specifically quantum computing, scientific computing and of course machine learning and AI. When she’s not working, she’s busy doing a part-time master’s degree at UC Berkeley (graduating Spring 2026). If there's any time left over, she loves traveling, photography, and food (both eating and cooking it)!
Session
Meta is proud to sponsor PyLadiesCon and to share our commitment to supporting the Python ecosystem through impactful open-source initiatives. In this talk, we’ll spotlight two major projects:
Pyrefly: a fast, open-source Python type checker and language server written in Rust, designed to catch type-related errors before runtime and provide powerful IDE integration
Free Threaded Python: a new addition to CPython (reached supported status earlier this year) that enables users to remove the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) to enable true parallel execution of Python code across multiple threads, significantly improving multithreading performance.
Join us to learn more about these initiatives, how to use them and how to get involved!