If you ask me which PyCon in Europe takes place in the most beautiful location, has the best food, great social events, and offers high-quality talks, I’d say without hesitation—PyCon Italia! I flew to Italy directly from PyCon US, which was in total a 25-hour journey, but it was totally worth it!

Florence

Florence is an incredibly charming city filled with sculptures, cute streets, and lovely natural surroundings. You can wander around for hours and find beautiful sculptures or artistic sights around every corner.

The city is safe and super clean. As a huge plant lover, I appreciated seeing so many plants around.

Food

My first quest upon arriving in Italy was to eat pizza! I went to random places, and every single spot I visited had such delicious food! I had no issues finding vegetarian options in Florence.

Public Speaking Workshop

The biggest highlight of the conference was a public speaking workshop with Lorenzo. The main takeaway from the workshop was to remove from your presentation anything that doesn’t add value to the end user. He also highlighted the importance of storytelling and how people don’t care much about facts.

Lorenzo inspired me to remove my ‘About Me’ slide—the audience doesn’t care about the speaker; they care about the value they receive. When I think about the best speakers I’ve ever seen, none of them spent a minute of their valuable time talking about themselves—they jumped straight into the topic.

The most important tip I remember is this: after every presentation, decide to improve one single thing. If you constantly improve after each of 10 talks, you’ll be better than 95% of the speakers.

When I got home, I read both of his e-books and can totally recommend them! You can find the link here. They offer lots of practical advice on putting slides together, understanding accessibility, and more.

In one of the books, Lorenzo shares a story where he asked his mentor for one piece of advice to improve as a public speaker. The mentor told him to start writing. This story inspired me to write more as well! Thank you, Lorenzo!

My talk

It was fun! I enjoyed talking to people afterward and received very valuable feedback on what to improve. I learned a lot and can’t wait for the final run of my talk at DjangoCon, where I’ll incorporate even more changes to make it even better!

Talks

I greatly enjoyed the keynote talk about Python performance & myths by Antonio Cuni, the author of CPy and core developer of MyPy. He mentioned an interesting point: if you have a program where 80% is slow and 20% is fast, you can speed up the 80% part, but then the 20% part becomes the bottleneck. So, you end up at the same place. The reason Python is slow is because it’s dynamic - the interpreter has to do a lot of guesswork, which takes time. I highly recommend watching the talk!

If you’ve ever wondered where the line is between humans and LLMs, I highly recommend Jodie Burchell’s keynote talk! She also discusses the phenomenon of LLMs hallucinating, explaining how they work and why. Beyond the content, I was really impressed by her presentation skills—she speaks clearly and articulately, making her easy to listen to.

I also loved Daniele Procida’s keynote talk about attention and details. He showed the following photograph and asked what we see in it.

The longer you look at it, the more details you notice, like the perfect alignment of elbows or knees, or the two thirds rule. It’s so nice to hear someone talk about art at a technical conference!

Thank You, Organizers!

As a fellow community organizer, I want to thank the organizers for the time and effort they put into making this event happen!

Arrivederci until next year!