Accepted Talks

These are the talks accepted to PyTexas, listed in no particular order. A full schedule will be released closer to the conference.

Build your own ChatGPT

Talk

Interested in machine learning and chatbots? This talk is for you! We'll go over the OpenAI API and use cases, particularly how you can build your own ChatGPT over text message using Python.

Speaker: Lizzie Siegle

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Put your Pants on and lint all your Python code!

Talk

Are you struggling to enforce custom code conventions in large codebases? Learn how to automate this process while maintaining a consistent CI time using Pylint and Pants Build. Attendees will be able to apply the stack in their own codebases right away.

Speaker: Aurelien Didier

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Recursion for Beginners: A Beginner's Guide to Recursion

Talk

An introduction to recursion and the Python-specific functionality for recursion. Recursion is not just for computer science wizards, and this talk breaks it down into smaller (and smaller!) concepts.

Speaker: Al Sweigart

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Using Python for Digital Investigations

Talk

With the vast amount of publicly available data unleashed by the internet's rise, anyone can now document war crimes, track extremist movements, and investigate environmental abuses. This talk will cover how Python tools and developers can accelerate and improve the accessibility of such digital investigations, and hold power to account.

Speaker: Tristan Lee

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Trust Fall: Hidden Gems in MLFlow that Improve Model Credibility

Talk

When it comes to machine learning projects, verifying and trusting model performance results is a particularly grueling challenge. This talk will explore both how we can use Python to instill confidence in model metrics and the best way to keep models versioned to increase transparency and accessibility across the team. The tactics demonstrated will help developers save precious development time and increase transparency by incorporating metric tracking early on.

Speaker: Krishi Sharmai

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Unlocking the Power of Health Data: An Introduction to FHIR and Python

Talk

Healthcare organizations generate and store vast amounts of data, but accessing and utilizing this data can be a challenge. One solution to this problem is FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), a standard for exchanging electronic health information. In this talk, we will explore the basics of FHIR and its data model, as well as how to use Python to interact with FHIR servers and manipulate FHIR data. We will also discuss real-world examples of how FHIR and Python are being used in the healthcare industry to improve patient care and drive innovation. Attendees will come away with a solid understanding of FHIR and Python, and be equipped to start using these technologies to unlock the power of their own health data.

Speaker: Aly Sivji

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Duck Typing, Metaclasses, & Recursion: Building a Generalized Deep Collection Type

Talk

Quickly groking and working with deeply nested collections like combinations of dicts and lists (and sometimes other types too) is a common problem, whether it's trying to understand a data set, an API response, or detailed instructions or results from infrastructure as code. Let's talk about current solutions to the problem, their limitations, and how to make that all even easier. Let's talk about making a DeepCollection that can handle anything.

Speaker: Joseph Nix

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Automating your Cloud Cost Analysis

Talk

Public Cloud is often touted as a cheaper option, but the bills we get in the mail can be long and convoluted. For better or worse, any dollar spent in the cloud is a result of an architecture decision. This talk will give attendees a firm understanding of the relationship between the architecture and the invoice and the key metrics to keep an eye on.

We will cover:

• What is FinOps and why is it important
• Key metrics for measuring Cloud spend
• Automating Cloud Invoices

Using Python, a SQL database, and FaaS, we can build a pipeline that automatically retrieves our invoice, and populates a searchable table to derive insights such as our top 5 most used services and biggest growing services. Attendees with small developers account to large multi-account deployments will better understand the impact of their architecture on their wallet.

Speaker: Amy Arambulo Negrette

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How to Build and Ship More Secure Python Apps with Sigstore

Talk

Software supply chain security is increasingly important to the open source ecosystem, but the learning curve can be steep. Certificate authorities, transparency logs, keys, signing… and even keyless signing! What do these terms all mean and how can a Python developer incorporate tools that make their projects more secure?

This talk will provide a high-level overview of the developer-first open source project, Sigstore, within the Python context. We’ll go through each component of Sigstore, including how to sign a software artifact with Cosign, how Fulcio issues certificates, and finally how developers and end users alike can verify claims made on the Rekor public ledger. We’ll discuss how PyPI is leveraging Sigstore to help with verifying and trusting dependencies we all rely on. Finally, we’ll go through a demonstration of creating, publishing, and signing a containerized Python app.

The audience will walk away with an understanding of how they can navigate software security more effectively and be better citizens of open source through implementing recommended security practices.

Speaker: Lisa Tagliaferri

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A BuildEngineer in a buildless lang

Talk

There’s more to Python than the language. And there’s more to Build Engineering than building code.

An entire ecosystem of amazing tools sit just beyond the atmosphere of Python’s interpreter. It’s a Build Engineer’s job to ensure you’re using the right ones, configured the right way, and that they run cohesively. As IBM Watson Orders' Build Engineer I am the guardian of the developer experience of almost 100 engineers and data scientists in a Python monorepo. In the past year pre-submit time plummeted, the ease-of-use of local development tools skyrocketed, and I became a maintainer of an Open Source Build System. I am restlessly passionate about their developer experience as well as yours. You should be too.

Come find out why Build Engineering is important to you and your org, through one person’s constant struggle to expect better, how to find and foster Build Engineering, and how you can build better Python for yourself and others.

Speaker: Joshua Cannon

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Real-time Event Streaming with Python

Talk

As real-time event streaming has become a necessity in many organizations, a plethora of libraries, frameworks, and applications have arisen to help meet that need. These different tools each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and you may end up deciding to use one or more of them, but many problems can be solved with a simpler approach.

Speaker: Dave Klein

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A Tale of Two Typings

Talk

We discuss two different methodologies we have used to add type annotations to our Python services: gradually adding type annotations, or incrementally re-writing the code with type annotations. We'll discuss the benefits and challenges of each, when either may be appropriate, and our real-world experiences doing both.

Speaker: Thomas Stephens

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Having fun with application design

Talk

Do you ever look at your software systems and workflows holistically? Do you ever wonder what could be achieved through smarter designs and dedicated effort? When you design your applications, do you consider developer efficiency and satisfaction as much as end-user experience? Python offers the simplicity and flexibility to achieve both.

In this talk, I will explore a journey from supporting disjointed components and addressing ad hoc business requests to developing a technical vision and creating an elegant solution that both serves business needs and offers developers a pleasant support experience. I will also highlight the design thinking approach, software architecture “-ilities” concepts, and the decision process that took place during this project.

Speaker: Natalya Buga

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Practical Decorators

Talk

Show some examples of useful decorators and talk about the pros and cons of the decorator protocol.

Speaker: Josh Schneider

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HoloViz: Visualization and Interactive Dashboards in Python

Talk

Do you use data visualization to understand data and tell stories? Do you need to visualize big data? Are you interested in leveling up your visualization skills and creating dashboards with HoloViz? This talk is for you!

Speaker: Sophia Yang

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Improving code without losing your mind

Talk

Do you find it harder to work with parts of your project? Do you shy away from working with aspects of your code? When showing people what you're working on, do you feel the need to explain why it got that way?

As our projects grow, they usually become harder to maintain. This happens when we focus too much on adding new features. As a result, our code becomes hard to change or understand.

This talk will give you a tool you can use to unwind that code, making it easier to change and understand, not to mention giving you more satisfaction.

Speaker: Chris May

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Exploring Socio-technical Security Concerns in Critical Open-source Python Repositories

Talk

Looking at open-source security concerns from a socio-technical perspective is currently underexplored. In this talk, we will learn about analyzing such risks by looking at governance structures, pull requests, and GitHub configurations in open-source 3D printer projects and the overall top Python repositories.

Speaker: Jessy Ayala

Lightning Talks Day 1

Talk

Rapid fire 5 minute talks

Speakers:

• Paul McGuire
• Josh Schneider
• Al Sweigart
• Shreya Batra
• Joshua Cannon
• Leon Vanstone
• Eric Adams

Lightning Talks Day 2

Talk

Rapid fire 5 minute talks

Speakers:

• Andrew Knight
• Ilan Schnell
• Mara Manskie
• Josh Schneider
• Adam Allevato
• Brandon Rhodes