PyVideo.org - PyCascades 2026

A bridge over (not) troubled waters: Collecting marine data from your couch

Sarah Kaiser — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Do you ever have a weird feeling that something around you is off? I certainly do, and one recent recurring thought I have is that the vintage boat I'm helping restore has sunk. I decided to use the tools available to me to put my mind at ease: software, a soldering iron, and stubbornness. My crewmate and I have built a way to get live data from our boat while on the couch at home at 3 am :) Data is a great way to reduce anxiety, and in this case has also generated a rising tide of interest in marine tech infrastructure. In this talk, we will give you a tour the cool OSS tools I have discovered for collecting telemetry on boats, a specialized marine data collection platform (Signal K), and an MQTT bridge to bring it all into my smart home dashboards on Home Assistant.

Am I ready to be a Senior Engineer?

Michelle Brenner — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

When you move from Junior to Mid-level Software Engineer, you’re mostly building on what you already know. You get better at writing clean code, you pick up speed, and you start to really understand how your team works. But making the leap from Mid to Senior? That’s a whole new game. Suddenly, you’re expected to make technical decisions, work across teams, and help drive your team’s success. I’ll talk about what being a Senior Engineer actually means, and what people are really looking for. These days, on-the-job training is rare. Managers want to see these skills early, not just when you have the title.

Here’s a challenge: the most experienced engineers are often working remotely, so it’s harder for newer folks to pick things up just by being around them. How are you supposed to know what’s expected if you never get to see it in action? That’s what I want to help with. We’ll dig into everything from system design to working with other teams, the stuff nobody really explains. This is a sneak peek from my upcoming book (coming Fall 2026), pulled from both my own experience and the many engineers I interviewed.

You’ll leave with practical skills you can start using right away, and a clearer picture of what it really means to be a Senior Engineer, so you can stop guessing and be ready for your next step.

Introducing t-strings: f-strings with superpowers

Dave Peck — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Python 3.14 introduces t-strings: template string literals that look like f-strings but evaluate to a Template instance instead of a str. This opens up exciting possibilities for safer string processing (avoiding injection vulnerabilities in SQL and HTML) and powerful custom formatting (like HTML templating directly in Python), all while using the familiar f-string syntax developers already know and love.

In this talk, I'll describe what t-strings are and how they differ from f-strings and other common Python formatting tools. I'll explore when they're a good fit for new projects and how to use them effectively in everyday code. I'll also demonstrate two libraries — tdom (HTML) and t-sql (SQL) — and close with a live tooling demo in VS Code showing the current state of formatting, linting, and syntax highlighting support.

Attendees will leave knowing when to reach for t-strings, how to adopt them safely, and which tools can improve their developer experience.

More. Better.

Mario Munoz — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

What would it look like to be a good software engineer? Would it mean that you are able to solve complex problems with proven solutions? Or would it mean that you can provide novel and creative ways to solve hard problems? The introduction of AI tooling into a developer's workflow promises gains in productivity. But what does _that_ mean? More code? Better Code? Less toil? More _time_?

Some executives bullish on this technology claim that AI assistants will eventually shorten workers' work weeks. However, the likeliest scenario is not a shorter work week, but increased demands within the same time constraints.

How do we become _better_ engineers within the current climate of overhyped AI technologies?

Python Stings Your Ego: Finding Pride in Community, Not Just Code

Emmanuel Ugwu — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

In tech, it’s easy to get caught up in ego. Chasing the smartest solutions, writing the most complex code, or proving who’s the best in the room. But Python has a funny way of humbling us. Its simplicity reminds us that good code isn’t about showing off; it’s about making things clear, accessible, and collaborative.

This talk is about what happens after that sting of humility. Python doesn’t just strip away ego, it builds communities that make you feel proud to belong. I’ll share stories from my journey with Black Python Devs and other Python groups, showing how people from all walks of life come together, support one another, and create space for growth.

By the end, you’ll see that the real magic of Python isn’t just the language. It’s the people, the openness, and the sense of pride that comes from being part of something bigger than yourself.

There and back again... but by I-5 or the ferry?

Justin Castilla — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Living on Washington State’s peninsula offers endless beauty, nature, and commuting challenges. In this talk, I’ll share how I built an agentic AI system that creates and compares optimal routes to the mainland, factoring in ferry schedules, costs, driving distances, and live traffic. Originally a testbed for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework, this project now manages my travel schedule, generates expense estimates, and sends timely notifications for events. I’ll give a comprehensive overview of MCP, show how to quickly turn ideas into working agentic AI, and discuss practical integration with real-world APIs. Attendees will leave with MCP Server resources and tutorials and a roadmap for building their own agentic AI solutions. A comfortable grasp of Python functions, API calls, framework decorators, and the role of context with LLMs is recommended.

Visual Unit Tests and Live Coding

Don Kirkby — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

When I write Python code to build graphical reports or user interfaces, I wish it felt more like Inkscape or Powerpoint where you can immediately see the effect of your changes.

In this talk, I'll demonstrate techniques I've developed that combine unit testing and live coding to create a Python environment that feels closer to Inkscape or Powerpoint. I'll also talk about some of the challenges of writing visual unit tests.

If you haven't written unit tests yet, you can still get some ideas from this talk. You could also read my essay on [test-driven development] to get a head start.

[test-driven development]: https://donkirkby.github.io/testing/

When the Baby App Crashed: Coding for Chaos (and Parenthood)

Laura Meng — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

As a first-time parent and a developer, I relied on an app to log sleep and feedings. If I was going to lose sleep, at least I’d have data. But one night, the app crashed right when I needed it most. Half-awake and fully frustrated, I decided to build my own version: one that could survive offline and my occasional parental meltdowns.

This talk explores how everyday chaos (whether in parenting or in production) can inspire better engineering. I’ll share how concepts like caching and feature flags turned a midnight side project into a small, reliable system.

Attendees will walk away with practical ideas for making their own applications more dependable under real-world conditions. Basic programming experience is helpful, but the talk is accessible to anyone interested in software reliability, distributed systems, or stories from the trenches of sleepless nights.

Airflow Beyond the Cloud: Python Workflows at the Edge

Constance Martineau — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Apache Airflow is famous for orchestrating massive data pipelines, but what if you could also use it to orchestrate things in your physical workspace?

In this talk, we'll explore how Airflow 3's new lightweight architecture makes micro-orchestration possible on resource-constrained devices. I'll demonstrate a real working system where an Airflow Edge Worker running on a Raspberry Pi controls an "On Air" LED that automatically lights up when a Zoom call starts. All built with standard Python and familiar Airflow patterns.

What starts as a desk toy points to a bigger trend: orchestration breaking free from the data centre and moving closer to where work actually happens. You'll walk away seeing Airflow (and Python orchestration in general) not just as a data-engineering tool, but as a bridge between the digital and physical worlds.

Basic familiarity with Python is all you need, no prior Airflow experience required.

Anti-Patterns in A/B Testing - or How does AB Testing Scale?

Stephen Pettinato — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

AB testing is a tried and true standard across technology companies used extensively for 20+ years, Still it's hard to get right. With vendors and libraries, with better statistics and more experience, companies still struggle to scale AB Testing beyond one artisanal test at time.

Learn the language and systems required to scale AB Testing. Tips and tricks for talking to your manager and stakeholders about the importance of AB Testing as a system and the benefits that happen when it runs like a song.

A basic understanding of AB Testing and Python will make this talk fully understandable, but attendees that lack both of these things will still get the general idea of how AB Testing can be hard to scale

Climbing Out of Fixture Hell, Indirectly

Sammie Jiang — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Once you've moved past the basics of assert and test_ functions, developers often run into a new set of challenges when projects and test suites grow in complexity. This talk explores using pytest's indirect fixtures to create modular, maintainable test suites that scale with your codebase. 

Fixture overuse and mismanagement is one of the most common areas of difficulty with testing/pytest 
- passing data to fixtures: they want to parametrize a `fixture` itself (this is how I initially discovered indirect parametrization)
- fixture hell: conftest.py becomes a dumping ground for poorly named, complex, and interdependent fixtures, making it hard to comprehend what a single test is doing
- scope confusion: struggles with when to use `function`, `class`, `module` or `session` scopes that lead to tests that are either slow (re-creating expensive resources for every test) or flaky (tests interfering with each other via session-scoped fixtures).

You'll discover how `indirect=True` parametrization can elegantly address each of these pain points and see examples of how to refactor messy, hard-to-read tests into clean, declarative patterns. Come away with a clearer mental model of fixture scopes and how to optimize them to reduce test run times.

This talk is for intermediate developers who have basic experience with fixtures and parametrization, who may have encountered the pain points of maintaining a growing test suite.

Getting Started with Open Source Contributions

Stefanie Molin — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

The open source community is all about giving back and learning from one another. No matter how small, every contribution is valuable. And everyone can contribute something with a little bit of help. The hardest part is finding something to work on that fits your interests and skills.

In this talk, I will provide five ways that I used to get started contributing to different open source projects. I also share some guidance on selecting projects to contribute to and how to set yourself up for success. Get ready to start your open source journey!

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This talk is for anyone that has wanted to contribute to open source, but didn’t know where to start or thought they wouldn’t be able to do it with their skill set or time. Come learn how to get started!

Graceful Deletes: Queues, Tasks and Distributed State Management in Python

Chantelle Chan — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Questionable queues, distributed storage chaos, stateful steps, and race conditions galore! Come join us as we dive into the wild world of queues and tasks in Python to perform asynchronous jobs, and how we built a system to manage user deletion across distributed storage systems and application isolation layers. We'll explore the pros and cons of common task queueing systems, and expose gotchas and workarounds that will hopefully save you future headaches! We'll navigate the challenges of sequential deletion in distributed storage systems as a case study, and ultimately show how we went from problem statement to deployed in production.

No More Spreadsheets! Building PyLadiesCon Infrastructure with Python and Django

Mariatta — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

PyLadiesCon is an online conference for the Global PyLadies community. It is one of a kind conference with programming spans 24 hours and offering talks and contents in multiple languages. Run entirely by volunteers, we face unique challenges specific to the nature of our conference.

One of the ways we have been managing the various aspects of PyLadiesCon is by using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets for volunteer sign ups, spreadsheets for program scheduling, spreadsheets for sponsorship. Any information you want about the conference, we have a spreadsheet for that.

While spreadsheets are great for capturing data, they come with drawbacks when it comes to online collaboration with various team members, causing frustrations and confusion among our team of volunteers.

In 2025, PyLadiesCon team said no to spreadsheets and instead started building our conference infrastructure: an open source web app for managing various aspects of our conference. Learn more our challenges in managing the online PyLadiesCon conference, and how we're solving our problems with Python and Django. Contribute to the project, and support the PyLadies community.

Permacomputing and Python

Łukasz Langa — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Will you be able to access your cloud data in 10 years? Are you able to easily access your photos and notes in an open format to analyze, aggregate, and backup? Is a device you bought in 2019 bricked now because the vendor stopped supporting it?

Let's talk about computers and longevity, with special focus on how Python plays into sustainable computing and how you too can reclaim some agency over your data and devices.

The Future of Python: Evolution or Succession?

Brett Slatkin — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

A decade from now there's a reasonable chance that Python won't be the world's most popular programming language. Many languages eventually have a successor that inherits large portions of its technical momentum and community contributions. With Python turning 35 years old, the time could be ripe for Python's eventual successor to emerge. How can we help the Python community navigate this risk by embracing change and evolving, or influencing a potential successor language?

This talk will cover the past, present, and future of the Python language's growing edge. We'll learn about where Python began and its early influences. We'll look at shortcomings in the language, how the community is trying to overcome them, and opportunities for further improvement. We'll consider the practicalities of language evolution, how other languages have made the shift, and the unique approaches that are possible today (e.g., with tooling and AI).

All levels of experience are welcome!

To Notebook or Not to Notebook: Multilingual Workflows for Exploratory Data Analysis

Rodrigo Silva Ferreira — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Notebooks have become the default environments for exploring data, prototyping ideas, and sharing results. Yet, their influence extends far beyond code execution, as they shape how we think, collaborate, and communicate with data. As real-world projects increasingly rely on multiple programming languages, magic commands and cross-language kernels open new possibilities for combining Python, R, SQL, markdown, and more within a single workflow, blending computation with storytelling in powerful ways.

This talk explores how multilingual workflows transform exploratory data analysis (EDA), highlighting where notebooks shine and where they introduce new challenges around testing, version control, and scaling. Through real-world examples, we’ll look at how these tools lower barriers, reinforce trust and integrity in data science workflows, and change the way we reason about problems. Attendees will gain practical strategies for integrating multiple languages in their notebooks and a deeper understanding of how these tools shape modern data science. Basic familiarity with Python and EDA is helpful but not required.

Variables and objects in Python: it's pointers all the way down

Trey Hunner — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

In Python, assignment statements don't copy objects, and data structures don't actually contain objects. These two surprising facts have a lot of interesting consequences and are the reason behind many of Python's design decisions.

In this talk, we'll explore the reference-like nature of Python's variables and objects, noting both the benefits and gotchas involved.

Among other ideas, we'll see that in Python:

The word "change" is ambiguous
Copying is usually explicit
Tuples aren't always immutable

During the process, we'll consider our own mental model of Python.

In Python, it's pointers (or references, names, bindings, or aliases) all the way down.