PyCon 2026

I first started learning Python when I took a job at Logos in 2007. Two people i respected and admired--my BBN colleague Lance Ramshaw, and my internet influencer/friend James Tauber--had told me about Python, and a new job seemed like the right time to try it out. I did, and never looked back: Python, and later Django, became the mainstay of the work my team and I did in curating and building Bible datasets and knowledge.

Since joining the Python community, i've attended a number of PyCons ()Python conferences), including the most recent conference in Long Beach. I've regularly found a lot of value from the tutorials in learning in depth about new topics, as well as the talks on various subjects. It's a bit like a buffet of knowledge, sometimes with a very full feeling afterwards.

I recently preached on Acts 17, the Apostle Paul's visit to Athens. As some Greek philosophers debated with him in the marketplace, they questioned his unfamiliar message: the NIV renders their comment as "What is this babbler trying to say?" The Greek word rendered "babbler" is only found this one time in the New Testament: it's σπερμολόγος (spermalogos), literally a "seed picker", as in a bird picking up seeds from the ground. This term had come to have the figurative meaning of someone who picked up bits of knowledge, attempting to appear knowledgable.

For me, PyCon can be a similar experience: I go from talk to talk, looking for bits of programming insight, or new libraries or framework, that might be helpful. Looking back on notes from previous PyCons, some things proved useful and have become part of my toolkit. Other things seemed interesting at the time but never "stuck". But it's very hard to know in advance what will pay off: it's just part of the experience.

Anyway, some highlights from PyCon US 2026:

• Pamela Fox's tutorial on MCP Build your first MCP server in Python was clear, with great materials (including "there's more than way to do it" instructions) that left me confident I could reproduce the approach on my own data.
• I learned about reactive notebooks at Daniel Chen's tutorial on Shiny: i'm looking forward to taking that further with Marimo.

Unfortunately the tutorials were not recorded this year, but some of the materials