The PyCon Italia 2022 multiplicity
More than two years after the latest edition, this year the PyCon Italia conference took place again in person, and at the 2022 edition I participated in multiple roles, all interesting and enriching for me.
Stories of a speaker (3 part series)
- Speaking online at EuroPython 2020
- The Django speaking tour 2022
- The PyCon Italia 2022 multiplicity
Introduction
I arrived for the first time at the Grand Hotel Mediterraneo in 2011 to participate for the first time in EuroPython as a member of the small Italian community of Zope/plone developers and instead I discovered the great family of Italian Pythonistas and immediately felt at home.
Since then I have always continued to participate in PyCon Italia in Florence, from time to time driven by different motivations: to become a better pythonista, to meet companies with whom to share a path and values, to become a speaker by sharing my experiences and finally to help organize the conference and contribute to its success.
The common thread in all these years of participation was not so much the Python language as the people I met and the community of which I felt more and more part, which is why the 2022 edition of PyCon Italia was special because it allowed me to resume this tradition in the presence after two years of interruption.
This year I experienced PyCon Italia from multiple points of view, from which I will try to tell you about my conference, I am sure that you will recognize yourself in one of them and that you will want to participate in a new role, and I hope you will participate in the next edition of PyCon Italia becoming part of the great Italian Python community.
The City
The journey to get to PyCon Italia for me is now an integral part of the conference itself, as usual, this year too I took the train from Pescara, and, after admiring the beautiful views of Italy from the window, I arrived at Bologna, making a small stop in the splendid university city where I studied and lived for a few years, and then I arrived directly in the center of Florence.
From the train station, as always, I can take a nice half-hour walk to the conference venue passing through the main places of the city: the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, the Baptistery of San Giovanni, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio, the Basilica of Santa Croce with its square and the Lungarno.
Obviously, I can also do this walk at the end of the conference by returning to the station from the conference venue, but above all I can visit these places in the evening, in an even more special setting, perhaps walking with other conference members after having eaten or drunk something together in center, on the way back to the hotel.
The venue
The Grand Hotel Mediterraneo has been hosting the conference for many years and is the meeting point for all participants, even those who stay overnight elsewhere, in fact they usually all converge here the day before the conference and entertain themselves in the evening to be able to continue chatting and meeting other people.
This year, upon my arrival at the conference venue, I found many people around, many beginner day participants and tutors, other organizers and volunteers intent on making the final preparations and some participants intent on pre-registration in order to save time. the following morning.
An absolute novelty of this year was the setting up of the garden as a green space to live, where you can rest in the shade of the trees, after being able to dine outdoors on the tables and also be able to participate in some talks and workshops.
Personally I took advantage of the garden a lot this year, I followed a talk on setting up your own remote workstation with plants, I had lunch in the shade of the trees in a quiet atmosphere and I also attended the group’s a-cappella singing performance. “Vocal Blue Trains”, the special event of the conference organized on Saturday evening by Matteo Benci.
Volunteer
In addition to being a participant, the first role I found myself in this edition of PyCon Italia was that of a volunteer.
Before the conference I was available to carry out a voluntary service to help the speakers in their presentations and on Friday morning at 8 o’clock I met with all the other volunteers to follow a short training given by Ernesto Arbitrio, the schedule manager.
I really appreciated seeing many young people among the volunteers, and also new members of the community who immediately made themselves available, but I found it very nice to find historical faces of the conference, volunteers who have contributed to the success of PyCon Italia for many years.
Talk manager
It was my first experience as a volunteer at PyCon Italia and I must admit that it was nice to help directly in the success of the conference and to support the speakers in completing their talk in the best possible way.
I was able to get to know many speakers more closely and understand better all the work behind the good presentation of a talk, which is very useful for me, a long time speaker.
Furthermore, I was able to support the conference managers, and understand more deeply how much organization is needed and above all for a large conference like PyCon Italia.
Keynoter host
I had the honor of being the host of Daniele Varrazzo in his keynote, it was a wonderful experience, in particular because I have been using Psycopg for a long time, the library of which he is the maintainer, and because lately I too have been trying to contribute to his growth.
Daniele’s keynote was very interesting and focused on many aspects of the life of a Free Software developer and the crucial role of the community to support these developers.
Organizator
After the 2019 edition of PyCon Italia, I decided to contribute to the success of this conference but the two years of forced stop have made the fact that I could work as an organizer extend over time.
In recent months I have tried to always participate in meetings and I have also tried to promote participation in Pycon Italia around other conferences.
I thank all the other organizers, who made the success of PyCon Italia possible, I was admired for the dedication they put into the organization of every single initiative and for the amount of work they have done in recent months to ensure that everything goes well. .
This experience was challenging but at the same time full of satisfaction also given the splendid success of PyCon Italia 2022 and I hope to try again to help organize the next edition of the conference.
Speaker
PyCon Italia was the conference where I presented my first talk and since then I have proposed a talk every year, and also this year to respect this tradition I presented some of my talks which were then voted on by the community.
This year I presented my talks in Italian because I wanted to address the members of the Italian Python community after having always presented talks in English in international online conferences.
The talks I presented were “Making the most of Django”, a talk on how to improve as developers by contributing to the community, and “Django with the superpowers of PostgreSQL”, a talk on using the specific features of PostgreSQL with Django.
I had very good talk managers who allowed me to present in total peace of mind, despite having had to present one of the talks in the very first slot of the conference.
I had some difficulties with the timing because I had been presenting a talk in Italian for some time and I kept adding information on the most interesting slides, which I don’t do in English, but in the second talk I was more able to stay on time.
I thank those who participated in my talks, for their time and also for the questions they asked me, both online and live, they helped me understand what to improve.
Sponsor
I met 20tab right at PyCon Italia and a few years later I joined their team. The commitment of 20tab in sponsoring the conferences of the Python community and in particular PyCon Italia is well known and is also one of the reasons that prompted me to be part of it.
Again this year without exception 20tab actively sponsored PyCon Italia, I encouraged my colleagues to participate as speakers and they responded in a great way.
In the end, in addition to sponsorship, the whole 20tab team actively contributed to the success of the conference, bringing 9 speakers who presented 9 talks, 2 lightning talks and a panel.
It is nice to be able to give something back to the community also as a company that is based on Free Software and in particular on Python.
I am proud that 20tab is active in this and I hope that many companies will follow its example, from the smallest to the largest ones.
Community member
In the last two years, participation in the Italian community of Python and Django has been almost essentially limited to participation in the respective Telegram channels which have taken the place of their respective historical mailing lists.
PyCon Italia gave the opportunity to meet live to many people who for months discussed, helped each other and joked together only from a distance, giving a face and a voice to a nickname and an avatar.
For me it was an opportunity to finally meet many members of the community, chat between talks, share a lunch break or a coffee break, walk around the center of Florence and have a drink together, I was also able to offer a couple of long-promised beers.
I discovered even more fantastic people who attended the conference in many ways, some as participants, even from abroad, others as speakers and still others as volunteers or speakers.
I was also able to take some nice pictures with some of them and capture some fun moments together, to talk about at the next conference, always in person.
Social creator
I started sharing my participation in PyCon Italia on Twitter from the 2015 edition, it was the first way I found to contribute to the community and to the conference by trying to document my participation as a memory and promotion.
Over the years I have continued to document my participation in conferences live on Twitter, but in recent years I lacked the possibility of sharing photos accompanying the tweets, so this year I tried to take lots of photos to share them with those who have not. took part in the conference.
Over the years I have often found myself looking back through my own tweets to find the name or photo of a speaker, the title of a talk or the link to the slides of a particularly interesting presentation, so I continue with great pleasure to document about Twitter the conferences I participate in.
Worldwide Python community member
Through Twitter and also through participation as a speaker at other conferences over the years I have met many members of the Python community all over the world, whom I have never missed an opportunity to invite to the PyCon Italia conference.
It was great this year to see that many of them attended PyCon Italia, it was nice to greet them in person, chat with them and even managed to have a nice dinner in the center of Florence, meeting new fantastic members of the worldwide Python community. .
It is nice that despite the distance and the linguistic and cultural differences, then you find yourself sharing the same values of the community and the same passion for Python and Free Software, and you can talk about it in person in a beautiful city, enjoying good food.
Statistics
Maybe it won’t be interesting but I wanted to line up some numbers of this partcipation at PyCon italia 2022.
- ⌛ Days [4] (from 2 to 5 June 2022)
- 🗣️ Presentations [2]
- Make the most of Django
- Django with PostgreSQL superpowers
- 👥 Conferences [1]
- PyCon Italia 2022
- 🏙️ City [1]
- Florence, Italy
- 🚀 Transfers [2] (~10 hours)
- 🚍 Pescara - Bologna - Florence
- 🚆 Florence - Bologna -Pescara
- 🥳 Social events [2]
- PyDrinks
- PycOn the Grill
- 📷 Photos [~ 500]
- 🐦 Tweet [59] (~ 50k impressions)
- 🗺️ Distance [~ 1000 km] (🚆🚶♂️)
Fun facts
- The first PyCon Italia conference was held from 9 to 10 June 2007 also in Florence and some of the organizers at the time participated in this edition as keynoter, volunteers or participants
- The participants who traveled the most to come to PyCon Italia 2022 departed from Melbourne in Australia
- In this edition of PyCon Italia for the first time there is simultaneous transcription on a special monitor
- The conference began on June 2, which in Italy is the Italian Republic Day established to commemorate the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946
- Juna gave a talk on the generation of labyrinths with Python and at the end distributed some small mazes created with a 3D printer