Why Python is our favorite Pizza topping!
This month we held the third Hamburg Python Pizza event! Originally planned as a hybrid event, where we hoped to spark connections between both those at remote and in person attending, we had to go full remote due to the rising COVID-19 numbers in Hamburg. While this was a setback, it didn't stop us hosting a great community event.
A community conference
Python Pizza is a community run micro conference, which was started in Naples in 2017 by Python Italia. Bringing together people's love of both Python and Pizza it has since been held in Berlin, Hamburg and Holguin, Cuba (where it will happen again in January 2022) as well as a special Remote edition on New year's eve 2020. The hallmark of this micro-conference is to present short, dynamic sessions, in which developers present their knowledge of the language or their own experiences with real-life projects. Each talk lasts 10 minutes (no more, no less).
"A good mix of topics, beyond the technical side of things. The plannable breaks turned out to be positive as well." -Attendee
For this edition we had 26 talks in total, 23% of which were from first time speakers, with a diverse lineup with speakers from all over the world. Two amazing keynotes kicked off both the morning and afternoon sessions, Iqbal Abdullah (Tokio LaLoka Labs) on Saying Thank You and Peggy Sylopp (Pexlab, Berlin) on AI and Sustainability. Talks were streamed live on both Youtube and Twitter.
In between talks Tereza and Jessica from PyLadies Hamburg and Berlin had a go at the long running joke format, weaving stories about Einstein and his personal driver into the talk topics and then training their own AI on what it meant to be human based on the conference talks (Spoiler it was to throw Pizza parties).
"A conference can feel like meeting friends (even though I didn't know most of the people)" -Attendee
We also organized interactive networking sessions where speakers and participants could join video calls and were given optional conversation prompts. Participants joined our Discord channel where they could ask questions and connect to other participants throughout the day and PyLadies Munich together with Luciano Ramalho ran a raffle for copies of Luciano's book Fluent Python.
Organizing a micro conference
The event was organized mostly by women from the PyLadies community. With initially planning to be hybrid we had inclusiveness in mind and wanted the remote and in person experience to be equally engaging. As it became apparent our plans would have to change, we adapted, this was not without its challenges.
Organizing a community event has the same needs and duties as any other event, plus all the work is voluntary. It involves tasks ranging from creating the scope of the event, organizing volunteers, creating and self-organizing tasks, seeking sponsorship, organizing giveaways, creating call for speakers, communicating with stakeholders, creating and updating the website and social media, deciding collectively and in numerous meetings and asynchronously what the next steps will be. It is not a trivial job but the reward is enormous, to have almost a ¼ of talks be from first time speakers is enriching our community and to be able to create a space where folks feel safe and empowered to express themselves is one of the many reasons volunteers opt in to such organization work. Communities often rely on these people who are willing to invest free time and energy so it’s always great to receive feedback on how that work has impacted others.
"Getting in touch before, for the tech check up was super important to have everything smooth on stage. You did a great job behind the scenes!" -Speaker
Our approach to the CFP was that we accepted ALL the talks submitted, meaning no filtering on talks based on quality or topic, considering the range and quality of talks this was, we felt, quite outstanding. Often conferences will openly admit to being unable to attract a broad range of speakers and we put our success in part down to the way we communicated around the event and where we did so. Before the conference PyLadies Berlin ran a talk writers room event to support and encourage more people from under-represented groups to apply for conference talks. However this also stems from the community Python Pizza has built and it was incredibly powerful to be able to put our trust in the community to bring interesting and high quality content to the conference.
"I couldn't have asked for a better experience/atmosphere for this. The writer's room was also a big help and I was thankful for the insights you provided regarding the CFP process." -Arati, who made her speaking debut at Pyton Pizza
What we learnt
While the overall feedback was positive, we also as an orga team made some important learnings. Rather than the multi platform approach we had which also expanded due to going full remote may have been better as a single platform for participants so they could stay in one place.
Another unintentional learning was to have more breaks to split up blocks of talks: during the day we had missed an hour in our schedule which gave everyone a welcomed extra break. In our post conference survey participants were also keen to have a space dedicated to being able to ask speaker questions.
"I think it was great for online conference, but I prefer live events (hope they will be possible someday again)" -Attendee
These learnings plus some more will help us make future editions, be there in person, remote or hybrid, better, and we are thankful to those who took the time to offer feedback.
We would like to thank all the attendees, speakers and the orga team for making an event that seemed to run so smoothly possible: Jessica Greene, Laysa Uchoa, Paloma Oliveira, Mariana Meireles, Laura Gutierrez Funderburk, Dr Maren Westermann, Felix Seeliger, 👩🏼🎨 Tereza Iofciu and Mary Bajorek
We would also like to thank our sponsors without which such events would just not be possible:
🍕COYO
🍕Ecosia
🍕Rasa
🍕Sauce Labs
🍕neuefische GmbH - School and Pool for Digital Talent
🍕Python Software Foundation
🍕EuroPython Society
🍕Python Software Verband e.V.
🍕PyLadies Berlin
🍕Pyladies Munich
🍕PyLadies Hamburg
In case you missed it!
Website: https://lnkd.in/dB6EknT
Youtube stream: https://lnkd.in/dS7z_7Em