North Bay Python 2024

Adam Harvey

Adam works as a security-focused software developer at the Rust Foundation working on ecosystem security, especially around improving supply chain security for crates.io and Rust releases.

Professionally, his history includes stints as a developer at New Relic, deviantART, and Sourcegraph, while his open source work includes being a project member of Rust and PHP.

In his spare time, he plays cricket, kayaks, speaks Spanish extremely badly, throws tennis balls for his golden retriever, and tries to convince people that his Australian accent is actually flawless Canadian.

  • Quantifying Nebraska
Akshay Agrawal

Akshay is both a researcher, focusing on machine learning and optimization, and an engineer, having contributed to several open source projects, including TensorFlow and CVXPY. He has a PhD from Stanford University, where he was advised by Stephen Boyd. He also holds a BS and MS in computer science from Stanford.

Akshay is currently building marimo, a new kind of reactive notebook for Python that's reproducible, git-friendly (stored as Python files), executable as a script, and deployable as an app.

  • marimo: an open-source reactive notebook for Python
Christine Story

Coming Soon

  • Exploring the intersection of humanity and technology in a hedonistic context with cocktail robotics
Christopher Swenson

Dr. Christopher Swenson is a computer scientist, programmer, author, and occasional mathematician, who has worked for companies like HashiCorp, Google, Twilio, and the US Government. Christopher wrote the book Modern Cryptanalysis. He is a cupcake.

  • WASM all the way down
David Lord

Lead maintainer of Flask, Jinja, Click, and others on Pallets. Member of the Python community and PSF fellow. I also enjoy hiking, scuba diving, ultimate frisbee, and brewing beer.

  • Magical (or not) GraphQL
Glyph

Although most well-known for being the founder of the Twisted project, Glyph has also worked on massively multiplayer online games, web applications, enterprise information management software, and created or contributed to dozens of open source projects, mostly related to infrastructure. Currently, he is an independent software creator, supported by patrons on Patreon, and a consultant.

  • The Perfect Python Project
Liz Acosta

Liz Acosta’s professional journey has come full circle from film student, to copywriter, to engineer, to developer advocate, and now to developer content marketing manager for Streamlit. As a developer marketing Swiss army knife, Liz is particularly interested in what happens at the intersection of tech and community and is especially fond of turning complex concepts into casual conversation.

Liz loves plants, pugs, pizza, and -- of course -- Python! She has spoken at Python conferences and meetups both local and national and enjoys sharing her passion for software testing with others.

  • Mock It Till You Make It: How to Verify Your External Mocks Without Ever Leaving Unittest
Lukas Fittl

Founder and CEO of pganalyze, a product for monitoring and optimizing Postgres performance.

Host of the weekly series "5mins of Postgres", that explains what's new with Postgres development, or introduces various Postgres concepts in detail.

Author of pg_query, a C library (with Ruby, Rust, Go, Python & other bindings) to parse queries just like Postgres does.

I love working with PostgreSQL statistics, visualizing them, and using techniques like constraint programming to automatically optimize a Postgres database for a specific workload.

  • How to optimize Postgres queries for Python developers
Margaret Fero

Margaret Fero is an interdisciplinary hacker with interests ranging from technical writing to board games to corporate risk analysis to the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. In their spare time, Margaret enjoys using their background in the performing arts, seeking out interesting snacks from around the world, and basking in the many useful services of local libraries.

  • What Not To Document And Why
Mario Munoz

I code Python by night, which is what happens when there's not enough time during the day. In the past couple of years, I've presented several talks/tutorials at PyCon US, DjangoCon US, Python Web Conference, North Bay Python, PyGotham, and others. Sometimes I neglect/blog on my website Python By Night, and start (or abandon) too many side projects.

  • Bridges, or Benefits of Connecting Our Communities
Noah Kantrowitz

Noah Kantrowitz is a web developer turned infrastructure automation enthusiast, and all around engineering rabble-rouser. By day he runs infrastructure at Geomagical/IKEA and by night he makes candy and stickers. He is an active member of the DevOps community, and enjoys merge commits, cat pictures, and beards.

  • What Python Can Learn From Other Languages
Pamela Fox

Pamela is currently a Principal Cloud Advocate in Python at Microsoft. Previously, she was a lecturer for UC Berkeley, the creator of the computer programming curriculum for Khan Academy, an early engineer at Coursera, and a developer advocate at Google.

  • A visual exploration of vectors
Paris Buttfield-Addison

Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison is co-founder of Secret Lab Pty. Ltd., a game development studio, and Yarn Spinner Pty. Ltd., an interactive narrative tools provider, both based in beautiful Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Secret Lab is best known for the BAFTA- and IGF-winning Night in the Woods, and the Qantas Joey Playbox. Yarn Spinner builds the wildly popular open source YarnSpinner narrative game framework. Paris formerly worked as a software engineer, and product manager for Meebo, which was acquired by Google. He has a degree in medieval history, a PhD in Computer Science, and has written more than 30 technical books on machine learning, programming, and game development, mostly for O’Reilly Media. He can be found on Elon's Hell Site as @parisba and on Mastodon at @parisba@cloudisland.nza, and online at http://paris.id.au

  • Nightmare on LLM Street: The Perils and Paradoxes of Knowing Your Foe
Phil Beffrey

Recently founded Revision PC and created a "boot-to-BASIC"-style OS and programming language with an '80s flavor but modern capability; and co-founded Atlas Innovations Inc (Delaware) and designed/developed next-generation crafting tools and STEM-learning products.

Co-founded Cognitive Devices Inc and developed hardware, firmware, and software for the Provo Craft Cricut line of electronic cutting products; you've seen these products advertised on TV.

At both Gracenote and Siren Systems I developed ML techniques for music analysis, identification, and recommendation. Gracenote created the well-known CDDB system for identifying music CDs.

Helped Pixar establish their interactive media group and developed numerous rendering and imaging technologies as part of their Graphics R&D group (i.e. RenderMan, which is the VFX/Animation standard for making images).

I was the first Engineering Manager at Digital Domain and the "father of" Nuke (DD's compositing system sold to The Foundry, now the industry standard for VFX post production).

Co-founded Digital Arts, a pioneering 3D graphics company that developed one of the first desktop 3D animation production systems, including the first RenderMan-compliant renderer.

  • In the 1980s and earlier, Python used to be BASIC. Could BASIC possibly be an alternative or a companion to Python today?
Philip James

Philip James (aka phildini) has been using Python since a friend used a projector at a summer camp to teach him code basics, changing the entire course of his life from "moody theater kid" to "moody (but smiling) Pythonista". Philip has used Python to help build the Internet at Eventbrite and Patreon, and now uses Python and Django every day as the CEO of Crowdalert.

  • Boxes Full of Python: Understanding ActivityPub and the Open Web
Rich Gibson

Currently Python, database, and spatial programming. In the past wrote books about mapping, worked on the Gigapan project taking high resolution images, various Maker type projects including Hello Drinkbot. He/him.

  • Exploring the intersection of humanity and technology in a hedonistic context with cocktail robotics
Tilde Thurium

Tilde (they/them) is a San Francisco based artist, activist, and engineer. By day they are a free and open source software advocate at deepset. They can probably deadlift more than you. Ask them about how to paint an algorithm, the intersections between mutual aid and biology, or which coast has the best vegan croissants.

  • To rewrite or not to rewrite: an OSS community journey in the LLMiverse
Zac Hatfield-Dodds

Zac grew up in Australia eating dark chocolate, reading books, and occasionally indulging in both at the same time. By day he works at Anthropic, an AI safety and research company in San Francisco; by night he (co-) maintains Hypothesis and Pytest, and contributes to a range of other Python projects. You can read more about him at https://zhd.dev/

  • Hypothesis Levels Up: codegen, observability, fault localization, and a black-magic backend