The Culture of PyCon AU

If you haven’t joined us for a PyCon AU before, attending PyCon AU may seem a bit different to other conferences.

We have an enforced code of conduct.

It’s not taken lightly. It provides a framework in which our event operates, and all attendees must observe and adhere to it. Read our code of conduct.

Everyone is welcome 🏳️‍🌈

All members of society are welcome at our event. We respect pronouns and preferred names. We use gender-neutral greetings. We appreciate all backgrounds, and understand that not everyone is a Python programmer. This conference is still for you.

We are a programming conference, not a hackercon.

For multiple years we have hosted the Security and Privacy specialist track. While we host content and speakers that may also be at home at a ‘hackercon’, we are not a hacker conference.

Speakers and attendees are reminded not to attack or pentest the conference networks, conference infrastructure, conference processes, or the conference attendees in any way.

We have some unusual references.

If you’re new to Python or PyCon AU, here’s some things we will probably mention without specifically stating their origin.

The may include, but are not limited to:

Lines from the “Zen of Python”

This is an easter egg in Python itself, where if you type “import this” you get “The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters”. Read more about PEP 20

curlyboi

curlyboi is our multicoloured snake graphic, lovingly designed by Tania Walker as part of our conference branding redesign in 2018. The name originates from the meme: “Who would win: (computer reference) or one curly boi (a right parenthesis)”.

Lightning talk references

The lightning talks from 2018 and 2019 yielded many amazing talks that fed into each other during the event. Some notable references:

flip flop operator, or the flipfloperator: referenced non-verbally in a 2018 invited speaker presentation, then expanded upon in a lightning talk, this refers to a now defunct operator in Ruby. Watch more: First lightning talk, Second lightning talk. (2019 update: the deprecation of the flip-flop operator in ruby was reverted.)
Woolworths: reference to the lightning talk “History and Politics”, and reprise.
Tim has too many projects: a recurring talk by Tim Ansell in which he invites community contributions to his many projects, including but not limited to some of the hardware used by Next Day Video, the AV team contracted by PyCon AU (sample lightning talk).
“One minute!”: when lightning talks are run in person, our affectionately named ‘Lightning Talk Czar’ Christopher Neugebauer uses lightningtimer.io to ensure talks are 5 minutes long. When 60 seconds remain, he often helps the speaker with a verbal queue, an ominous “One minute!”.

What is ‘dunder’? What are ‘magic methods’?

In Python, many features are implemented using ‘magic methods’ or ‘dunder methods’. ‘Dunder’ here is actually a portmanteau of ‘double’ and ‘under’, and describes what ‘magic methods’ look like, for example, __str__ is one that can be added to an object to customise what an object looks like when you print(...) it out. For more information and a better explanation, watch Josh Cannon’s “Oh the (Methods) You Can (Make): By Dunder Seuss” from North Bay Python 2023.

We don’t do that here.

In-jokes create a sense of community, play a part in setting its tone, as well as being a bit of fun.

While there are many in-jokes, there are some that are actively problematic that we do not use.

Belittling other programming languages

This event is designed for developers, users, and practitioners of the Python programming language, but we do not put down other languages to lift ourselves up. This includes putdowns of users of other programming languages purely based on the fact they don’t use Python.

DjangoCon AU, a recurring specialist track at PyCon AU, has often invited programmers specifically outside of Python and Django to share insights from their language or framework of choice. Indeed it was one of these very speakers that brought us flipfloperator.

Monty Python

Monty Python has deep roots in the Python programming community, but references to comedy films that are now 37+ years old can leave younger Pythonistas feeling left out.

We also acknowledge that the humour used in this series is not the most inclusive, and so we avoid using such reference where more inclusive and modern references can be made that have the same effect.

If you don’t get a reference, ask!

If there’s an in-joke or reference you don’t get, ask for it to be added to this list!