Conferences are a great way to learn diverse topics in your field. That’s why I like to go to events like Pycons and last Friday, PyGrunn. PyGrunn is a Python event in Groningen, the Netherlands. I submitted two talks for the event myself. One of them was selected.
Here is a recap of the talks I attended and the stuff I learned, so you maybe get inspired to attend Python conferences and even speak at these events.
Keeping your Python in check – Mark Boer
Python was originally developed to make coding more accessible. Where at other programming languages you had to tell what type of data type your variables are, Python deduced this automatically. Good for beginning coders, maybe not so good for advanced data solutions.
Mark Boer has experience in strong typing in his data science solutions. He shared how you can ensure typing in different ways: in data classes, using Pydantic and named tuples. The talk assumed that the attendees already had experience with typing. I had not, so it was a lot to take in. But if I can review the video in a few weeks, I hope to catch on.
Building a serverless character profile creation pipeline using Python and AI – Jochem Kleine
This was a surprising talk. Before I was wondering what a “character profile creation pipeline” was. It turned out that Jochem creates games in his spare time. And he was looking for a way to use LLMs to help to create a user’s character in his adventure game Roads. He uses a OpenAI model to dynamically ask the user philosophical questions.
The questions are have a Myers-Briggs, DISC method vibe to them. That’s not unexpected, since the prompt instructs the model like that in its prompt “You are creating a personality assessment for a game character”.

The answers will not only define the user’s character, but also are used to generate an image of the character, also with an AI model.
Jochem then did a demo where he created a character for one of the organizers. The game/AI model asked 6 questions about personal growth, community benefit and negotiation (“You discover a hidden path leading to a treasure guarded by a dragon”). After the questions were answered the game generated an image for the user: a dwarf with a map in his hands. It’s a fine use of personality assessments, I’d say.
Django Template LSP: Smarted Completions for Django Templates – Kees Hink
I don’t know a lot about Django. I’ve done very little with this framework (for creating websites). And yet I’ve learned some interesting things at this session by Kees Hink. He and his colleagues at Four Digits created a solution in VSCode that can autocomplete code in Django templates based on the Python code in that Python project. Meaning something similar should be possible for my CV generator.

Repos are like children, parenting 101 – Bart Dorlandt
For this talk Bart Dorlant took this analogy of your repositories being like your babies and took that analogy quite far. Like how you make sure they grow, stay on the right path and make sure they can take care of themselves.
Along the way he explained what tools you can use to improve your Python repositories. I definitely learned some stuff here, like how you can use Cookiecutter or Copier to create new projects based on templates.
He also has created a tool to convert your poetry projects to uv projects. Definitely something I will check out: https://github.com/bartdorlandt/convert_poetry2uv/

Leveling up your teams with guilds – Marcel-Jan Krijgsman
Next it was my turn. I had prepared a talk about how teams can learn from each other in a Python guild. I think it was well received. I enjoyed doing it.
I hope someone has a photo of it. The video will be online in a few weeks I think.
Make LLMs Fun Again: MCP the usb-c for LLMs – Alex de Vries
This is why attending conferences like this one is useful. There is so much stuff going on in our field. And there’s always someone who already tested the waters. Alex de Vries talked about these Model Context Protocols. I heard about them, but didn’t have time yet to find out what they are about.
Alex had created a LLM solution to create a LLM solution that can plan his bike rides and find a place to sleep at the end of a ride. He explained what MCPs are, where you can find them (smithery.ai) and how you can use them.
So how can these MCP’s work? Well, you can for example use Github’s MCP. Forgot how to do a thing with git commands? Now you just can talk to your model: “Push this change to my repo”, and it will generate the appropriate git command.

Keynote: Homo ludens, Python and play – Daniele Procida
Usually keynotes are done at the start. At this conference the keynote was at the end. Luckily Daniele Procida from Canonical had an engaging talk about Python, play and I guess philosophy. I think what it came down to was: when people offer their spare time to work on open source projects, how do we make sure they are appropriately appreciated for it?

Speakers diner
Because I was one of the speakers, I was invited for the speakers diner of PyGrunn. I wouldn’t say no to a diner invitation of course. But it was also fun to talk to people from many Python backgrounds. We had engaging discussions about AI (of course), but also about e-ink displays (one of my favourite topics), hacking cars with Python, hacking and security in general and many other things.

I had a great time. I definitely would recommend attending PyGrunn next year, or AIGrunn this year.
Oh one more thing: I mentioned I’m riding Tour for Life for the Daniel den Hoed Foundation for cancer research this year. If you want to support me, you can do so here: https://supporta.cc/lfqd/z0qpn9xqox . Thanks!