The Noteable team had a blast at Pycon 2022 in Salt Lake City. Ten of our engineers attended the conference in person, while others engaged virtually. As a fully remote company, many of us met each other off-camera for the first time. We saw friends and colleagues that we’ve missed since the pandemic started, caught up with open source maintainers, watched incredible talks, and handed out a bunch of swag.
Three of our core values were on display over the weekend: Engage Community, Nurture People and Inspire Trust. Attending Pycon and supporting the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and other open source efforts such as NumFOCUS and DuckDB, is one way we live our values. Collaborating at the Language Summit, Typing Summit, open spaces (shoutout to Samuel Colvin, maintainer of pydantic), and along the “hallway track” has created trust between us. Our shared experience and greater trust will carry us through the good times and the challenging times as we build Noteable.
The presentations and speakers were top notch, as always. The improvements to type hinting coming with Python 3.11, which Lukasz Langa covered in his keynote, along with other features like the asyncio.TaskGroup will be immediately applicable in our own code base as we will use those in conjunction with popular frameworks like FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and pydantic.
We’ve eagerly watched developments in the WASM space since Russell Keith-Magee’s “Black Swan” keynote in 2019, and offered support and feedback in the pyodide/iodide community. We’ve followed the awesome work Jeremy Tuluop and others have done on Jupyterlite, demonstrating how the Jupyter backend can run in the browser as an alternative to managing server-side compute resources. Peter Wang’s keynote unveiling PyScript, backed by Anaconda, will keep the momentum going on innovation in the client-side compute area.
In this author’s opinion, Sara Issaoun left us with the most memorable presentation of the conference. Her talk about the Event Horizon Telescope and scientific work analyzing the M87 black hole was inspiring. One of the best parts of Pycon is hearing how humanity uses open source contributions for the betterment of everyone. We recommend everyone watch her keynote, especially if you need a reminder of how your gifts to the Python community are being used for noble causes.
Sara’s presentation also reminded us of the challenges that large teams face. Reproducible science and mass collaboration across roles, physical sites, and time zones were difficulties they overcame aside from the hard astro-science. At Noteable, our mission is to enable everyone with data. The notebook we’re building is informed by the enterprise obstacles we have seen in prior lives at Netflix, Amazon, government, research institutes, and elsewhere. Like Sara and her team, we’re focused on collaboration across teams, companies, and, maybe someday, galaxies too.
