After a nine-year break, PyCon Finland was back this Friday as a part of PloneConf 2025.
I took a morning train to Jyväskylä and gave my talk about extending Python with Rust. It went fine. I went through the slides so fast that I must have skipped over something, but thankfully there were a lot of great questions from the audience so we made good use of the extra time. A talk video will be uploaded eventually.
Like at PyCon UK, I bumped into a few people who already are extending Python with Rust. In the talk, I claim that it’s a pattern, a trend. The evidence for the trend keeps accumulating.
I didn’t catch many other talks, but the keynote by Patrik Lauha about Muuttolintujen kevät was a delight. It’s a mobile app that can automatically recognize bird songs from recordings, tailored for the bird species in Finland. If you hear a bird that you can’t recognize, you can record its song with your phone and the app will tell you the species.
Patrik is the scientist who has developed the machine learning model behind the app. His talk covered how the app works and how they’re using the data they’ve gathered through it. Through the citizen science style data collection, they’ve been able to make existing bird distribution models more accurate. Cool stuff!
Saturday was the sprint day. Most of the people were working on Plone and Plone-related projects, but Hugo van Kemenade was running a CPython sprint. I sat down with him and a few other people to work on CPython issues. That was nice, and a first for me. I haven’t attempted to contribute to CPython before.
The combination of frosty weather and autumn leaves made Jyväskylä look beautiful, especially around the Ylistö campus of University of Jyväskylä. I posted a few photos on Mastodon.
It was great to see PyCon Finland happening again and I’m glad I got a chance to give a talk there. Thanks to all the organizers, sponsors, and attendees for making it happen and making it fun!
Check out Juha-Matti Santala’s conference report, too.