Another great PyCon DE & PyData is over and I'm exhausted but happy, and… | Ines Montani

Another great PyCon DE & PyData is over and I'm exhausted but happy, and feel very inspired! Here are my personal highlights: ⚡ Feminist AI LAN Party with Katharine Jarmul! Thanks SO much to everyone who came to our chill room, joined or held workshops, contributed to the DIY zine or just stopped by for a chat. And thanks to Alexander C.S. Hendorf 👋 and the PyCon team for trusting us with the space and making it happen. Stay tuned for the full recap and results! 💬 giving my brand new talk on PDF processing and modular document understanding beyond plain text with spaCy and Docling, and having lots of conversations with NLP developers on how they handle PDFs in their industry use cases 🎙️ panel discussion with Walid Mehanna (Chief Data Officer, Merck), Dr. Alexander Beck (CTO, Quoniam) and me on real-world AI and what's needed for companies to effectively adopt the technology in Germany and Europe 📸 lots and lots of polaroids and a community wall connecting people IRL 🪄 as always, the most entertaining lightning talks (and bingo) hosted by Valerio Maggio, Ph.D. – seriously, don't ever skip the PyCon lightning talks again 🧠 learning new things – we had such a diverse selection of unconference sessions at Feminist AI and I learned about adversarial attacks, boxing and kicking a**, what AI thinks yoga for programmers should be, West Coast Swing, Shiva Banasaz Nouri's cool workflows using Prodigy for synthetic data and more 💖 hanging out with my conference and PyLadies friends: Cansu Cak (loved spending time together – let's continue in Berlin soon!), Tereza Iofciu, PhD (thanks for the yoga and zine magic), Paloma Oliveira ("pleasure activism" gave me a lot to think about), Cheuk Ting Ho, Dr. Paula González Avalos, Doreen Sacker, Dr. Maria Börner, Jesper Dramsch, Martin Borus and so many more. If I had to explain what makes PyCons so special, I'd definitely say the amazing community and no-bullshit content. There are so many tech and AI conferences these days and lots of them are just talk. PyCon is where the real practitioners come together, those who actually *do things* and build stuff. And this is making a real difference!