Last week I had the privilege to attend the inaugural North Bay Python conference, held in Petaluma, California in the USA. Being part of any community-run conference is always enjoyable, and to help launch a new one was very exciting. In this post, I’m going to briefly tell you about the conference and help you find recordings of some of the best sessions (and also the session that I presented).

Petaluma is a small city in Sonoma County, about one hour north of San Francisco. Known for their food and wine, it was a surprising location to find a conference, including for many locals who got to attend their first Python event.

If the photo to the right looks familiar, you probably remember it as the default Windows XP background image. It was taken in the area, inspired the North Bay Python logo, and doesn’t actually look all that different from the hills surrounding Petaluma today.

Nearly 250 attendees converged on a beautiful old theatre to hear from twenty-two speakers. Topics ranged from serious topics of web application accessibility, inclusiveness, through to lighthearted talks on machine learning and Django, and the absolutely hilarious process of implementing merge sort using the import statement. All the videos can be found on the North Bay Python YouTube channel.

Recently I have been spending some of my time working on a proposal to add security enhancements to Python, similar to those already in Powershell. While Microsoft is known for being highly invested in security, not everyone shares the paranoia. I used my twenty-five minute session to raise awareness of how modern malware attacks play out, and to show how PEP 551 can enable security teams to better defend their networks.

(Image credit: VM Brasseur, CC-BY 2.0)

While I have a general policy of not uploading my presentation (slides are for speaking, not reading), here are the important links and content that you may be interested in:

• Full text of PEP 551 on python.org (with links for further reading)
• My sample Python code as a gist on GitHub
• PEP 551 implementation for Python 3.7.0a3 on GitHub
• PEP 551 implementation for Python 3.6.3 on GitHub

Overall, the conference was a fantastic success. Many thanks to the organizing committee, Software Freedom Conservancy, and the sponsors who made it possible, and I am looking forward to attending in 2018.

Until the next North Bay Python though, we would love to have a chance to meet you at the events that you are at. Let us know in the comments what your favorite Python events are and the ones you would most like to have people from our Python team come and speak at.