IndyPy’s 15th Anniversary: The Future of Python Meetups in a Global, Hybrid World

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[Music] welcome everyone this is our 15th year
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as a meetup doing python meetup here in indianapolis i consider us some of the old school like
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awesome folks here in the community and what i’m super excited about is there are some other regulars back in the room
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uh not some of the og regulars you probably saw some of the slideshow go by and i’ve not seen some of those folks but we have some of the og irregulars
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who are you know you’ve joined us for the speak easy actually who in here came when we were in the boardroom at
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scotty’s anybody from the scotty’s era i know he i
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so i’m technically the co-founder uh clayton my brother as a founder is also a co-founder he’s at a kickball
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tournament right now i think so next time you see clayton give him a super hard time for not being here for
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his 15-year birthday for this uh so yeah we we have been through a lot
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including a couple years of not meeting in person and i want to change that and so we’re going to talk about that as
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well i’m excited to be back in person uh for the do we we have a plethora of door
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prizes tonight so please make sure that you are registered oh yeah turn that
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back on there we go please make sure you’re registered on meetingplace.io if you’ve not rsvp’d on meetingplace.io
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please rsvp on there and i will be doing the normal live code drawing uh from the meeting place rsvps and
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we’ve got oh cool uh meow bits we’ve got uh some pie badges we’ve got
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at pi badge edges which is the new tensorflow lite like pie badge embedded embedded one
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we’ve got all kinds of giveaways there’s tons of free swag at the back and ari who’s on
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you can see our aria wave everybody can see there you are ari from jfrog is giving away a 3d printer tonight so i’ll
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we’ll get we’ll get to him in a moment so i’m glad you all showed up must be present to win uh whether you’re online
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or here in the room it’s totally awesome and again super excited you’re all here i’ve even started dating slideshow yet i
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gotta find the slideshow calvin i’ll throw in uh some talk python courses if you want oh oh yeah nice so michael kennedy
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that’s the voice you just heard there is kicking in a little extra so uh pretty excited about this super
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awesome let me find there we go ah to help bridge that gap between virtual
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and in person we are using slido tonight uh you can just go to slido.com or
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slido.com or slide.do and put in indie pie as the event tag
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tonight and that’ll be how i want everyone to ask michael and i questions as we do the main presentation today
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i will put the slido up on one of these screens so you’ll be able to see all the questions coming in real time
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from uh virtual and in the in-person folks i’m hoping to make sure we kind of level that playing field so make sure
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you go and either go to the slido address there it’s like bitly.com indiepi 15 slido or if you just go to
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slido and put in the event tag indiepie that will take you to the spot where we’re going to have some polls we have
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some questions there’s going to be some fun stuff coming up actually i’ll go ahead is everyone getting installed got
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their phones especially those people online i’ve got some questions that i’m going to put up
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on here for you actually i don’t know why that turned off to which computer is that
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here we go yeah we’re going to so go to the slido
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we’re gonna have our first poll i’m gonna put our first pull up on slido uh which is gonna be
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when did you join any pie let me throw that up on some screen some place
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hold on nope not that one must be this one
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nope oh here we go yeah yeah it’s this one
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there we go so i have the slido up there let me turn that off so everyone can see it
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yeah when did you join indiepie i kind of gave a range of time frames in there you can hit the qr code up there and it
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should take you right to this specific poll you still get cake oh yeah by the way
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there’s cake tonight and if you didn’t know jetbrains is picking up the tab for all the drinks so thank you and thanks
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to them for uh hanging out with us now my favorite stat on this whole chart right now is that this is my first indie
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pie meetup i i swear to you up and down every meeting we’ve had a new person and
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i consider that to be a great thing that people are coming out and hanging out actually first time people
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in the room raise your hand oh david glick nice nice look at that look at all these first timers that’s awesome
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they do you’re here [Laughter] you’re here you’re here with us we’re
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all good now awesome so that’s our first first poll up there
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uh we will be live tweeting tonight so if you are on twitter virtual or in person use the indiepi hashtag or just
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app indie pie also if you have indie pie memories uh in your you know photo albums someplace
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there’s actually a ton of them on a meetup.com site but feel free to post those on twitter as well and use the
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indie pie memories hashtag and we’ll uh you know make sure we gather those all together for our 20th uh anniversary
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birthday we’ll definitely make sure we do that as well that means i think we’re seeing the uh that we’re
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still seeing the slide out so you may want to go back to the slide to the uh let me let me oh man
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that was that was my next uh wrong wrong i got way too many computers going on up here
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here we go there we go back in the slide back in slide mode here turn turn that on so you can see me
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okay yeah the wait that’s the rotating sideshow uh nope wrong one
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there we go this computer for those of you don’t know it’s a ridiculous av mess up here
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but i’m managing it somehow trying with grace so yeah there’s there is the twitter hashtag make sure you
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follow us for all things uh python here in indy and all upcoming events that we’ll be doing
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there is the indie pie memories hashtag so you probably saw the slideshow as we were coming in
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some of the photos from over the years the very top left-hand photo there is
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our initial original meeting that’s like my brother another six well
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actually all of us worked at six feet up it was just a meeting of six we have people in a place other than six feet up um so but it kind of doesn’t meet up
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right that was like early days of of indie pie and memories so
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i would this all wouldn’t be possible obviously without our awesome sponsors so we’re gonna get into that right now
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we’re gonna talk about our sponsorship my name is calvin hendrix parker for those of you who are new since there are
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new people in the room uh i am co-founder and cto of six feet up and indy pi is organized by six foot up and
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sixty yep is a python and i’m gonna read this off the thing because that’s what i do uh oh
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gotta like dodge people from flying by me as well we are a python and cloud expert consulting company that helps
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innovative tech leaders build apps faster innovate with ai and ml simplify big data
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uh and leverage cloud technologies using modern process technologies and processes and and laura will love this
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we make anything possible and we’re excited to make indy pi possible i’m super excited to have you
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all here next up we have jetbrains so a big round of applause for jetbrains
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not not only are they buying all the drinks
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they also are doing what we got how many laura how many pie charm licenses are we
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giving away two or four we’re giving away four full-time ones and then
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there will be another giveaway with every single person gets a free six months yes there’s a free six months for
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every single person in the room in addition to four full pie charm professional licenses
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that will be given away so thank you jetbrains for being awesome the python community and to just being really great
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people in general i want to thank reify health they’re one of our newest sponsors spontaneous a little bit over a
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year now they actually renewed um it’s just jeff here yep i don’t think jeff did jeff show up on virtual no jeff is
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not here well if you see jeff from rfi health he’s here local in indianapolis they’re
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hiring and they’re like obviously so my 14 year old needs to stop using
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electronics right now let me block him that’s what that that’s what that alarm was for
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uh and now uh jfrog has been a sponsor now for going on three years i think at least right ari hey everybody i’m ari
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waller i’m the meetup event manager for jfrog and it’s been so awesome uh being an indie pie partner going on our third
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year um normally i share a short intro about who we are and how jfrog is the devops
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software company with our flagship product artifactory which works seamlessly with pi pi and allows python
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developers to deploy software fast and efficiently but you know what tonight i’m not going to do that tonight
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all right i want to talk about how awesome it has been to really be part of the indie pie community uh let’s let’s just quickly
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rewind um just even two years ago i know many of you have been here a lot longer than that based on that poll but just
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two years ago when the pandemic first started and people were just feeling their way online and i remember how
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incredible of an experience it was the first time this community meetup started
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it was more than just the great talks and the door prizes it was something that i learned over the next few indie
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pie meetings i came to is that the what was able to really transcend the ver
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into a virtual environment was your community’s authentic personality really shined through and it
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felt like home it became quickly uh it became quickly clear that indy pi the
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community that’s been built here is really really special and i’m a meetup event manager i actually have that in my
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title i do this for a living i’ve sat in hundreds of meetups literally um over the last
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few years and i am here not blowing any smoke indie pie is very very special calvin
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why while i know there are a lot of people that helped make this meeting up happen your commitment to the community has
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really been such a pop made a positive difference in so many people’s lives here we uh
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have just a sample of that but 15 years of commitment 15 years of good times and
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maybe some tougher times and 15 years of both a lot of time and a lot of money
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so a community of python professionals can grow and learn in a caring and accepting
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environment there’s a lot to be said for that and uh i don’t know everyone seems to
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have a drink tonight i have mine maybe we can lift our glasses really quick and calvin this is the strength for you and
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just thank you for everything that you do for the community thank you thank you ari
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you’re gonna make me cry damn it stop that well i don’t wanna i don’t i don’t i don’t wanna make you i don’t wanna make that happen so tonight we’re
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actually gonna do a uh raffle for a 3d printer um if you haven’t done 3d printing before this is the perfect
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entry level to that uh you can enter with the qr code that you see and the bitly link that uh you can see which
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should be pretty easy to remember um it is case sensitive um and um and we are definitely excited
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to be giving one of these away now i work for a big company we have a compliance department we have people on
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the internet and in person i can’t give it away live as much as i would like to tonight however
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you have my commitment that a winner is going to be selected randomly within three business days
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that winner is going to be um contacted and once they formally accept the prize
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i am going to make sure that everyone knows who that lucky winner is uh for
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the 3d for the 3d printer um but uh very very excited to be again be part of this
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um thank you so much uh calvin and team laura and everyone that really makes the
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uh the community so special for everything that you do thank you arya so everybody make sure
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you scan that code and you will be in the running for a 3d printer literally
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giving away tonight like this is just for indie pie like it’s only us only you only you i promise only the people in
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this room and the only people in that zoom are are eligible for this printer so don’t pass up this awesome opportunity this is the first of many
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fabulous prizes this evening and thank you ari and the jetbrains crew are not jet brains good lord sorry and the j
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frog crew jj j j frog we like jeff brains too it’s cool yeah they’re good people but no thank you just jet fraud
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to jet frog there we go i’m just gonna i’m just gonna call a jet frog at this point no it’s a j frog for being a part
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of the anti community and everything we’re doing here so i really appreciate that and thank you so much for being
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with us pleasure oh yeah yeah actually we do have the the
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jfrog book that you gave us we had some extras left over from python web conference so there is a
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book on the list from liquid software so make sure you pick up your copy of liquid software it is on
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the table those are free to take for anybody in the room and thanks again to jfrog for that if you all want to be as
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awesome as jfrog jetbrains reifi health and six feet up you can become a sponsor
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um i know that’s kind of blocked right now but you can email laura at six feet up who is just right there there with aura right there
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or you can just go to any pi.org become a sponsor and we will get you all
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signed up to help build this awesome community even further uh beyond what we have already done
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uh we normally would go around the room rooms plural i guess the zoom room and
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physical room but that would take a long time and we’re gonna do that tonight so make sure you join the indie pie slack
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there is a bitly link there for joining the indie pipe slack and go into the jobs channel we would love to know
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people who are looking for a new career change or if you’re hiring please go in there and so many great connections have
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happened through indie pie actually people in the room people online raise your hand if you found a job because of
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indie pie or if you found an employee because of indie pie i know there’s multiple multiple folks who have definitely benefited from the indie pie
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community and i want to make sure that continues as well okay
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what’s that uh yes actually you’re not the only one either
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uh there have been multiple uh relationships have come out of the indie pie community as well other than just a
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career opportunity so you never know i mean it can happen it has happened which is kind of crazy
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make sure you are rsvp now on meetingplace.io we are obviously moved off of meetup.com if you want to be in
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the running for all the rest of the fabulous prizes this evening quickly get out there and rsvp onto me
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place the i o for today’s meeting and when i go do the random drawing uh it’ll be from the rsdps that are on there you
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have until the end of the official presentation to rsvp to be in
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the running for all the rest of the prizes that are up there uh and i will do that live code afterwards also right after the main
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like michael and i doing our little like uh song and dance up here we will uh darcy raise your hand here so darcy lee
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is in the room she’s with six feet up now and it’s going to be doing some quick little video testimonials uh we’ll
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find her and you can actually like you know just tell tell everyone like what you thought about
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and success brought you here and and how things are going so look for darcy after us all uh speaking
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so speaking of that uh i think we’re ready to get on with the actual schedule of the program uh
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like it won’t be super technical tonight but i am actually interested in in hearing and talking to people about the
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effects of like going virtual and like the hybrid meetup and how the world’s gonna you know kind of change uh from
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here on out so i brought uh michael kennedy you can hear me i’m gonna spotlight your video up there actually
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before we get started i got one more poll that i want to do so mostly this is for uh
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this is for folks who are on the virtual space so everyone who is in the virtual meeting
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uh go to the slido right now and tell us where you’re at i want to hear where everyone is at so you should see the qr
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code up there you should be able to actually go and tell us where you are at so we got san
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diego’s in the house we got portland in the house obviously indianapolis is in the house because we’re all sitting
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literally in the house oh thank you for someone putting uh indianapolis in there lafayette vladimir we got chicago uh
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someone was actually in the district tap that’s crazy who never expected that uh boston
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atlanta come on david soul you gotta register your vote in there
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there we go now they’re all starting to show up look at that this is awesome there are people from all over the world
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who are literally gathering tonight for indie pie our little old meet up
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and uh i’m excited to have everyone here who’s not just always in the same room together so now we’re trying to bridge
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that gap and get everything going here all right i’m going to turn off that
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pole we’re going to go back to regular questions uh with do i have to start answering these now
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is that like what starts this whole thing does it count how many ub keys or how
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many two-factor hardware devices do i own you’ll never stop counting them [Laughter]
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okay so the topic tonight is really around um
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your meetups in the community and so i i brought michael on because i’ve really
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been enjoying everything he’s been doing around the talk python to me and the python bytes uh podcast and all the
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efforts he has done in the python community to train people up and i felt like it’s a good match up
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here for indie pie and the fact that we have been trying to also bring a community of people together and so my i
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want to actually i would love to michael i’d love you to introduce yourself real quick and i want to hear your python origin story how did you how did you
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become one of us how did i uh hello everybody how did i become one of you i’m amazing
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i’ll start with uh just my quick introduction so hi i’m michael i’ve given a couple of talks here over
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the past couple years i’ve spoken at python webconf as i think about most the other world has given how many
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tracks you all managed to put together at the same time there which is fantastic
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uh i by the way i’m to some degree a temporary local i was in the pc program
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at purdue for a while so up in west lafayette i know it’s not quite indie pie but if you go go north of town
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yeah close closer than portland where i am now all right so uh
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origin story actually before before i go on just i just want to say one more thing calvin
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and laura and folks that we just had the python web conf
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we just had pycon and i was going through looking for interesting topics for things to cover on the podcast and
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other things to just check out and watch and i got more interesting content from the
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python web conf than i did from all the pi contacts combined so thank you like
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that was really really a good resource and for everyone out there and like genuinely i i like why is the this was
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so much longer from the the work that you all did so thank you for that oh thank you so much yeah i i love doing
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these things for the community i love bringing these people together so this is like that’s perfect but
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that’s what i wanted yeah for sure all right so to answer your question origin story i
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thought i should become a mathematician so hence why i was at purdue and that was a lot of fun i really
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enjoyed it but i started getting into like simulations and research and all sorts of stuff with programming to like
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do more math and i had this weird feeling i was working on this this project with silicon
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graphics mainframes and whatnot and there was parts that were really really fun their parts like ah this is not so fun like it turned out the math parts
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are the not so fun i’m like why am i doing math for them why are going to do these computers so long story short i
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did programming for oh my goodness many years since um late 90s really
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and around 2010 20 maybe a little bit before 2008 2009 i
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i saw python becoming more and more popular and i had traditionally done c plus plus c c sharp those types of
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languages and and i’m like this is such a weird language let me check it out and i was hooked soon as i saw it at first i
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was like blown away like how can you have no semicolons and no brackets parentheses to keep this thing
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in control but after about a week i went back to those other c based languages i’m like
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they’ve lied to me what are all these parentheses and curly braces we didn’t need them they told me i needed them like and it just is such a breath of
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fresh air and ever since then it’s been sort of my mission to just get really good at it
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i wanted to listen to the podcast about and hear the stories when i was getting started there was no podcast at the time so i’m like well
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i guess i’m gonna have to do that and try my hand at podcasting and so that is pretty much all she wrote since then
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that’s awesome so when was your first picon you went to
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my first pycon was either 2015 or 2016 probably 2016.
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2016 would have been portland first portland well you would think it’s in my backyard
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which is where i live i was spending a year in germany with my family so i had to fly back and raid the hotel in
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portland and then fly all the way back to germany uh because i had rented my house for the year while i was gone so
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it was a i traveled very far to come to the first pycon right by my house
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i think that that speaks volumes to the dedication of people who will seek
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out the python community that you could travel back from germany back to portland to come to pycon for your first
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bike on and i don’t know if many folks here have experienced the you know the python conferences
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the some of my favorite python conferences are actually you know early picons python’s always a classic but the
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regional conferences have been a favorite of mine as well you know the pie tennessees the pie ohios the pike
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colorados uh the pie gotham these are all amazing like local but
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they bring in folks who will travel to them so i mean obviously i’ve been to most of those
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events and it’s i find it more intimate like have you been to any of the regional conferences
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i have been to some of them i would love to go to more i’m i very much enjoy pie cascades which is
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the one vancouver bc seattle uh portland one and it cycles through the different uh
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cities and stuff there so yeah that’s a good one so do you have any experience with
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programming language conferences outside of python sure i used to yeah yeah i used to do a ton of csharp.net stuff so
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i would go to conference like in dc and oslo or uh other ones in london and
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stuff would it be different for me to ask you to say it would be fair to kind of ask
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me ask you to compare and contrast like what those communities are like compared to the python community
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uh no it’s no it’s it’s uh really different the community for the pikethon based ones
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pycon and the regional ones it feels much more by for and from the people
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the community whereas you go to these other ones and it feels very much like well here is the vendor of this you know think
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a microsoft build well what is the story that microsoft wants its people to tell you
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or wwdc or google i o or any of those types of things they may be somewhat you know like ndc
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might be more formed from people who are in that group but there’s still there’s like this sort
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of here’s the story that we’re telling and with the python ones you go there and you just get this really different
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feeling of we’re all in this together we’re just trying a bunch of crazy stuff and somehow we’ve become the most
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popular programming language in the world and look it’s it’s working you know you let it out thousand flowers
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bloom and you know some of them grow pretty strong and tall yeah i would agree with that sentiment
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about being you know for the people and by the people that these conferences are definitely community run there’s not a
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big corporate entity behind the language there never has been i felt like python grew in popularity and
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almost in spite of itself like it was never attempting to be a popular language but it was one that so many
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people loved and like flocked to and were more productive with that it just those same people now all
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of a sudden got together in the same room together and celebrated that language and learned from each other you
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know through all the various you know sessions so yeah and calvin i would say that uh
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many people in the community felt that way but even guido was surprised at some of these things i
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asked him why he thought the python 2-3 transition was so hard and he said well it’s the packages that
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people depended upon but what we really misjudged was how many people depended upon python
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as it like they just didn’t realize how important in the scale of it um
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which you know if guido’s not gonna be able to guess like we’re definitely not gonna guess right yeah if you’ve
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ever run into guido on the you know pycon expo hall floor he’s a very humble
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person like i’m very unsuspecting and he’s always said that same thing that he never
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intended for this to be the language for the world to use he was the one he built that made sense in his brain you know based on how he
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thought programming should be done which i guess somehow i agree with him
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on that but you’d have to know guido i think they kind of get that yeah
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uh don’t can i give you one more one more comparing contrast i think i think
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it’ll be fair so when we were living in germany i had
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this chance to speak at this conference in london and it was mostly a sort of dot-net shop type of conference but my
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topic was trying to recruit people over to python so it was like python for the net developer type
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of uh presentation and i went over there and i had this chance to bring one of my
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daughters who was 15 or 16 at the time along because she had school break and so like hey it’s just london it’s not
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that far we’ll take the train we’ll make a week of it i’ll have a lot of fun and so we went to the speaker dinner
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at the speaker dinner there were 29 guys and one girl
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there who were the speakers and she was all excited to come and then she looked around and said dad where are all the girls i said
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that’s a really good question and i don’t know really how to appropriately answer that
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for you but you could just tell she was like ah this might not be for me and i think if i had taken her taken her
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to a pycon she wouldn’t have felt that way yeah the [Music]
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the landscape changed when it came to [Music] speakers at conferences for the python
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community around the santa clara conference you know there was an incident then kind of the donglegate
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community thing that i think shifted that pendulum back toward
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we really want to encourage those who may not normally step up and want to be speaking behind the podium to be a part
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of this community and actually indeep and really we can always do better but i’ve been
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pretty proud of the fact that we’ve had a good number of you know underrepresented groups or you know kind
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of i don’t know we’re not going for equality here because that’s still our goal but we’ve had a lot of great speakers you know who don’t look like me
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which is what i want i don’t want only people who look like me up here you know talking and speaking at indie pie and so
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i think the python community has made a very intentional effort to obviously take inclusivity to this like
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next level um it was definitely a knee-jerk reaction i don’t if you remember that back from the it was kind
28:37
of before you because that was that was in santa clara uh but it it worked i felt like in the
28:43
python community like we had a rough year or two in there but then like i feel like the folks stood up and actually
28:50
started speaking who maybe not have before and so i find python not not only to be approachable
28:55
as the language but to be very approachable as a community right and i think a big part of that i
29:01
know there’s a conscious effort to encourage people who are not normally presenting to do so but i think that
29:06
there there’s also a good uptake for that because most people in the community are very welcoming and very open
29:13
and kind and that makes it easier to put yourself out yeah yeah when you might not otherwise
29:19
do it yeah yeah for those of you who are you know brand new to the python community at a pycon or regional conference or
29:26
even in indie pie i think everyone’s fair game to walk up to and ask any question at all there’s
29:32
no there’s no silly questions in the community and and everyone is actually excited to get those questions uh so if
29:39
you are new don’t hesitate to ask anybody else in the whole room who you know who may look like they might know
29:45
something if they don’t know it they’re going to find somebody who does and point you in that right direction
29:50
uh that’s the thing i love about the community don’t forget to ask us questions up on the slido for the virtual community or
29:57
in the in-person room that’s how we’ll be doing mainly for the questions
30:02
the next thing i want to talk about though is where do we see meetups and the social community of
30:09
people meeting on the regular like the monthly type meetup i mean we just spent
30:14
two and a half years in a virtual only world i can’t say i was super pleased
30:19
we started obviously strong you know 75 people were coming to the virtual meetup uh month one
30:26
by month 28 we were probably about 10 to 12 people i think the appetite for
30:33
virtual only meetings even you know ours which is like we do a pretty good job as i already kind of alluded to because ari
30:40
has never actually been in person for our meetings he’s only ever come to the virtual version of indie pie
30:46
michael where do we see the the world going right now are we heading back into
30:51
in person is that changing are we trying to do to sass by hybrid i’ll let you go first i’ve got some
30:57
things to say on this sure i i’m torn like where do i want it to go
31:04
or where do i see it going yeah are these these are those yeah yeah sure yeah yeah let’s talk
31:10
about both of those so i would say you know we just had pycon in person
31:16
which well first of all congratulations to everyone at the psf and and involved they had pycon in
31:22
person and that was fantastic however i think it was less than half
31:27
the people attended they limited it to 1800 people which was less than half what we had in cleveland
31:34
yeah so it’s so there’s an impact right there is an impact of go getting back together and i think there’s a lot of reasons for that
31:41
right like flights are insanely expensive and all sorts of stuff but also
31:47
you we’ve realized to some degree that we even we don’t necessarily like it we can survive
31:53
through a whole ton of zoom calls and so i think that makes people have different trade-offs i personally really
31:59
wanted to go back to pycon but i didn’t go because i just wanted to have one year of a big
32:05
conference and make sure everyone’s safe and see how it goes and no i’ll figure it out from there
32:10
you weren’t i know i know i was so yeah but the thing is i saw all the here’s the thing about the community is
32:17
right like you can go and see the talks but then i started getting the text messages hey we’re meeting at this bar
32:22
or hey we’re hiking this mountain you want to come no i’m not there i
32:28
would love like why am i not there you know so it’s it is tough i do think that we’re getting back to it but i
32:35
i don’t think we’re going all the way back i think people have there were many people who said i don’t
32:41
believe you can do remote hybrid types of things and then we were forced to and
32:46
so to some degree we’ve seen that it’s possible if not as good so i i don’t know i don’t think
32:53
we’re going all the way back but i would like it to be back i really enjoyed those events
32:58
yeah yeah i i share that opinion that i would love for us i want us all to be back 100
33:04
my main hold up on the hybrid version of this is we’ve gained a whole community of people
33:11
who are on the zoom out here so it’s it’s like there’s a whole new group of people who now are
33:16
part of indie pie who are regularly here and i want to make sure we include them because i i feel like that
33:23
they are our new community like indie pie it’s not just indy uh it’s hardly even the midwest anymore is really a
33:31
global thing we when the pandemic started and we had people joining from you know
33:36
east coast and west coast and from north africa and from europe and from mexico i mean from all over from south america i
33:43
was just i was i was floored that people first of all found indiana on any map
33:51
and we’re like okay there’s python in indiana uh and they’re here so i feel like we i have a duty
33:58
to make indie pie somehow accessible to both both audiences uh and it’s not easy
34:04
um to do this that we are doing a fully hybrid one speaker in the room one speaker not in the room
34:10
event but as people can kind of see what’s going on here like it is it is not a simple setup to make this
34:18
work so i i don’t know if there’s gonna be some new you know technology that can kind of come you know out through all
34:24
this that can help meetups bridge this gap somehow uh because i i
34:30
went to extra extraordinary efforts i think to make sure we could have it here tonight and i really wanted the people
34:35
who are online which i love seeing their smiling faces i feel like they are here with us like i’ve never met david’s soul
34:41
in person and i cannot wait and there he is like sitting there in a python web conference jersey smiling all
34:48
the way from mexico city i’m like this this is like he’s our people like he’s not in indiana
34:53
but he’s right up there as part of our community so i i want both i’m going to work hard to make both
34:59
happen i don’t know if there’s some open source projects and kind of come from this or hardware type things
35:05
it’s ridiculous what’s going on over here beside me um maybe you guys can build some python
35:11
automation raspberry pi thing to create a hybrid set up in a box i do a switcher
35:17
on my ipad that i’m using to control the two different screens that are going on in the room so that everybody can like
35:22
see everybody else going on here so i just think that the communities
35:27
are worth it it’s worth getting this group who’s remote to be part of it and also the availability of speakers like
35:34
the fact that michael didn’t have to travel here but it can still be you know joining
35:40
they had a social going on while we were all socializing in here and i just thought we had you guys up on the screen
35:46
so we could see you know kind of the brady bunch uh view of that and it was cool like knowing that there’s another
35:51
group over there who’s just kind of chatting like the other group over here yeah and we had a nice little chat for 15 minutes while you all were setting up
35:58
it was good yeah so i i think it’s definitely doable i think that right now it’s bailing wire
36:03
and shoe strings and duct tape but i think it’s going to get better and i think
36:09
conferences can do a better job at this as well they’ve already got like av teams you know recording the talks that
36:15
are happening up on the screens but they’re not doing they do zero to bridge that gap of people who are virtual into
36:23
the real room like even from the slido is a huge i think innovation standpoint that
36:29
people who are outside this room and people inside this room are asking questions at that same level um so
36:34
that’s that’s where i think that the the conference venues i think the venues probably should tackle this problem they’ve got the
36:40
infrastructure they’ve got the ability to put in place you know tools for
36:45
but we shouldn’t be professional av technicians to be able to run a meet up like this
36:52
so i think that’s coming i think that’s definitely coming uh yeah so there’s a question there’s a couple questions up here i hope you want
36:57
to like tackle those or do you have another comment there mike i have a quick comment on what you just said and then let’s tackle this
37:04
one you talked about slido and the polls and the q a and all those sorts of things
37:10
even for just a somewhat large in-person meetup like the fact that you’re adopting these
37:16
types of things can make it better there might be somebody in the bank who doesn’t want to interrupt but has the best question of the night
37:21
right and they could put it into this q a thing or the polls are people raise their hand you kind of get a vague sense
37:26
but then you get really more precise like you can participate as a group even in person
37:31
better by leveraging some of these tools that just also happen to facilitate remote
37:37
no i agree it’s so true that so many some so many times the best question the room may not be
37:42
asked because they’re not willing to kind of raise their voice for it but they’re willing to type it in a slide though and so you’re right especially
37:48
anonymous listed up there right that you don’t get right take ownership this anonymous person is very prolific with
37:53
their question asking the other thing i wanted to just second was your comment about
38:00
uh like david from mexico city me from portland and people just from around the world you know there’s
38:07
indianapolis is a pretty big city there’s there’s a lot going on there are a lot of places where people
38:13
are python developers of a community of one right and they have
38:19
no one to exchange ideas with no one to exchange inspiration with uh to get
38:25
mentorship from or to be a mentor for they’re just in their own space and i’ve heard stories over and over you know
38:32
i work at in a small town in vermont i’m the only one who does python that i know
38:39
and you know how do i connect right or i got a really nice message from a guy in africa saying
38:47
uh you know your podcast has been the python community for me i take you on walks and
38:52
i just i have no one else to be part of and so even though it’s it’s really nice to have in person there’s also something
38:59
special about making that space for everyone who is uh got a community of one
39:05
yeah i agree uh [Music] it’s just again
39:10
the fact that you have been the community the whole community for some people through your podcasts is i mean a
39:16
great dedication to bringing us all together even if it’s like a almost a one-on-one but you’re
39:21
you’ll be able to publish a podcast so easily to connect with those other human beings
39:27
it’s honestly a little nerve-wracking like i shouldn’t be the the only representative but it’s great i have other people on so they can
39:33
i can bring that in but you know it’s it is really humbling and quite amazing so yeah yeah all right let’s talk about this tackle
39:40
yeah first one up here is future venues for any pie in person meetups right now what i am what we are planning
39:46
to try and do is going to be a at least once a quarter in person meetup and the
39:51
other three being uh a or other two being a virtual meetup so there’ll still
39:57
be plenty of virtual meetups but then we’ll do i’ll put the extra effort in for that once a quarter
40:02
talking about doing it right now at the iot lab up in fishers so i’ve been talking with those folks
40:08
they’ve got a nice space they’ve got a good connection they can accommodate my crazy stuff
40:14
and so i think iot lab may be our our spot for the next quarterly in-person
40:19
meeting and we’ll just kind of take it as it goes there’s a lot of effort into making an
40:25
in-person version of this go and even more effort uh making it the hybrid fully hybrid version before pandemic six
40:33
we are the indie pie and the indie aws communities we were live streaming
40:38
what was going on in the room but it was all one way there was no two-way we didn’t have the ability for people on
40:44
the outside to ask questions we didn’t have the ability for the presenters and the speakers even we could do a panel
40:50
like this you know we could have a couple people in the room couple people on the on the on the screen and i think the this is the this is the
40:56
new way i want to be able to do this is to have this truly hybrid experience where
41:02
there may be networking there and networking here but then when we get together there’s an experience where everyone is
41:07
in in the same space i’ll call it so that is the future venue ideas right
41:14
now for indie by meetings uh tips for for hybrid meetings to go
41:20
well oh my gosh i’ve heard some so right now like for
41:25
example this this seems not specific necessarily to just indie pi but just in general for
41:32
uh meetings in your company we’ve gone all remote and so all of our
41:37
meetings are by definition all virtual although i think that there’s a difficulty when you’ve got people who
41:43
are in a room and people who are outside the room in those types of meetings that the people outside the room are rarely heard or it’s hard for them to interject
41:51
i mean yeah it goes both ways because there’s a timing issue i think with this virtual
41:57
space versus in-person space
42:07
yeah the one thing we found really helpful is the the type of usb
42:13
speaker or phone setup that’s like a you know the older type meeting room
42:19
speaker phones yeah so if you have eight or ten people around a table with that type of speakerphone feeding into
42:26
zoom or whatever then it can feed out you know what they’re talking about and that integrates it together pretty well yeah
42:33
i would 100 agree yeah if you want to speak in either space hero either space if you’re online virtual uh
42:40
you’re fully welcome to unmute and comment on this as well if you’re in the room i’ll ask that you use the
42:45
microphone so that the online people can hear you right now they only hear me um because i’m the only one speaking but if
42:52
you use this they will hear you and will help bridge that gap but it’s hard it is
42:57
not an easy thing because of that i think there’s just a there’s such a face-to-face 3d aspect to
43:03
this like michael’s very 2d to me right now okay sorry you’re very 2d [Laughter]
43:10
but you are very 3d to me so i obviously feel as a human connected to the people who are right next to me so everyone in
43:16
the room has to make an extra effort for those who are not and i think that that goes for the meetups as well as in-person
43:24
meetings so i think to do this kind of a hybrid you know python meetup we have to be able to make sure that folks in the
43:30
room are asking questions on slido they’re not just like blurting it out because that gives an unfair advantage to them versus people who are
43:37
on the virtual side of things can i add one quick thing that i know that you want to connect with alan is um
43:46
i think it’s really important that people have a decent not fantastic but a decent video and audio setup if they’re going
43:52
to be wrong oh my gosh yes like if you’re just a scratchy person i can barely hear you and just really quiet it’s if it’s if it’s draining and
44:00
exhausting to try to listen to somebody i think it’s really hard and so you know i feel like i feel very dressed up for
44:06
our presentation tonight not i mean i have an old mozilla shirt on but i mean i have lights and i have like i’m in
44:12
focus and it probably sounds good if i got the right mic set up you know i think that’s that’s a new sort of i’m
44:19
prepared for work to be here professionally that that wasn’t there five years ago
44:24
i more important than the video is the audio yes you have better you better nail your audio before you ever worry
44:30
about any video um use the oldest crappiest logitech webcam but get a reasonable microphone
44:37
that sits fits your situation if you’ve got background noise you’re getting a different mic than if you don’t have background noise like there’s there’s
44:43
all kinds of choices to make there but even if you just have the apple like old-school wired headphones
44:50
you know with the microphone on them they’re actually really good um though you will sound very clear to people and
44:56
that’s what matters is if you are heard and you are clear that makes all the difference even over being seen
45:02
obviously visuals are nice but i’m going to go out there and say that audio is the most important part of this equation
45:08
totally agree yeah all right now the most important question tonight uh drew sheppard is
45:14
asking for a friend thanks for asking questions in the room on the slide though because that’s awesome how do we bridge
45:19
the gap of the open par for folks at home um because we obviously are enjoying
45:25
drinks thanks to jetbrains although the david soules got the idea right there he obviously jeff brains didn’t buy that
45:30
drink for him but i don’t know i have i am open to suggestions i would love to understand a
45:36
better way to make that happen
45:41
so the comment in the room was drink prices versus gas prices none of you had to drive anywhere to get here so
45:48
obviously you could buy your own drink for that one i don’t know michael you got any
45:53
suggestions actually anyone in the crowd got any suggestions on the open bar bridging the open bar gap
45:59
and that’s like the milling around just chatting but what sorry about it is that like
46:05
like milling around just chatting like sort of the small talk is that what you mean i think it might be just actual
46:11
drinks we’re that i can solve yeah
46:16
i guess someone needs an app where you can just quickly buy someone else a drink they’re like you’re at a bar like
46:22
i know you’re there but i could i can send a message to the bar that the drink shows up
46:29
yeah i don’t know how to start so that other problem though is how do we solve the milling around and chatting problem
46:36
i don’t know that’s why i kind of kept the networking separate to start with like that there would be billing around chatting in here
46:42
and milling and chatting over there [Music] there’s been things pitched like you know maybe we need a little phone booth
46:48
where people can kind of go in and like quickly jump on to the zoom and if they wanted to see anybody who was there but
46:53
i don’t know what kind of uptick realistically we would have for that it just seems a lot of overhead someone had
46:59
to think about doing it another thing to set up to do so for now i’m going to make sure we
47:05
chat here youth chat there we all come together my experience with the group that before
47:10
we had a really nice chat and it was lots of people talking it’s a lot of fun i don’t think it would have gone so well
47:15
if we tried to like mix that with the audience i just yeah no that’s why i didn’t even join the audio from uh in
47:22
the room while you guys were chatting because it would have been chaos chaos would have been absolutely ensued
47:27
uh the next question actually that’s more of a comment and i harness and agree it is so weird hearing michael’s voice
47:35
at 1x speed like i really feel like i need i need to be able to hit i need to be able to hit the 2x button
47:41
here somehow because you don’t sound right to me right now kevin why do you think it’s weird that i talk so slow
47:47
that’s much better yeah there we go there we go thank you michael for accommodating us podcast listeners who listen at 2x speed
47:55
no problem okay uh
48:01
taking volunteers for help or av settings setting it up in person meetups this would be wonderful but i feel like
48:08
it needs to be an apprenticeship program that comes along with this because there’s just like a lot of
48:13
knowledge that kind of had gone into building all this av kit and i would love help absolutely if anyone’s willing
48:20
to want to be an apprentice this is more for the in-person folks who are in the room
48:26
but you’re more than just kind of being a roadie and schlepping stuff in what’s up
48:38
a meeting up to discuss how to do a hybrid meeting we are
48:44
it’s very matter we that’s a very meta question when is the meetup about how to
48:49
do a hybrid meetup is about what we should be discussing
48:54
and we’ll be hybrid i honestly think
49:00
yeah we should talk about this more because i would i think if we could build a standardized
49:06
small kit i said i know aaron so aaron brought that up just now i would love to build a small portable kit and you
49:12
talked about doing something even battery-powered which would be amazing because just be able to pull in and like drop something on the ground and
49:19
just hook up a couple of little sources and be done would be awesome this this involved you know a gopro
49:26
mirrorless camera two two outputs from my video mixer that are going up into both spots
49:32
uh i would love to simple make this the most simple version of it possible that still gets the same impact
49:38
of people being in the room so yeah uh we need to do a virtual hybrid meeting meeting up meetup
49:46
uh for us then i mean i don’t know i mean in in michael and have you gone to any
49:52
in-person meetups in portland yeah i have actually brian knock and i ran the pie con python west
50:00
meetup for sadly only for like six months before covert hit but yeah and then i’ve gone
50:06
to the main there’s a larger older one downtown and there’s been some right some other ones i used to know a couple
50:13
of the pi pdx folks but did they have they done anything special for those who are not in the room
50:19
they probably did after kovid but not before yeah
50:24
yeah it kind of not that i know what i expected the next question up there was uh
50:32
2d or not 2d that is the question uh more of a comment not a question i’m
50:37
sorry next is going to be how do you convince your company to pay
50:43
for all this new gear oh who’s the ass who asks that he says it says it says anonymous up there
50:50
is is my ceo in the room where she is i was just saying it’s like yeah i want to know
50:56
is she online where’s where she at this has been a slow building process
51:02
it’s like it’s just like it’s just the same way you boil a frog right you just turn the temperature up very very slowly
51:09
so that you can get all the things you want i think the question was more along the lines i just said
51:15
yeah yes so what who pays for that
51:26
so if you’re going to talk in the room you got to have a microphone okay i’m not it’s not worth me even repeating
51:36
let’s get to some real questions here next okay i’m new here and want to eventually
51:43
learn python until then though does this group ever work on micro controllers or languages like arduinos and c plus
51:50
uh we have such a plethora of topics to talk about at any pi but i
51:55
would love for you to submit your topic idea if you if actually this is a great way to give a talk if you don’t know
52:02
anything about it do a bunch of research to give a talk and now you’ll know much stuff about it and you can also enlighten others who
52:07
are in the room and those are great topic great ways to give talks at a meet
52:12
up like this and it’s actually those are fully valid topics for indie pie because it’s indie
52:18
pie or python bridges so many different you know areas you know from web dev to embedded
52:23
to hold on you gotta you gotta grab the microphone here
52:29
why aren’t you gonna use python for that microcontroller and use circuit python instead of sequence that’s true
52:36
that’s where my brain went was like you use python for this kind of thing anyway right nothing helps learning like a
52:42
deadline to give a talk that’s true very very true uh i would agree with that and the fear of embarrassment
52:51
i don’t know anything about that actually yeah that’s probably related to the next
52:57
question up here is uh where do you get good disco ball pants um i don’t think they make them anymore but
53:04
if you go to betabrand.com you can find you used to find disco wear
53:11
is it none glenn in the room is confirmed because i was wearing a pycon my smoking jacket
53:16
from the same company and we could not find it on betabrand.com he found it on some third-party site
53:22
and bought one so i don’t know where you’re gonna find good disco ball pants uh they’re limited edition and i got my own pair
53:28
so you’ll have to find yours supply chain issues yes
53:33
now uh by that previous question about kind of embedded stuff we used to do open tech
53:38
study hall uh with the dershims and a couple others where josh is at we roped we roped a young
53:44
yeah he moved yeah so we actually had a a indie pie attendee a young youngan
53:51
we talked into organizing our open tech study hall and so that was when we got together and literally
53:58
brought pieces of hardware and and everyone kind of like hacked on projects and drank marinate pizza and that was
54:03
fun i don’t know how you do that virtually because there was a lot of interactivity between the participants who were in here so i’d recommend that
54:09
you find a group locally and do those kinds of things where you can you know hack on something if you get like a makerspace or a co-working space where
54:17
people are doing kind of hacking like that that’s a good thing to do there in portland the portland pdx meetup they have um
54:25
they have the regular meetup then they have like a workshop night brewing your projects bring the stuff you’re stuck on and we’ll help you know we’ll just work
54:31
together to get people unstuck like hey i’m stuck on this django auram thing someone else like yeah i know django orem let me help you yeah if folks
54:38
wanted to organize an alternate you know like we were on the second tuesday if you want someone want to do like the fourth
54:44
tuesday for a hack workshop night like that i mean indie pie is not just my platform it’s for everybody for the
54:51
community so if someone stood up and said they wanted to do that i’d obviously be in support of that kind of
54:56
thing there’s a couple really important questions coming up especially the second one on the screen uh next one
55:02
though is is there anything unique or interesting that you can only do with the hybrid meetup that you couldn’t do with a fully in-person or virtual
55:10
i don’t know i i think the opportunity is that a truly hybrid meeting is
55:16
tricky to do and i don’t know if there’s anything that’s more specific
55:21
i can interject there what’s that david yes i can interject i can’t come because
55:27
if it was i think the question was as opposed to
55:33
fully virtual like you can come to fully virtual but at least now you’re here in the room with us i guess in the hybrid
55:39
space so i tried to put on the screen while you guys were networking like video of the room so you can see there’s
55:46
like other activity going on i don’t think you can do that you know just just one versus the other
55:52
i do agree the next question which is less talk more cake um i don’t know if michael if you have any final closing
55:58
questions uh or things you would want to answer i’ll take with more cake that sounds good
56:04
i could throw into really quickly to this hybrid uh thing is there’s some interesting tools that are coming up now
56:10
um you have tools that will do real-time translation to other languages so you
56:15
could reach people who don’t necessarily speak english really well or there’s also oh i want the cake i
56:22
want a piece that looks fantastic and then the other one is there’s tools like otter ai otter.ai you can well get into
56:30
your zoom and it’ll take notes and like try to highlight important topics out of there and so you might be able to
56:37
document your meeting not just record a transcript but do a little bit more potentially
56:42
i’m not sure that’s a compelling reason but i think possibly live language translation maybe
56:49
that would be interesting the fact that in the room they could be translated because we could be using auto right now to transcribe everything’s going on in
56:55
the room too the trick is calvin is like because we’re facilitating this through
57:00
microphones both in the room and virtually like it’ll get captured properly right right
57:06
yeah that back to the audio is a very important aspect
57:12
all right so we do have cake uh for tonight’s participants who are i don’t know how to spin cake through the camera
57:18
i tried just there a second ago but you know all the best you could do was see it you couldn’t even smell it was it
57:24
fungible or non-fungible that cake picture is that a non-plungeable cake i don’t
57:29
know i don’t want to share it now non-fungible all right
57:35
so i want to thank michael so much for being with us tonight at indy pie in our 15th anniversary everybody give a big
57:41
round of applause there’s a huge huge round of applause going on here in the room
57:46
uh one more thing thank you everyone
57:52
[Music]
57:59
you