Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year

Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach—we have new AI and security tracks this year

[Simon Willison’s Weblog](http://simonwillison.net/)

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Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach—we have new AI and security tracks this year

17th April 2026

This year’s PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It’s in Long Beach, California this year, the first time PyCon US has come to the West Coast since Portland, Oregon in 2017 and the first time in California since Santa Clara in 2013.

If you’re based in California this is a great opportunity to catch up with the Python community, meet a whole lot of interesting people and learn a ton of interesting things.

In addition to regular PyCon programming we have two new dedicated tracks at the conference this year: an AI track on Friday and a Security track on Saturday.

The AI program was put together by track chairs Silona Bonewald (CitableAI) and Zac Hatfield-Dodds (Anthropic). I’ll be an in-the-room chair this year, introducing speakers and helping everything run as smoothly as possible.

Here’s the AI track schedule in full:

• 11:00: AI-Assisted Contributions and Maintainer Load—Paolo Melchiorre
• 11:45: AI-Powered Python Education : Towards Adaptive and Inclusive Learning—Sonny Mupfuni
• 12:30: Making African Languages Visible: A Python-Based Guide to Low-Resource Language ID—Gift Ojeabulu
• 2:00: Running Large Language Models on Laptops: Practical Quantization Techniques in Python—Aayush Kumar JVS
• 2:45: Distributing AI with Python in the Browser: Edge Inference and Flexibility Without Infrastructure—Fabio Pliger
• 3:30: Don’t Block the Loop: Python Async Patterns for AI Agents—Aditya Mehra
• 4:30: What Python Developers Need to Know About Hardware: A Practical Guide to GPU Memory, Kernel Scheduling, and Execution Models—Santosh Appachu Devanira Poovaiah
• 5:15: How to Build Your First Real-Time Voice Agent in Python (Without Losing Your Mind)—Camila Hinojosa Añez, Elizabeth Fuentes

(And here’s how I scraped that as a Markdown list from the schedule page using Claude Code and Rodney.)

#### You should come to PyCon US!

I’ve been going to PyCon for over twenty years now—I first went back in 2005. It’s one of my all-time favourite conference series. Even as it’s grown to more than 2,000 attendees PyCon US has remained a heavily community-focused conference—it’s the least _corporate_ feeling large event I’ve ever attended.

The talks are always great, but it’s the add-ons around the talks that really make it work for me. The lightning talks slots are some of the most heavily attended sessions. The PyLadies auction is always deeply entertaining. The sprints are an incredible opportunity to contribute directly to projects that you use, coached by their maintainers.

In addition to scheduled talks, the event has **open spaces**, where anyone can reserve space for a conversation about a topic—effectively PyCon’s version of an unconference. I plan to spend a lot of my time in the open spaces this year—I’m hoping to join or instigate sessions about both Datasette and agentic engineering.

I’m on the board of the Python Software Foundation, and PyCon US remains one of our most important responsibilities—in the past it’s been a key source of funding for the organization, but it’s also core to our mission to “promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers”.

If you do come to Long Beach, we’d really appreciate it if you could book accommodation in the official hotel block, for reasons outlined in this post on the PSF blog.

Posted 17th April 2026 at 11:59 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

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This is **Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach—we have new AI and security tracks this year** by Simon Willison, posted on 17th April 2026.

conferences 188open-source 302pycon 27python 1245ai 1964psf 21 **Previous:**Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7

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